DrElia Apostolopoulou

My research interrogates the contested geographies and political ecologies of infrastructure, urbanisation and social-environmental justice. My work is primarily organised around three interrelated strands: first, the transformative power of infrastructure projects and neoliberal environmental and planning policies in reshaping spaces, socionatures, and everyday livelihoods; second, the uneven and often unjust effects of these transformations on communities along lines of class, gender, and ethnicity; and third, the emancipatory potential of grassroots activism and community struggles in advancing alternative pathways toward social-environmental sustainability and justice.

Empirically, I combine comparative, multi-sited research across the Global North and South with ethnography, policy analysis, and participatory approaches. My projects examine large-scale infrastructures — including ports, transport corridors (railways, highways, metro systems), and logistics centres — alongside urban redevelopment, housing development, and biodiversity offsetting programmes, with a particular emphasis on community responses to environmental, social, and spatial injustice. I consider my research committed to advancing policy-relevant and socially engaged scholarship.

Key topics of my previous and current research include:

• Environmental and infrastructural justice
• Infrastructures and urban transformation
• Neoliberal urbanism, gentrification and austerity
• The politics of public space
• Sacrifice zones
• Social-environmental conflicts and movements 
• Market-based environmental governance and biodiversity offsetting