Camillo Boano

Dr Camillo Boano is an architect, urbanist and educator. He is Senior
Lecturer at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University
College of London (UCL), where he directs the MSc in Building and
Urban Design in Development. He is also co-director of the UCL
Urban Laboratory. Camillo has over 20 years of experiences in research,
design consultancies and development work in South America, Middle
East, Eastern Europe and South East Asia. His research interests revolve
around the encounters between critical theory, radical philosophy with
urban and architectural design processes where collective agency and
politics encounters urban narratives and aesthetics, especially those
emerging in informal and contested urbanisms.

Camillo research interests revolve around the encounters between critical theory, radical philosophy with urban and architectural design processes where collective agency and politics encounters urban narratives and aesthetics, especially those emerging in informal and contested urbanisms. At the moment he is working on several complementary parallel projects: a) Working on the praxis of Community Architecture as alternative and valid strategies adopted by architects collectively to expand social engagement and dealing with the commodification of urban processes. Specifically studying the Asian Coalition of Housing Rights Community Architects Network working in 19 countries in South East Asia engaging with informal urbanism and collective housing struggles at city scale; b) Researching spatial practices and spatial complexities of the informal urbanism as both discursive and design related challenges where voices, languages and political representations are emerging as claim to centrality, solidarity and equity. The research is spanning across several geographies: Mumbai, Medellin, Bangkok, Rome, Phnom Penh, Santiago de Chile and c) Researching the conditions, the emergences and the spatial implications of urban borders and the spatial dialectics created around different urban fractures working on the paradigmatic cases of Jerusalem and the archipelago-topologies of the colonial condition of the West-Bank, and the sectarian colour-like but neoliberally-induced urban lines in Beirut.