Fernanda Palmieri

Profile

PhD Project 

Reforesting London: exploring the transformative capacity of council estate land in London for the expansion of urban treescapes. London is a city of 3,500 council estates, with local authorities owning on average 28 percent of the land in their boroughs, a spatial realisation of the post-war era in Britain, which rebuilt and re-shaped London creating a unique urban fabric permeated by a system of common land – the council estates. These radical social housing projects persist outside the dominant form of land ownership of private property to this day, yet their costs and inefficiencies represent one of the most pressing challenges faced by local authorities. Socio-spatial inequalities are compounded by active disinvestment, degraded environmental and building conditions, and the growing uncertainties of climate change. This research will explore the transformative capacity of council estate land in London for the creation of a new urban forest infrastructure. Specifically, it will take a participatory approach to investigate the extent to which tree-planting can become a tool for radical citizen participation and promote environmental, social, political and ecological transformation. The project will take the first community woodland in a council estate in Hackney as a case study and use relational mapping to evaluate its local transformative potential underlining the strategic importance of council estate common land for urban resilience, public health and socio-ecological transitions.

Supervisors 

Dr Regan Koch, Department of Geography, Queen Mary

Dr Elsa Noterman, Department of Geography, Nottingham University

Prof Alison Blunt, Department of Geography, Queen Mary

Funding

London Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP) – Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

Research Interests

Cities, Trees, People, Critical urban studies, critical design, transition thinking, socio justice, ecological justice, transformative justice, ontological turn, relational mapping, decolonial methodologies, scholar-activism, engaged research

Academic Background

MRes Architecture (critical urbanism), University of East London
BA and MA Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo

Publications

Palmieri, F., Jungfer, C. and Kling, N. (2022) ‘“DALSTON! WHO ASKED U?”: A Knowledge-Centred Perspective on the Mapping of Socio-Spatial Relations in East London’, Urban Planning, 7(3). Available at: https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v7i3.5365.

Contact information

fernanda.palmieri@qmul.ac.uk

Research