School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK

Contact: G.Aiello[at]leeds.ac.uk

Giorgia Aiello is Lecturer in International Communications at the University of Leeds, in the Institute of Communications Studies. She obtained her MA from the University of Bologna (Italy) and her PhD from the University of Washington (Seattle, United States), where she was also a co-founder of the Urban Archives project. Her research focuses on the relationship between visual-material communication and globalization, with an emphasis on how identities are formed and social and cultural differences are negotiated across cultures and through mediated imagery, design, branding, space, and the urban built environment. She has published articles and chapters on various aspects of urban regeneration, city branding and public communication in cities located across Europe as well as in Italy, Central and Eastern Europe, the UK, and the US. She was the main organizer of the international conference “Communication and the City: Voices, Spaces, Media“. Currently, she is working on the edited collection Communicating the City (with Kate Oakley and Matteo Tarantino) and a special issue of the International Journal of Communication on methods and methodologies for urban communication research.

Latest publications

2013
From wasteland to wonderland: The hypermedia(tiza)tion of urban regeneration in Leeds’ Holbeck Urban Village, First Monday, 11(4) Link. PDF

2012
Confined to the edges: Reflections on visual research in Bologna, Lo Squaderno: Explorations in Space and Society. Observing today’s Italy. New urban ethnography in Italy.  24.June 2012: 37-41. Link. PDF

2011
From wound to enclave: The visual-material performance of urban renewal in Bologna’s Manifattura delle Arti, Western Journal of Communication. 75.4: 341-366. Link. PDF

2010 [with Irina Gendelman]
Faces of places: Façades as global communication in Post-Eastern Bloc urban renewal, In: Jaworski A; Thurlow C (eds.) Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. Continuum. 256-273. Link. PDF

2010 [with Irina Gendelman and Tom Dobrowolsky]
Urban Archives: Public memories of everyday places, In: Hou J (eds.) Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. Routledge. 181-193. Link. PDF