Bio
Julia is a Junior Research Fellow at the African Centre for Cities currently working on the ‘If Cities Could Speak’ project. If Cities Could Speak is a four country project, exploring the health impacts of climate change in vulnerable urban settlements across Kenya, India, South Africa, and Sierra Leone. Julia’s role in the project has been leading the health-histories package, as well as academic and policy-oriented outputs from the ACC team. The Health Histories package has consisted of ethnographic research since April 2025 in Langa and Taiwan, Site-C Khayelitsha. She is currently thinking around the continuities of colonial spatial planning and its implications for the just urban transition and, in collaboration with research partners at IIHS, KDI and SLURC, around what housing and health justice looks like in the context of climate-related local government policy developments.
Julia completed her MPhil Urban Studies – Southern Urbanism at ACC. Her dissertation, titled The Grey Matters: Investigating the Wingfield Strip as an Urban Borderspace, explored the criminalisation and marginalisation of South African citizens and non-citizens alike in contested urban margins. Her work deals with the production of spatial illegality, urban border spaces and differentiated citizenship manifest in everyday interactions with local government and via (non)delivery of services and infrastructure. Thinking about border regimes at the urban scale informs Julia’s ongoing work around the spatialised and unequal burden of climate hazard in Cape Town.
She has experience in creative research platforms such as CityScapes Magazine, as a research assistant on the Shift Urban Toolkit and Season 3 of the City Show Podcast. Julia was a research assistant in the first phase of the ReBuilt Cape Town project at the ACC, contributing to research around regenerative building practice in a South African context.
