Francesco Chiodelli

Associate professor of urban and legal geography at the Università degli Studi di Torino

Francesco Chiodelli is associate professor of urban and legal geography at the Università degli Studi di Torino, where he is the director of OMERO – Interdepartmental Research Centre for Urban Studies. His research lies at the intersection of urban space and institutions (norms and rules in particular), with a specific focus on questions of pluralism, diversity, informality. Currently, his working mainly on housing informality in Southern European countries and on different manifestations of illegality in the urban sphere (e.g. corruption in urban planning, criminal infiltration in urban governance and development).  He also investigated the spatial dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over Jerusalem. He writes regularly for Italian newspapers, such as Il Manifesto and Huffington Post Italia.

His papers have appeared in the main international journals in the fields of urban studies, geography and planning, such as Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers, Urban StudiesInternational Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchPolitical GeographyProgress in PlanningPlanning TheoryTown Planning ReviewUrban Geography, Housing Studies.

Selected publications

Chiodelli F., Moroni S. (2025), The Legal and Political Geography of Pluralism. Supporting Diverse Public and Private Spaces in Contemporary Cities. Bristol University Press, Bristol 


Chiodelli F. (2023). Cemento armato. La politica dell’illegalità nelle città italiane. Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 


Chiodelli, F., Maslova, S., & Vasudevan, A. (2024). Three theses on informal housing in Europe. European Urban and Regional Studies, 31(4): 319–327 


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