Maria Reitano

Maria Reitano is an architect and PhD candidate in urban planning at the University of Naples Federico II, in Italy, Department of Architecture (DiARC).

In her Master’s degree thesis in Architecture, Maria dealt with spatial self-governance and self-organized processes in peri-urban areas and practices of informal self-building. Her current doctoral thesis draws on a transdisciplinary perspective based on the critical and post-foundational approaches to urban studies and on urban transfeminism. It aims to investigate situated processes of emancipation determined by intersecting spatial practices of insurgency and care that oppose contemporary urban neoliberalization strategies. Her current empirical work focuses on Italian cities, particularly Naples, south Italy, through a scholar-activist perspective and an urban ethnographic methodology. Maria is also co-founder of the independent action-research project Città della Cura, investigating practices of radical urban care and democracy in the different districts of Naples.

Her interests involve urban social movements, the urban political, popular agency in public space, processes of contestation and everyday resistance against neoliberal forms of urbanization.