Hugo López

I joined the School of Geography and Planning at the University of Sheffield in 2025 as a PhD candidate. My doctoral research approaches the Atlantic Forest as an urban project. This work pursues a counternarrative of the forest's urbanisation alongside the memories and aspirations of a quilombola community in Rio de Janeiro, providing situated understandings of urban–environmental relations and contributing to justice-oriented sustainability adaptations.
I hold a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), where I am also affiliated as a guest researcher at the Laboratory of Urban Studies. During my undergraduate studies, I completed an exchange year in "Urban Management and Development: Sustainable Urbanism" at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. I later earned my MSc in Urbanism from TU Delft.
Following my master’s degree, I worked within the Horizon Europe project UP2030 at TU Delft, contributing to the development of conceptual and practical tools to integrate spatial justice into urban sustainability transitions across European cities. I remain a member of the TU Delft Centre for the Just City and collaborate with the Urban Climate Change Research Network European Hub. Alongside my doctoral research, I am engaged in teaching, podcasting, and international research collaborations that connect academic inquiry with policy dialogue and public engagement.

Atlantic Forest as an urban project: territorialities from Rio de Janeiro

My doctoral research approaches the Atlantic Forest as an urban project, pursuing a counternarrative of its urbanisation through the memories, practices, and aspirations of a quilombola community in Rio de Janeiro. The thesis explores how urban–environmental relations are lived, remembered, and imagined beyond dominant planning narratives, contributing to justice-oriented perspectives on sustainability transitions.
The research is grounded in relational, decolonial, and spatial justice approaches to urban theory and planning. It challenges Eurocentric and extractive framings of urbanisation by examining how forest–city entanglements are constituted through social, ecological, and cultural relations. Rather than treating the forest as a peripheral or passive landscape, the thesis investigates its agency as part of extended urban territorialities.
The main aim of the research is to co-produce situated understandings of urban–environmental relations that can support more just and plural pathways for sustainability transitions. Specifically, the thesis seeks to reframe the urbanisation of the Atlantic Forest through community memories and territorial experiences; explore how quilombola knowledge and practices contribute to alternative spatial imaginaries; and investigate how recognition, care, and relationality can inform planning theory and environmental governance.
The research adopts a qualitative, situated, and participatory-oriented methodology. Fieldwork is conducted in collaboration with a quilombola community in Rio de Janeiro, combining semi-structured interviews, memory-oriented narrative inquiry, and place-based engagement. The approach is inspired by relational and pluriversal epistemologies, seeking to foreground knowledge practices that emerge from lived experience and collective memory. 
The study emphasises reflexive and ethical research practices, prioritising long-term attentiveness, reciprocity, and accountability in knowledge production. Analytical work integrates thematic and interpretive approaches to understand how urban–environmental relations are narrated, practised, and imagined across temporalities. 
Overall, the thesis contributes to debates on spatial justice, decolonising urban knowledge, and the role of relational ontologies in planning for just urban futures.

Supervisors: Dr Philipp Horn, Dr Olivia Casagrande and Professor Vanesa Castan Broto