Melanie's work also focuses on two core areas: firstly, urban informality, particularly spatial and housing practices in the global South and North; secondly, urban land and conflict, exploring land tenure and regulation in contexts of informal urban development.
Under the first theme, her research focuses on spatial informality in marginalised contexts and particularly urban informal neighbourhoods, exploring micro-scale, local and wider influences and processes, in Latin American and European cities. Under the second theme, Melanie explores the nexus between urban land and conflict in diverse contexts, with a particular interest in territorial contestation. Building on these themes, her current research aims to facilitate, understand and mobilise stories about how people make cities, with a focus on marginalised communities, in order to improve formal and informal responses to their challenges. Melanie is PI for a British Academy-funded project ‘Interrogating crisis representation and response in “disorderly” Southern cities’ exploring how communities in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Cali and Buenaventura understand and experience crisis. This multilingual comparative project used an innovative creative methodology to run four storytelling workshops in each of the case study cities, leading to the production of 19 collective story outputs (storybooks, podcasts, videos).