Research

LATEST ARTICLE: An Archaeology of the Affective Commons: Summoning the Border in Motion. UOU Scientific Journal, no. 10, In Detail Special Issue (2025).
LATEST BOOK: English Urban Commons: The Past, Present and Future of Green Spaces (Routledge, 2024).
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COMING SOON:
“Imaginaries of the Post-Colonial Commons.” In The Routledge Companion to Spatial Practice and the Urban Commons, eds. Andrew Hewitt, Mel Jordan, Emma Mahony and Socrates Stratis. London and New York: Routledge.
(with Oren Lieberman) “Situated Imaginaries of Care.” Architecture and Culture 13, no. 4 Special Issue (2026).
“Australia’s Fugitive Commons.” Architecture and Culture 13, no. 4 Situated Imaginaries of Care Special Issue (2026).
(with Oren Lieberman, eds.) Situated Ecologies of Care. Critiques: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities. London: Routledge, 2026.
(with Eleanor Suess) “Unbeating the Bounds of Australia’s Colonial Commons.” In Repair Stories, eds. Hélène Frichot, Lucy Benjamin and Virginia Mannering. Perimeter Editions, 2026.
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My research sits across two overlapping areas:

the interdisciplinary space where architecture, archaeology and anthropology meet, especially through drawing; and

the “commons”—understood both as legal/territorial spaces (from English urban commons to Australia’s colonial commons) and as the everyday negotiations of ownership, access and spatial power.

Commons

I’ve worked on the commons for over a decade. Most recently, I was a Co-Investigator on the 3-year AHRC-funded project Wastes and Strays: The Past, Present and Future of English Urban Commons, working with colleagues across several UK universities and major “open space” NGOs. The project’s book, English Urban Commons, came out with Routledge in 2023:

Rodgers, Christopher, Rachel Hammersley, Alessandro Zambelli, Emma Cheatle, John Wedgwood Clarke, Sarah Collins, Olivia Dee, and Siobhan O’Neill. English Urban Commons: The Past, Present and Future of Green Spaces. London: Routledge, 2023.

I also recently guest-edited (and contributed to) The Journal of Architecture Special Issue Architectural Agency and the Commons:

Delsante, Ioanni, and Alessandro Zambelli. “Architectural Agency and the Commons.” The Journal of Architecture 28, no. 1 (2023): 1–6.

Zambelli, Alessandro. “‘Period Property in Sought-after Area’: 2,500 Years of Digging and Building at St George’s Hill.” The Journal of Architecture 28, no. 1 (2023): 7–30.

My current work expands these questions into the Australian context—looking at colonial-era common land, lingering legal and cadastral traces, and contemporary environmental care. This includes Beating the Bounds of Melbourne Town Common, shown at Melbourne Design Week 2025, and the collaborative Bartlett–ABP framework In-Commons (2025–26), which I co-lead and which explores writing, fieldwork and relational practices around the commons. I’m now developing an ARC Future Fellowship (FT26) focused on Australia’s “forgotten” commons.

The Structure of Architectural Interdisciplinarity

I’m also interested in how design disciplines operate—particularly their visual, material and analogical foundations. Rather than seeing architecture, archaeology and anthropology as separate fields, I read them as borderless centres of practice that often work through the production and interpretation of visual artefacts.

Drawing between Architecture, Archaeology and Anthropology

These long-standing interests led to my single-authored book Scandalous Space: Between Architecture and Archaeology (AADR, 2019), which was included in REF 2021. I’ve also explored this territory in earlier work such as:

Zambelli, Alessandro. “Occlusions of the Operational Sequence: A Coincidental Conversation between Robert Matthew and André Leroi-Gourhan in Six Diagrams.” In Architecture and Anthropology, edited by Adam Jasper. London: Routledge, 2018.

Across drawings, fieldwork and writing, I continue to explore how these disciplines overlap methodologically—especially through gestures, diagrams and material thinking.

The Theory of Architectural Practice

In my teaching and writing, I tend to see architectural history/theory and architectural practice not as different kinds of work but as different modes of attention. Architecture is constantly shuttling between thinking and making, reflection and action. My research and studio teaching—at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels—treat those movements as productive rather than oppositional.