Dr Federico Caprotti

About me:

Federico Caprotti is a human geographer interested in sustainable cities and the green economy. He has worked on nature and the city from a historical and visual viewpoint, and has more recently worked on the off-grid city and renewable energy infrastructures in South Africa, and eco-city and smart city projects in China and the EU. Theoretically, Federico's work draws on a range of approaches to urban socio-environmental and technological change, including urban political ecology, studies of socio-technical transition, and Global South urbanism.

Over the past few years, Federico has built a portfolio of funded research work on off-grid urbanism, the smart city and platform urbanism. Since 2015, Federico's research has been funded by over £2.2m from a range of funding bodies in the UK, EU, China, Taiwan and South Africa, including the ESRC, British Academy, Royal Society and UK Energy Research Centre. Additionally, since 2022 he has been involved in consultancy with external partners, on evaluation systems for large-scale megaprojects: this work has attracted £1.2m since 2022.

Examples of past research projects and research networks led by Federico include: 1.) the €1.4m ‘Smart Eco-Cities for a Green Economy (SMART-ECO)’ research consortium, which involved researchers in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Germany and China. SMART-ECO was funded by the ESRC, China’s NSFC, and the national research funding agencies of France, Germany, and the Netherlands; 2.) a £403K ESRC Urban Transformations project on energy transitions in South African municipalities.

Federico was a Fellow (2018-21) of the Alan Turing Institute, and in 2020 was awarded the 2020 Newton Prize, in the Chair's Prize category. The £500K prize is for a project linking off-grid solar energy to sustainable refrigeration-based businesses, run by women entrepreneurs, in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2017, a paper he was lead author on was named as one of the 25 most significant papers published in the past 40 years in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

A regular participant in research funding assessment panels, Federico has reviewed grant applications and sits on panels for a range of international research agencies. This has included the roles of: international vice-chair for the Horizon Europe HERITAGE programme (2024); review college membership for the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO) (2023-26); grant panelist for Horizon Europe's Driving Urban Transitions European Partnerships programme (2023-24); and panel chair for the interrnational expert panel at KTH Digital Futures, Stockholm (2021). I have also been part of the grant review process for ESRC, the Royal Society (2024), the British Academy (2023), andf for international funding programmes such as the Netherlands Research Agency-China Academy of Sciences joint green cities funding stream.

Broad research specialisms:

Nature and the city; urban political ecology; sustainable cities; eco-cities; smart cities; platform urbanism.

Interests:

My main research interests are in the relationship between nature and the city, and in the ways in which discourses, urban plans, visualities and geographical imaginations and visions of the city are used to shape urban and societal futures. I have carried out historical work on these topics, focusing on the construction of new towns and on visualities associated with technology. More recently, over the past ten years I have been working more closely on contemporary eco-city and smart city projects, with a focus on new-build and retrofit urbanism in China and Europe. My research is informed by conceptual approaches including urban political ecology, cultural economy, and critical approaches to the study of transitions.

Qualifications:

BA (Hons) Geography, Oxford University;
DPhil Geography, Oxford University;
Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, University of Plymouth;
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Career:

Federico joined the University of Exeter as associate professor in human geography in 2016, and in 2020 became a professor of human geography. He has previously lectured at the universities of Leicester, Oxford, UCL, and Plymouth. Prior to joining Exeter as associate professor in human geography, Federico was senior lecturer and then reader in cities and sustainability at King’s College London. Federico holds a bachelor’s and doctoral degree from Oxford University, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.