Sabina Andron

IVSA Board Member

Sabina Andron is a cities scholar specializing in creative and transgressive public cultures, with a specific interest in the semiotics of urban walls and surfaces. Sabina’s research focuses on the surfaces of cities as spatial typologies, by examining their material, visual, and legal dimensions. Her areas of expertise include graffiti and street art, public writing and city signage; urban visual culture and geosemiotics; the right to the city, spatial justice and the urban commons; legal geography and urban property regimes; and deviance, disorder and crime as forms of urban citizenship.

Her first monograph, Graffiti, spatial justice, and the city: the surface commons establishes a research field of surface studies, looking at how surfaces are inscribed, regulated, and valued, and how they articulate cultures of control and resistance in cities. The book will be published with Routledge in 2023.

Sabina is a Faculty of Arts Postdoc Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cities. She previously taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where she received her Architectural History PhD in 2018. Her teaching includes subjects such as “Insurgent cities”, “Representations of cities”, “Surface city”, as well as survey courses on architectural history and the London built environment.

Sabina was a UCL Grand Challenges grantee and organiser of the international Graffiti Sessions conference in 2014, as well as a British Council fellow at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016. She is the recipient of the 2020 Prosser award for outstanding work in visual methodologies, awarded by the International Visual Sociology Association, and co-directed the IVSA annual conference in 2022.