Associate Professor Marilu Melo Zurita

Marilu Melo Zurita is Associate Professor in Human Geography and a member of the Environment and Society Group in the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW Sydney. Her disciplinary background spans human geography and cultural anthropology, and her research has moved across peri-urban disaster management, water governance and volumetric urbanism.

Her main body of work concerns subterranean spaces, and it has helped establish the underground as a site for critical urban scholarship. Through concepts such as sub terra nullius, she examines how the space beneath cities comes to be treated as empty and available, and how that emptiness is produced through law, surveying, engineering and finance. This includes a sustained focus on the political economy of tunnelling: how the underground has become a significant frontier for urban development, and what its imaginaries, conceptualisations and challenges look like from a critical urban perspective.

She is currently Chief Investigator on Wiring Australian Cities: Making Space for Telecommunications (ARC Discovery, 2025 to 2028, with Professor Kurt Iveson at the University of Sydney), which traces how communications cabling has been laid beneath Australian cities, from the first colonial conduits in Sydney through to the NBN, and asks who gets to control that space. She is also finalising two long-running collaborations. Repairing memory and place (ARC Linkage, Monash-led) is an Indigenous-led, practice-based approach to urban water design in Naarm, concluding with an exhibition at Melbourne Museum in 2026. Related creative work from this research, including the Hidden Rippon Lea immersive digital tour, has been shown at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale as part of the Australian Pavilion and at the 2023 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. And UNDER: Geosystem Services (Swedish Research Council, FORMAS) has developed indicators and mapping tools for subsurface planning in collaboration with the Gothenburg, Malmö and Askersund municipalities.

Alongside this she works on groundwater knowledge and governance, including the ARC-funded national groundwater recharge observing system, and continues her research on disaster and society. She has worked on the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, the 2010 to 2011 South East Queensland floods, the 2017 Mexico Earthquake and most recently on disaster justice and disability in the Philippines.

Marilu is Group Leader for Urban Integration with the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association, and sits on the editorial boards of Political Geography and Australian Geographer. Before UNSW she held teaching and research positions at the University of Sydney, Macquarie University, the University of the Sunshine Coast and the University of Melbourne.