Research areas

Gustavo Prieto is an urban geographer and Associate Professor at the Cities Institute of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). He holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of São Paulo (USP) and has held visiting research positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the University of Minnesota (UMN). He currently coordinates the Critical Ethnographies Laboratory (LEC/Unifesp).

His ethnographic research examines the expansion and diversification of criminal economies and explores how everyday life in the urban periphery is shaped by indebtedness, land grabbing, and spatial segregation produced through the entanglements of state, market, and criminal actors, establishing overlapping regimes of power and urban sovereignty.

He also studies the social and environmental impacts of business activities and the global circulation of corporate sustainability discourses, including strategies of greenwashing and political-corporate training networks that operate across Brazil, Peru, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and the United States.

Current research

Gustavo Prieto is an Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) under the mentorship of Dr Marie Kolling. During the fellowship, he will develop publications based on his long-term ethnographic research in Brazil, contributing to international debates on urban inequality, eviction, debtfare urbanism, financialisation, land grabbing, and contested forms of governance in cities of the Global South.