Amelia Thorpe
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Amelia Thorpe is professor of law at UNSW Sydney. Amelia works in planning, property and environmental law, focusing on mobility and urban governance. Her approach is sociolegal and interdisciplinary, using examples from food delivery cycling to colonial land grants to understand the norms, rules and practices through which cities are shaped.
She worked in planning and public interest environmental law prior to academia, and has since served on several boards and statutory bodies, including local and state planning and design review panels, the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority and Shelter NSW. She is an Acting Commissioner in the Land and Environment Court of NSW.
In September 2025, Amelia Thorpe joins the Paris IAS for a ten-month research stay.
She holds the Ville de Paris 2024-2025 Chair, supported by the City of Paris and the Paris IAS, aimed at promoting research on subjects of interest to the municipality.
Research topics
Mobility; urban governance; citizen participation; sociolegal studies; infrastructure; green democracy.
Democratic infrastructures
Streets are the quintessential sites of democracy: not just marches and assemblies where rights are demanded and disrupted, but also the everyday expression of collective decisions about how we live together, about who gets access to which space and for what purposes, about the role of the state and the rights and responsibilities of citizens. Through activities on public streets, people make material and discursive claims, and those claims contribute to the ongoing constitution (and sometimes reorientation) of the norms, rules and practices through which cities are governed.
For much of the last century, streets in many places have been governed to prioritise travel in private cars, and the need to change is increasingly urgent. Paris has been a leader in the shift to sustainable mobility. Beyond established democratic channels, material engagements with infrastructure – from gilets jaunes to Uber Eats and Vélib'– have been central.
Infrastructure provides a useful lens through which to reflect on this shift and its implications for green democracy in Europe and beyond. What might be necessary to sustain and extend sustainable mobility spatially, within and beyond Paris, and temporally, past the Hidalgo administration? How do engagements with infrastructure influence participants’ understandings of legality, and in turn their practices of civic engagement and democracy? How do social understandings about rights and responsibilities take effect in the world and become ‘real’?
Key publications
Amelia Thorpe. "Planning and Property", in Nicole Graham, Margaret Davies et Lee Godden, Handbook on Property, Law and Society, Routledge, 2022.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003139614
Amelia Thorpe. "Prefigurative Infrastructure: Mobility, citizenship, and the agency of objects", International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2022.
Available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4290099
Amelia Thorpe. Owning the Street: The Everyday Life of Property, MIT Press, 2020.
DOI: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539784/owning-the-street/
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