I am a Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Human Geography and Urban Studies at the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation CEDLA of the University of Amsterdam. As a researcher I am affiliated to the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies ARTES. 

My research in urban studies focuses on the intersections between urban space, urban culture and urban governance and planning. Geographically speaking, most research is located in the Andean region and Central America. Together with colleagues and with the Master and PhD students in my team I have published on issues related to low-income housing, self-help neighborhoods, public space, gentrification and urban planning. I am interested in questions that relate to the scale and size of cities (my intermediate cities research) as well as in the question how translocal flows and networks shape local urban conditions (my research on remittance architecture), and in how cities deal with dead disposal and commemoration in their territory (my Deathscapes program).

I am the PI of the NWO-funded project Contesting Urban Borderscapes in Latin America (2023-2027). I am was one of the coordinators of UvA-Centre for Urban Studies' funded project Repurposed Infrastructures in the Unequal City (2022-2023).

I coordinate the minor program in Latin American Studies. I am the Book Review Editor of the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Societies worldwide are urbanizing at high speed. Advancing sustainable urban land use planning is an urgent theme, as infrastructure has to be provided to over 6.5 billion people. This means that water, electricity, and sewage systems will have to be improved, and smarter mass transport systems will have to be developed. One of the basic human necessities not explicitly addressed in urban planning is the need for sufficient dignified spaces for dead disposal and commemoration, in other words, ‘deathscapes’. The right to a dignified final destination is a basic human right. Higher population densities in cities urge us to find more space-efficient solutions for dead disposal. In practice, this will arguably result increase tensions between disposal space and memory space.

As one of the most urbanized regions in the world, Latin America figures prominently in the urban studies literature. However, information about the development and transformation of urban deathscapes in Latin America is remarkably scarce, especially compared to the large amount of studies that have addressed deathscapes in other parts of the world, notably Asia.

Between the start of this research project in 2014 and 2025, six case studies have been conducted in different cities across the region based on the question of how ‘cities of the living’ find new forms of co-existence with the ‘cities of the dead’; how deathscapes can potentially be or become formative sites of conviviality for the city at large. With the help of nine research assistants and several Master's students, who developed their thesis projects as part of this research, and dozens of local interlocutors in Latin America, the project has generated new insights and several academic publications.

Key publications:

Klaufus, C. (2025) Life and Death in Latin American Cities: The Necropolis at Stake. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Klaufus, C. (2024) ‘Interstices between polis and necropolis’, Lo Squaderno 67: 55-58.

Debray, H., M. Kuffer, C. Klaufus, C. Persello, M. Wurm, H. Taubenböck, and K. Pfeffer (2024) ‘Detection of Unmonitored Graveyards in Lima in VHR Satellite Data Using Fully Convolutional Networks.’ In: > Kuffer and G. Stefanos (Eds), Urban Inequalities from Space: Earth Observation Applications in the Majority World. Cham: Springer,  pp. 167-188.

Klaufus, C. (2023) ‘Informal deathscapes in metropolitan Lima as cultural knowledge systems.’ In: D. House, M. Westendorp, with A. Maddrell (Eds), New Perspectives on Urban Deathscapes: Continuity, Change, and Contestation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 21-41.

Klaufus, C. and J. Weegels (2022) ‘From prison to pit: trajectories of a dispensable population in Latin America’, Mortality27(4): 410-425.

Klaufus, C. (2020) ‘Safeguarding the house of the dead: Configurations of risk and protection in the urban cemetery’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45(6): 1056-1063, DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12890.

Klaufus, C. (2019) ‘Superstar-Saints and Wandering Souls: The cemetery as a cultural hotspot in Latin American cities’. In: H. Selin and R. M. Rakoff (Eds), Death Across Cultures: Death and Dying in Non-Western Cultures. New York: Springer, pp. 275-294.

Baud, J.M., R.A. Boelens, F. de Castro, B.B. Hogenboom, C. Klaufus, C.G. Koonings and J.L. Ypeij (2019) ‘Commoning Xela: Negotiating collective spaces around a Central American intermediate city’, Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 108: 267-279.

Klaufus, C. (2018) ‘Colombian deathscapes: Social practices and policy responses’, Journal of Urban Affairs 40(2): 209-225.

Klaufus, C. (2017) ‘Cemetery modernization and the common good in Bogotá’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 37(2): 206-221.

Klaufus, C. (2016) ‘The dead are killing the living’: Spatial justice, funerary services, and cemetery land use in urban Colombia, Habitat International 54(1): 74-79.

Klaufus, C. (2016) ‘Deathscape politics in Colombian metropolises: Conservation, grave recycling and the position of the bereaved’, Urban Studies 53(12): 2453-2468.

Klaufus, C. (2015) ‘Displacing the dead, Disregarding the living: Public space and cemetery planning in Bogotá, Colombia’, Progressive Planning 204: 27-29.

Klaufus, C. (2014) ‘Deathscapes in Latin America’s Metropolises: Urban Land Use, Funerary Transformations, and Daily Inconveniences’, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 96: 99-111.

This research project seeks to better understand the social dynamics that occur in self-built neighbourhoods that receive a large migrant population. The project has two case studies: Moravia in Medellín, Colombia and La Carpio in San José, Costa Rica. 

First, we want to investigate the integration of new migrants in these neighbourhoods through the eyes of the migrants themselves with a photography project. How do they see the social fabric of the neighbourhood where they want to stay? And how do they adapt to be part of this fabric or survive without adapting? We also want to investigate how the established social fabric of these vulnerable, self-built neighbourhoods – based on mutual aid and community work - can be changed by the arrival of new cultural aspects from the countries of origin of new migrants who settle there. 

​The theoretical approach of the research deals with border landscapes within the urban environment. This means that on the one hand we will investigate new spatial and social borders and (symbolic) boundaries that are constructed by the arrival of new migrants, on the other hand we are interested in where these borders and boundaries are broken down in order to construct new spaces of coexistence and convergence. The neighbourhoods included in the project are self-built neighbourhoods in which the population relies heavily on self-management to get by.