2019 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), 3-8 April, Washington D.C.

This paper is based on my article for the forthcoming first issue of Radical Housing Journal, which will be launched at the 2019 AAG. It is included in the session, “Introducing the Radical Housing Journal: Launch of Issue 1 and Scholar-Activist Work From Forthcoming Issues (Part II)”, organised by Erin McElroy and Michele Lancione, and featuring AbdouMaliq Simone as discussant.

In this paper, I forward the concept of benevolent evictions to describe a new mode of dispossession, whereby expulsions from the urban core to the periphery are facilitated through the deployment of benevolence as a technology of evictions. Drawing on the experience of a community association in Pasig City in Metro Manila, Philippines, I examine how benevolent evictions, as materialized in The People’s Plan, reconfigured community participation and activist contestations. I distil the politics of participation by troubling practices of inclusion in housing affairs and exclusion in flood control matters; and critically assess the implications of non-transgressive co-production models on organizing for housing justice. While democratizing housing solutions did not necessarily result in the democratization of participation, I argue that the contradictions that emerge present radical possibilities for rewriting the politics of participation toward the transformation of slum-state and citizen-state relations.