I am a critical urban sociologist, geographer, and political activist previously based in Manila, and currently working on a PhD The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London (UCL). I am the recipient of the 2018 DPU 60th Anniversary Doctoral Scholarship Award, as well as the 2018 Gilbert F. White Thesis Award from the Hazards, Risks and Disasters Specialty Group (HRDSG) of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). I have published theoretical and empirical articles in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) and Radical Housing Journal (RHJ).

My master’s thesis, Discourses of ‘danger zone’ evictions and the aestheticization and territorialization of disaster risk in post-Ondoy Manila, threaded the concepts of territorial stigma, aesthetic governmentality, and territoriality in: (1) tracking the genealogy of ‘danger zone’ evictions, (2) charting the production of the discourse of slum evictability in the post-Ondoy moment, and (3) explaining the phenomenon of ‘danger zone’ evictions as a technology of disaster governance and a strategy of spatial segregation and urban transformation.

My PhD research builds and expands on this previous work. It aims to weave a critical account of ‘resilient’ city making in post-Ondoy Manila (2009-present), and in the process theorize urban transformation and dispossession beyond processes of capital accumulation in vulnerable and at-risk Southern cities. Through a critical genealogy and ethnography of the Metro Manila Flood Management Project and the Informal Settler Families Housing Program, it examines how ‘danger zone’ evictions, as a consequence and requirement of resilience-seeking, in post-Ondoy (2009-present) Metro Manila transformed coastal and riparian corridors in the urban core and created relocation hubs in the peri-urban fringe.

Other interests include architecture; urban political ecologies of infrastructure, water, land, and logistics; and Southern urban theory.

I tweet at @travailzen, and may be reached at alvarez.tin@gmail.com.