Author Archives: Maria Khristine (Tin) Alvarez

About Maria Khristine (Tin) Alvarez

I am a critical urban sociologist and geographer, and a political activist previously based in Manila and currently working on a PhD at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London (UCL). In 2018, I won the Gilbert F. White Thesis Award (Master’s) given by the American Association of Geographers’ (AAG) Hazards, Risks, and Disasters Specialty Group; and received the DPU 60th Anniversary Doctoral Scholarship Award from my current department. My PhD research examines how a flood-resilient Metro Manila is being built in the aftermath of the 2009 Ondoy flood disaster which spurred the reconstitution of the Philippine disaster risk management framework. I aim to develop new conceptual tools for understanding the relationship between resilience on one hand and dispossession and urbanisation on the other. This is part of a larger intellectual project that seeks to understand the new logics, drivers, and modes of expulsion and urban production in Manila. I have published theoretical and empirical research articles on the politics of ‘danger zone’ evictions and flood risk management. The first appeared as part of a symposium issue of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), and was recognised as a Top Cited Article for 2019-2020; while the second one was published in the Long Read section (focus on critical analysis and theory-making) of the launching issue of Radical Housing Journal. My writings on cities have also appeared as essays in The Funambulist and Al Jazeera, and as a chapter in the book, Cities of Dignity: Urban Transformations Around the World, published by Rosa-Luxeumburg-Stiftung, Brüssels.

AWARD | TOP CITED ARTICLE (2019-2020) in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

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My paper with Kenneth Cardenas, “Evicting Slums, ‘Building Back Better’: Resiliency Revanchism and Disaster Risk Management in Manila”, was recognised as a Top Cited Article (2019-2020) in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), the world’s consistently top ranking urban studies journal.

I am very honoured to receive this recognition, and very pleased to know that it falls on the third anniversary of my Gilbert F. White Thesis Award, given by the American Association of Geographers’ Hazards, Risks, and Disasters Specialty Group at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the AAG in New Orleans.

This paper is part of the Symposium Issue, “Flooding in Asian Coastal Megacities”, edited by Gavin Shatkin, featuring contributions from Liza Weinstein, Andrew Rumbach, Saumitra Sinha, and Kian Goh.

In our article, Kenneth and I forward the concept of resiliency revanchism to characterise Metro Manila’s disaster risk management (DRM) strategy, which we argue is predicated on the mass eviction and relocation of informal settlers. We trace the first shift in Philippine DRM policy to the 2009 Ondoy floods, and cast critical attention on the ways the disaster was constructed, and the ways by which flood projections and solutions further marginalise vulnerable yet undesirable social groups.

We draw on Ulrich Beck’s concept of “risk society”, Löic Wacquant and Tom Slater’s work on “territorial stigma” and “agnotology”, and Asher Ghertner’s idea of “aesthetic governmentality” to critically examine how the deliberate production of ignorance by disaster, climate, and urban expertise constructed anti-slum discourses of flooding, disaster, and resilience, which in turn produced deeply unjust landscapes of risk and resilience in ‘building back better’.

This paper is based on our respective Master’s theses. It synthesises four chapters in mine: Chapter Two (Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks), Three (Why the Slum Had to Go: Territorial Stigmatization, Undesirability, and the Power of Representations), Four (How the Slum Was Made to Go: Aestheticizing ‘Danger Zones’ and Territorializing Risk), and Six (Conclusion).

It is the first of three planned journal articles based on my Master’s thesis. The second, entitled “Benevolent Eviction and Cooperative Housing Models in Post-Ondoy Manila”, was published in the launching issue of Radical Housing Journal, and the third is still in preparation.

Conference sessions organised | Perspectives from Urban Political Ecology & Disaster Studies

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2021 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), 7-11 April, Seattle

I’m very glad to collaborate with Dr Emma Colven (University of Oklahoma) on two sessions we co-organised for the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). Our virtual panel and paper sessions are both entitled “Perspectives from Urban Political Ecology & Disaster Studies”, and are part of the Symposium on Socio-ecological Justice in Hazards Adaptation. We are sponsored by three specialty groups: Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE); Hazards, Risks, and Disasters (HRDSG); and Urban Geography (UGSG).

CALL FOR PAPERS (CFP) | “Perspectives from Urban Political Ecology and Disaster Studies”, 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, 7-11 April, Seattle

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VIRTUAL Session: Perspectives from Urban Political Ecology & Disaster Studies

Sponsored by the Hazards, Risks and Disasters (HRDSG), Human Dimensions of Global Change (HDGC), Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) and Urban Geography (UGSG) Specialty Groups

Session Organizers: Khristine Alvarez (University College London), Emma Colven (University of Oklahoma) and Dakila Kim P. Yee (University of the Philippines Visayas, Tacloban College)

Discussant: Dr. Jola Ajibade (Portland State University) 

Political ecology and disaster studies share much common ground. Both fields are committed to explaining the unequal distribution of environmental processes and risks; how socio-spatial positioning shapes our experiences of environmental processes/events; and the role of the state in creating and perpetuating environmental risks and inequalities. This is perhaps unsurprising given the strong influence of the hazards school (Burton et al., 1978) on early political ecology, and its intellectual origins in seeking to provide more critical perspective on hazards, and risk and vulnerability scholarship.

Yet curiously, these fields have since developed largely independently from one another. The last decade has seen the emergence of scholarship bridging political ecology and disaster studies (Collins, 2008; Grove, 2014; Ajibade et al., 2013; Ajibade, 2017; Marks, 2015; Colven, 2017; Saguin, 2017); however, this approach remains marginal. We believe that urban political ecologists and disaster researchers could learn from one another in ways that would produce more theoretically robust, critical research that better serves marginalized communities and directly engages with policy and praxis. Disaster researchers, for instance, are generally more effective at linking theory to praxis. They have also contributed to advancing conceptualizations of vulnerability, risk and resilience, which are comparatively under-theorized in (urban) political ecology. At the same time, urban political ecology’s radical Marxist roots, critical perspectives on power, and concepts such as metabolism might find new resonances in the field of urban disaster studies. 

The opportunity for engagement across these fields is pertinent at this current conjuncture. Coastal cities around the world are grappling with the realities of sea-level rise and increasingly severe storms; normative definitions of urban resilience that maintain the status quo have been adopted by city governments and transnational policy networks (Ajibade, 2017); and emergent research is demonstrating how urban adaptation projects often re-intrench inequalities in exposure, risk, and vulnerability (Alvarez & Cardenas 2019; Ajibade 2019), highlighting the urgent need for equitable and just adaptation and urban transformation.

We invite theoretical, empirical, and methodological papers that explore one or more of the following topics:

  • Hazard- and disaster-induced dispossession 
  • Managed retreat and resettlement programs
  • Bourgeois environmentalism and climate gentrification;
  • Environmental and climate justice movements;
  • Climate risk and insurance riskscapes;
  • Critical perspectives on disaster ecology;
  • (Global) racial capitalism and intersectional approaches to disaster research;
  • Participatory planning and community-led disaster preparedness and response;
  • Political ecologies of urban disasters;
  • The material production of hazardscapes;
  • Materialities and objects of urban disaster risk reduction;
  • Climate adaptation and spatio-temporal reconfiguration of cities
  • Resilience planning and socio-spatial fixes
  • Gender and urban disasters
  • Real estate development in marginal urban areas;
  • Critical studies on urban disaster policies and policy networks;
  • Studies that center marginalized and underrepresented communities;
  • Spatialities of urban adaptation to climate change and natural disasters;
  • Urban zoning, redlining and the production of environmental risk and vulnerability;
  • Vulnerability studies of communities in low-income, rental and mobile housing.

Interested participants should send a title and abstract of no more than 250 words to emmacolven@ou.edu by November 6, 2020. Participants will be notified of acceptance by November 14 and asked to register for the conference and provide their PIN by November 19.

Relevant Literature

Ajibade, I. (2019). Planned retreat in Global South megacities: disentangling policy, practice, and environmental justice. Climatic Change, 157(2), 299-317.

Ajibade, I. (2017). Can a future city enhance urban resilience and sustainability? A political ecology analysis of Eko Atlantic city, Nigeria. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 26, 85-92.

Ajibade, I., McBean, G., & Bezner-Kerr, R. (2013). Urban flooding in Lagos, Nigeria: Patterns of vulnerability and resilience among women. Global Environmental Change, 23(6), 1714-1725.

Ajibade, I and Gordon McBean (2014). Climate extremes and housing rights: A political ecology of impacts, early warning and adaptation constraints in Lagos slum communities. Geoforum (55), 76–86.

Alvarez, M. K., & Cardenas, K. (2019). Evicting slums, ‘building back better’: Resiliency Revanchism and disaster risk management in Manila. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(2), 227–249. 

Bogard, W.C. (1989). Bringing social theory to hazards research: conditions and consequences of the mitigation of environmental hazards. Sociological Perspectives, 31, 147-68.

Burton, I., Kates, R.W. and White, G.F. (1978). The environment as hazard. New York: Oxford University Press.

Colven, E. (2017) Understanding the allure of big infrastructure: Jakarta’s Great Garuda Wall Project. Water Alternatives, 10(2), 250-264.

Eriksen, C., & Simon, G. (2017). The Affluence–Vulnerability Interface: Intersecting scales of risk, privilege and disaster. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49(2), 293-313.

Grove, K. (2014). Biopolitics and adaptation: governing socio-ecological contingency through climate change and disaster studies. Geography Compass 8(3), 198-210.

Grove, K., Cox, S., & Barnett, A. (2020). Racializing Resilience: Assemblage, Critique, and Contested Futures in Greater Miami Resilience Planning. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110(5), 1613-1630.

Jon, I. (2019). Resilience and ‘technicity’: challenges and opportunities for new knowledge practices in disaster planning. Resilience, 7(2), 107-125.

Koslov, L. (2019). Avoiding climate change: “Agnostic adaptation” and the politics of public silence. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 568-580.

Marks, D. (2015). The Urban Political Ecology of the 2011 Floods in Bangkok: The Creation of Uneven Vulnerabilities. Pacific Affairs, 88 (3), 623-651. 

Mustafa, D. The production of an urban hazardscape in Pakistan: Modernity, vulnerability, and the range of choice. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(3), 566-586.

Ramalho, J. (2019). Worlding aspirations and resilient futures: Framings of risk and contemporary city‐making in Metro Cebu, the Philippines. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 60 (1), 24-36.

Ranganathan, M. (2015). Storm drains as assemblages: The political ecology of flood risk in post‐colonial Bangalore. Antipode, 47(5), 1300-1320

Saguin, K. (2017). Producing an urban hazardscape beyond the city. Environment and Planning A, 49(9), 1968-1985.

Sultana, F. (2010) Living in hazardous waterscapes: Gendered vulnerabilities and experiences of floods and disasters. Environmental Hazards, 9(1), 43-53.

Weinstein, L., Rumbach, A., & Sinha, S. (2019). Resilient growth: Fantasy plans and unplanned developments in India’s flood-prone coastal cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(2), 273– 291. 

Yee, D. K. P. (2018). Constructing reconstruction, territorializing risk: imposing “no-build zones” in post-disaster reconstruction in Tacloban City, Philippines. Critical Asian Studies, 50(1), 103-121.

Zeiderman, A. (2012). On shaky ground: The making of risk in Bogotá. Environment and Planning A, 44(7), 1570–1588.

Book chapter | An atlas of praxes and political possibilities: radical collective action and urban transformations

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In our chapter in “Cities of Dignity: Urban Transformations Around the World” published by Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Mary Ann Manahan and I survey municipalist actions featured in Transnational Institute’s “Transformative Cities Atlas of Utopias”. We then identify de-privatisation, the rise of the urban commons, and social movement unionism as key alternative praxes underpinning radical urban transformations across the globe. Some of the lessons we draw from these transformative initiatives that resonate with my work on dispossession and housing justice pertain to the need to decentre urban expertise, to scrutinise ‘inclusive’ new urban governance regimes, and to shift from liberal notions of citizen participation to collective governance. Our aim is to show how the urban commons as praxis radically reconfigures the spaces we inhabit, reconstitutes social relations, and re-politicises urban citizenship towards the creation of “cities of dignity”.

The book is open access and available for download at the link above, but you can also download our chapter by clicking on the image below.

Op-ed | What ‘relief’ for the poor should really look like

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This think piece is less about “what ‘relief’ for the poor should really look like” than why our generosity fails to give relief. Here, Josh Makalintal (University of Innsbruck) and I use relief goods as an entry point for illuminating unreflexive, unempathetic, and exclusionary practices of care and provisioning in times of emergency and disaster. We ascribe this impoverished culture of giving and helping to legacies of classed understandings and attributions of human dignity, which regard the poor as people who matter less and therefore require and deserve less. We consider what it means to think in terms of life rather than survival, and invite a critical reorientation from thinking of the poor to thinking from the poor.

Conference paper | Making the city: A critical review of Metro Manila urbanization and dispossession research

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11th International Conference on Philippine Studies (ICOPHIL), Alicante, Spain

This paper is part of the first of two panels on Philippine critical urban studies co-organised with Dr. Noah Theriault (Carnegie Mellon University).

Urbanizing Metro Manila has involved cleaning up the city region through the erasure of poor informal settlements and the elimination of the people who dwell there, to facilitate the reconfiguration of urban space. Since the 1960s, following the trend of transforming postcolonial capitals into national symbols of progress (Singh, et al. 2019), large-scale infrastructural and architectural projects were undertaken by the Philippine state with the specific aim of ‘developing’ the metropolitan landscape into a showcase for modernity (Benedicto 2015) and later, remaking it according to imaginaries of a ‘world-class’ city (Ortega 2016). Throughout the years, this transformation has been accompanied by displacement, dispossession, and death. This paper reviews five decades of Metro Manila urban and housing research to track, identify, and critically assess the drivers of urbanization and dispossession in the city region. Centring attention on the period after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, I consider how contemporary scholarship has approached questions of urbanization and dispossession largely as a consequence of capital accumulation, and how this orientation of explaining the city in terms of neoliberalization consequently scripts understandings of urban expulsion primarily as outcomes of gentrification. I argue that the focus on capital accumulation tends to overlook other equally powerful processes and agendas that drive urban change and dispossession (i.e., disaster risk and resilience), and call for an attentiveness to both new and emerging empirics in the field. 

References:

Benedicto, Bobby. “The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City: (Trans)gender Performance and the War of Beautification. Antipode 47, no. 3 (2015): 580-597.

Ortega, Arnisson Andre C. Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession. Lanham: Lexington Books. 

Singh, Ganeshwari, Simrit Kahlon & Vishwa Bandhu Singh Chandel. “Political Discourse and the Planned City: Nehru’s Projection and Appropriation of Chandigarh, the Capital of Punjab.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109, no. 4: 1226-1239. 

Invited talk | South-South itineraries: Alternative routes for mutual learning between Latin America and Southeast Asia

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Last 2019 October 1, I gave a talk at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre’s event for “Decolonising the LSE Week”. The podcast for our panel, “South-South itineraries: alternative routes for mutual learning between Latin America and Southeast Asia”, is available to download and stream at this link.

My talk reflected on the lack of engagement with the work of Southern urban scholars writing on and in the South. I began by situating my work as Southern scholarship that aims to theorise urbanisation, dispossession, and climate displacement in ‘vulnerable’ and ‘at-risk’ Southern cities. Reflecting on names and places encountered in literature reviews, manuscript revisions, conferences, and conversations, I enquired into the invisibility of other Souths in studies of the urban global South. To contextualise the questions I raise, I used my experience and my scholarship as reference points for illuminating absences and silences in a field that constantly challenges itself to diversify and provincialise both knowledge and knowledge creation. Finally, I explored three correctives in support of decentring knowledge production and expanding the intellectual geographies of critical urban scholarship.

JOURNAL ARTICLE | Benevolent evictions and cooperative housing models in post-Ondoy Manila

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The second journal article from the MA thesis is out. I am honoured to publish in the first-ever issue of Radical Housing Journal, an autonomous and fully open-access academic journal for “debat[ing] ideas and advanc[ing] knowledge, theory, and practices around a radical approach to housing”. 

Out of the more than 70 submissions for Issue 1, 15 were selected, rigorously reviewed by three activists and scholar-activists, editorially evaluated, and accepted or rejected accordingly.

My article for the Long Read section (focus on critical analysis and theory-making) decenters ‘post-2008’ organising around housing struggles, the theme of this issue, using Manila as a frame. I make the case for a systematic state-led eviction crisis in the city region. Proceeding from this, I argue that Manila’s ‘post-2008’ is not the global financial crisis but rather the 2009 Ondoy flood disaster, and its ‘post-crisis housing situation’ is the mass eviction and relocation of informal settlers from ‘danger zones’ under the Metro Manila Flood Management Project and Informal Settler Families Housing Program. I introduce 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 systematic deployment of benevolence as a technology of eviction. Drawing on the experience of Alliance of People’s Organizations Along Manggahan Floodway (APOAMF), a community association in Pasig City, I examine how benevolent evictions, as materialised in The People’s Plan, reconfigured community participation and activist contestations, and end by considering the radical possibilities that emerge from the contradictions of cooperative housing models.

Two research articles in the launching issue are on the Philippines, including Hazel Dizon’s important paper for the Retrospectives section (focus on specific cases, histories, ideas, and actions) which describes the tactics and strategies employed by Kadamay in claiming their right to shelter through the takeover of idle public housing. 

Presentation | Celebrating Five Years of DPU’s 60th Anniversary PhD Scholarship

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I’m presenting my PhD research on 16 May before the people who make this PhD possible. I will talk about resilient city making in Manila via ‘danger zone’ evictions, particularly how the systematic dispossession of informal settlers along waterways, in the name of climate change adaptation and flood/disaster resilience, is spatially reconfiguring Manila and its suburbs. Green spaces and flood barriers are sprouting in the city’s riparian corridors and reclaimed enclaves are being planned along its coast, as relocation hubs are emerging in the peri-urban fringe. Manila and its periphery are being transformed neither solely nor primarily by capital, but also by flood and disaster risk and the anticipatory logics of ‘resilient’ futures. My research attempts to read this transformation through a critical genealogy and ethnography of the Metro Manila Flood Management Project and the Informal Settler Families Housing Program, the main proponents and primary beneficiaries of ‘danger zone’ evictions.

This event marks the 65th year of the DPU and is part of the #Bartlett100 celebrations. It is free and open to all; non-UCL attendees are required to register as indicated in the details below.