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I am a critical urban sociologist, geographer, and political activist previously based in Manila, and currently working on a PhD at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London (UCL). I am the recipient of the 2018 DPU 60th Anniversary Doctoral Scholarship Award, and the 2018 Gilbert F. White Thesis Award from the Hazards, Risks, and Disasters Specialty Group (HRDSG) of the American Association of Geographers (AAG).

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 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 periphery. Through a critical genealogy and ethnography of the Metro Manila Flood Management Project and the Informal Settler Families Housing Program, it aims to weave a critical account of ‘resilient’ city-making and theorise the new drivers and new modes of dispossession that reconfigure urban and peri-urban space in vulnerable Southern coastal cities.

This work on disasters and the urban draws from a strong rights and justice tradition, inherited from my activism and sharpened by my training in sociology and self-study in human geography. I understand the city primarily in terms of home, particularly who it homes and un-homes: who it protects and neglects; who it welcomes and abandons; and who, to borrow from Ben Anderson (2012), it “lets live” and “lets die”. This is why dispossession, displacement, and deprivation are the central theme that cuts across my work.

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

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

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Work cited:

Anderson, Ben. 2012. “Affect and Biopower: Towards a Politics of Life.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37(1):28-43.

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