Maria Khristine Alvarez

University College London | UCL · Development Planning Unit

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 eviction. Drawing on the experience of a community association in Pasig City, a part of Metro Manila in the Philippines...

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a major contradiction in contemporary urban planning. This is the relationship between the entrepreneurial modes of urban politics that shape contemporary planning practice and the interrelated dynamics of economic precarity and informalisation of low-income communities that exacerbate contagion, and therefore...

Nach der Revolution von 1986 verschrieb sich die politische Elite der Philippinen dem Neoliberalismus, anstatt die Probleme der Bevölkerung anzugehen. Das rächt sich heute.

How did a clear majority of the electorate become so inclined to believe or disregard outright lies from Bongbong Marcos and his allies? What are the circumstances under which massive advantages for one candidate or bad messaging deployed on behalf of another become decisive? To address these issues, we need to historicize the current moment in Ph...

Marcos Jr. won because of two contiguous failures after 1986: that of liberals to force significant concessions from elites, and that of leftists to advance a compelling alternative to elite rule. . . . In the final analysis, what enabled Bongbong to win the presidency was not simply the machinations of his powerful family, but a strong current of...

For too long, the Philippine left has been sucked into giving support to different factions of the ruling elite. An unprecedented left-wing campaign in this year’s presidential election is a chance to break with that approach and put forward a radical agenda. | Published in Jacobin Magazine, March 1, 2022: https://jacobinmag.com/2022/03/philippines...

Infrastructure and the spatial practices that coalesce around them come to matter in multiple ways. Building on the legacy of splintering urbanism and subsequent appraisals, we explore the paradoxes of infrastructural spaces in a Global South city. In Manila, urban infrastructure plays a central role in enabling evictions in city spaces marked as “...

In this chapter, we 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 t...