Research

My research lies at the intersection of urban political ecology and critical agrarian studies, and focuses on the dynamics of urban expansion in peri-urban and rural environments. I am interested in the relationship urbanization and environmental change from three dimensions:

(1) the financialization of real estate, looking at how practices of financial speculation around urban real estate shape the form and rhythm of urban development.

(2) environmental governance, looking at the complexities of land use and water management in urbanizing spaces marked by authoritarian power structures.

(3) resource grabbing, looking at the complex practices of land and water appropriation that accompany processes of urbanization.

Currently, I am working on two projects. The first is a book manuscript about the history of real estate development in Nuevo Cuscatlán, El Salvador, a coffee-producing town whose forested lands have been targeted as a site of peri-urban gentrification. This project examines how the institutionalized system of land and water dealing constructed by Salvadoran elites during the post-war period paved the way for the emergence of what I call real estate populism - a historical convergence between real estate speculation and authoritarian populist politics with major social and environmental implications. My second projects focuses on the emergence of libertarian city experiments in Central America.