Elizabeth Milagros Alvarez is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Elizabeth is a Caribbeanist urbanist researcher, whose interests are grounded in her experience as a Black immigrant and city dweller in Santo Domingo and the Bronx.

She is interested in how the home acts as a locus of mediation for large-scale transformations, particularly that of globalized capital and its spatialized local contexts. Her research focuses on how the coloniality of tourism sites complicates the concept of housing, transforming it into a hub for assetization and transnational activities. This political economic construction of the home aims to challenge the relationship between the housing, residents, the market and the state, in tourism-developed economies where planning contexts are undergirded by both processes of dispossession as well as the framework of popular rentier capitalism.

Elizabeth’s work has also examined the emergence of Caribbean tourism as a development policy in the historical context of U.S. imperialism. She holds a master’s degree in public and urban policy from The New School. Prior to doctoral research, Elizabeth’s career spanned the fields of journalism, public relations and market research, most recently managing a $2M portfolio for Brandwatch.