Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago is Professor of Urbanism and Planning History at the School of Architecture (ETSAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). Positioned at the intersection of urban studies, critical theory, and social history, his scholarship traces the entanglement of planning genealogies with struggles over collective life and the historical trajectories of capitalist development. Drawing on sustained engagement with archival inquiry, policy analysis, and radical intellectual traditions, he has contributed substantively to debates on the role of spatial strategies in processes of capitalist restructuring, the constitution of urban planning as a field of knowledge and practice, and the contested politics of commoning and enclosure. Taken together, these lines of research frame spatial planning and urbanization not as neutral technical domains but as terrains of class struggle, revealing their function as spheres of social ordering while also illuminating their capacity to sustain insurgent spatial imaginaries and transformative practices.

Sevilla-Buitrago is the author of Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and editor of Neil Brenner: Critical Urban Theory and the Politics of Scale (Icaria, 2017, in Spanish). He lectures internationally and has published extensively in leading journals and edited volumes, including Antipode, The Architectural Review, Planning Perspectives, Social and Cultural Geography, Society and Space, and Urban Studies. He holds a PhD in Planning and Urban Studies (2009) and an MA+BArch (2002) from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Prior to joining academia full time, he accumulated over a decade of experience in professional practice as an architect and urban planner.