Research

My research situates at the intersection of urban political economy/ecology, critical development studies, and critical agrarian studies. Currently I work on three research areas: (1)  Urban extractivism, how urban and real estate speculation shape patterns of territorial dispossession and environmental conflict; (2)  Ecologies of digitalization, how digital transformations redefine the use, access, and management of land and land-based resources; (3) Land reform, how the resurgence of interest in land reform among social movements is shifting public debates on environmental governance from a regulatory framework toward a redistributive approach.  

Publications

Book Project

My first book project, tentatively titled Forests of Speculation: Land, Power, and the Birth of Urban Extractivism in El Salvador, examines the limits of urban environmental governance in Central America. It focuses on the case of Nuevo Cuscatlán, El Salvador, a semi-rural town undergoing a process of urban expansion. I draw on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research to analyze real estate investors’ efforts to transform forest land into a district of high-end gated communities and their subsequent conflicts with longtime residents over resulting deforestation, disasters, and water access. Moving beyond narratives that understand environmental conflicts mainly as the consequence of a local culture of corruption that hinders an effective implementation of land use regulation, I argue that the conflicts around urban expansion are rooted in two broad characteristics of the local land use policy: 1. its subordination to a private property land regime, and 2. its view of the real estate sector as a key agent in the financing of public services and infrastructure. Heavily influenced by the interests of Salvadoran landowning elites, these two aspects are the source of an institutionalized pattern of land and water grabbing by the speculative investors. The book situates this dynamic within a broader story about global environmental change and the role of capitalist urban expansion in the production of environmental vulnerability and dispossession.

Peer-reviewed Articles

Gutiérrez, Julio. 2025. “Building Hype: Libertarian Cities, Fictitious Development, and Speculative Dispossession in El Salvador’s ‘Bitcoin City.’” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 57 (3): 973-995 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.13137

Gutiérrez, Julio. 2024. “Real Estate Oligarchs: Elites and the Urbanization of the Land Question in El Salvador.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 51 (2): 489–511. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2023.2252758

Gutiérrez, Julio. 2023. “Staging the New City: Urban Spectacles and the Ecological Origins of Nayib Bukele’s Authoritarian Populism.” City & Society 35 (3): 141–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12473

Other Articles

Gutiérrez, Julio. 2019. "Ecological Crisis: The Blind Spot in Migration Discourse." Hot Spots, Fieldsights, January 23. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ecological-crisis-the-blind-spot-in-migration-discourse

Articles available upon request: juliogutierrez@berkeley.edu