Fields of expertise:
Urban History and Theory, with focus on industrial history and biopolitics.
Research subjects:
Company Towns | Industrial sites | Corporate Urbanism | Historic Preservation | Global South | Post-extractive sites
Methods and approaches:
Microhistory | Oral History | Business Archives | Co-creative design processes | Critical Cartography

My work proposes alternative narratives and microhistories of power. I consider the territory as a subject, and the socio-ecological transition the great challenge of our times. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, including archival research, microhistory, and spatial analysis, my research engages with questions at the intersection of history, architecture, and the social sciences. This approach not only uncovers the narratives embedded in company towns and industrial cities but also informs contemporary debates on the socio-ecological transition.

Flaring Oil in Paradise: Colonial Legacies of Company Towns in the Dutch Caribbean (2025-2027)
Section of Urban Design, TU Delft, Netherlands
Sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation, grant number 235164

The spatial impacts of the oil industry extend beyond extraction sites to include company towns (CT), settlements designed by corporations to house workers and manage social infrastructure. While company towns in Europe and North America are well-documented, those in the Dutch Caribbean – Curaçao and Aruba – remain underexplored within architectural and urban history. This project examines how petroleum-driven urbanization in these islands perpetuated colonial power structures through architectural and urban design, embedding corporate influence into the socio-spatial fabric. It addresses a gap in understanding how colonial logics were reconfigured, rather than dissolved, in the twentieth century. The primary objective of this research is to investigate the structural continuities between colonial governance and corporate-led urbanization in the Dutch Caribbean.

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