About

María Arquero de Alarcón is an associate professor of architecture and urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan Taubman College. Her work advances urban strategies promoting cultural and environmental values in territories under conditions of scarcity. María leads MAde Studio, a research-based, collaborative design practice that offers integrated expertise in architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Through a combination of grant-funded research initiatives, urban design experimentation, and site-specific interventions, MAde Studio focuses on the co-generation of socio-spatial strategies addressing urban transformation in collaboration with local partners and residents. Her design and research has been recognized with awards such as the ACSA Collaborative Practice Award (2019), AIA Michigan Design Awards (2013-2015), BSA Award Citations (2013-2014), and an ACSA Faculty Design Award (2012). Her work is published in various volumes and journals, and she has exhibited in notable venues including the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, and several universities. María holds an architecture professional degree from Madrid Polytechnic University, a master of advanced studies in landscape architecture from E.T.H. Zurich, and a master of landscape architecture in urban design from Harvard University, where she received the award for Urban Design Academic Excellence. Her academic journey in the US was supported by the Fellowship for Postgraduate Studies “Obra Social La Caixa.”

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Business
• Engineering
• Law
• Economic growth
• Geography
• Economics
• Public administration
• Socioeconomics
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• The making and unmaking of place: the extroversion of the Mapleridge neighborhood in post-bankruptcy Detroit

  Geoforum · 2026-01-10

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  • Our work unpacks divergent trajectories of abandonment, vacancy, and reuse in the active production of decline in Detroit. • Post-bankruptcy Detroit is an uneven landscape where the afterlife of abandoned spaces acquires sui generis characteristics. • Our examination of Detroit’s Mapleridge neighborhood challenges singular narratives of generic recuperation. • Mapleridge experienced contradictory pressures: introversion (place-based inertia) and extroversion (extraterritorial flows). • Going beyond fragmentation as an outcome of abandonment, we focus on extroversion as a process reinforcing neighborhood decline. A strong current in recent scholarship on post-bankruptcy Detroit has endorsed an uplifting narrative of resilience leading to spatial stability and eventual city-wide recovery. Yet this constructed tale of rebirth has conveniently overlooked entrenched zones of deprivation that remain virtually untouched by the “Comeback fever.” Looking at what has happened in the neighborhood east of Gratiot Avenue and south of 7 Mile Road reveals a different story of enduring distress that unsettles singular narratives of anticipatory recuperation. Mapleridge (as the neighborhood is officially known) is part of a larger mosaic of stubborn precarity across the urban landscape. While housing vacancy and an aggressive demolition campaign have figured prominently in shaping the physical contours of leftover spaces in Mapleridge, three less visible currents have embedded themselves in the already depleted landscape, turning the neighborhood literally “inside out.” The suburban lifeline that sustains Assumption Grotto Church, an underground economy tied to regional drug trafficking, and commercial businesses operated by immigrant entrepreneurs all can trace their existence to social forces originating outside Mapleridge and Detroit. In seeking to understand how and why abandonment and vacancy have persisted in the neighborhood, it is necessary to recognize that Mapleridge cannot be treated as a cocooned island-like enclave insulated from outside pressures. Instead, the neighborhood must be seen as an outward-looking zone of engagement with porous boundaries shaped more by powerful external forces than by internal dynamics. As a result, Mapleridge has come to function as a conduit, or passageway, linking extractive practices to multiple “elsewheres.”

  PublisherDOI

• From Environmental Criminalization to Insurgent Environmental Justice

  2025-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Brazil, like many countries, recognizes the right to an ecologically balanced environment in its constitution and national legislation. However, this right spuriously conflicts with the constitutional right to housing, and it has been used to criminalize land occupiers in areas of environmental protection through environmental fines, penalties, and displacement. This study examines informal dwellers’ non-conformity to the ascribed positionality of environmental offenders, illuminating their acts of defiance as a mechanism to challenge criminalization while asserting their agency within the framework of “insurgent environmental justice.” We analyzed in-depth interviews and lessons from participatory action research to understand environmental injustices in two young land occupations and one legalized and upgraded settlement in São Paulo. We introduce the “insurgent environmental justice” concept to characterize the processes of conscientização (awareness-raising) that empower informal dwellers to challenge environmental criminalization through counter-hegemonic discourses. The collective actions of these informal dwellers have given rise to various forms of insurgency, encompassing diverse emancipatory processes, including rights-based claims that underscore environmental stewardship within the framework of the rule of law. Furthermore, these insurgent practices engage with invited spaces of citizenship while nurturing the development of transformative networks focused on citizenship and justice.

  PublisherDOI

• <scp>THE CONTESTED URBANISM OF ABANDONMENT</scp> : The Afterlife of Two Distressed Neighborhoods in Detroit

  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · 2025-09-15

  articleOpen access

  Abstract In post‐industrial cities in decline, what happens to leftover spaces after abandonment? This question lies at the root of trying to make sense of entrenched distress in neighborhoods in deindustrializing Detroit, a city struggling for more than five decades with disinvestment, job losses, population shrinkage, a collapsed housing market, abandoned properties and dysfunctional public services. Located on the west side of Detroit, Brightmoor and Delray are two neighborhoods that share common features of distress. Despite what might look like similarly neglected landscapes, the leftover spaces in these neighborhoods have not suffered the same fate, and what is happening has in fact diverged along alternative pathways. Making use of a relational comparison enables us to excavate beneath the level of appearances to expose entrenched differences. This investigation constructs layered profiles of these neighborhoods to counteract the erroneous misunderstandings that suggest that processes of decline put in motion by vacancy and abandonment have only produced lifeless voids where nothing happens, or empty slates where anything can happen. Rather, the uneven trajectories of urban decline in Brightmoor and Delray have left behind unanticipated residues that embed themselves in the social fabric of these neighborhoods, complicating conventional approaches to market‐led stabilization and sustainable recovery.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Activist Co-production for the Right to Occupy, Hold Ground, and Upgrade

  Planning Theory · 2024-01-31 · 4 citations

  article

  This article theorises a multi-year participatory action research engagement focusing on young land occupations and consolidated favelas in São Paulo’s south periphery, providing an arsenal of tools for activist-scholars. Building on Paulo Freire's legacy, we call on academia to embrace activist co-production, learn from and support informal dwellers’ everyday urbanisms, and join social movements’ struggles for social transformation. We advance three modalities of action: awareness raising through emancipatory education and capacity building; articulatção through knowledge exchange between young and consolidated informal communities; and advocacy through policy reform for the right to occupy, hold ground, and upgrade.

  PublisherDOI

• In Service of the Public Interest, The Public Design Corps

  2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  During the summer of 2020, the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests spurred architecture schools across the nation into sites of sociopolitical action. The students’ capacity to self-organize, articulate the urgent need for changes and demand institutional responses was bold and unapologetic. At stake was a perceived numbness in the curricular structures, classrooms, and syllabi that made universities complicit with the status quo and the ethos guiding academic excellence, inappropriate. At the University of Michigan, student organizing took on a bold stance calling the college to take a position and go beyond words to implement meaningful changes. Design Justice Actions (DJA) brought together students from across degrees in the college to give shape to a manifesto that would turn their many discontents into actionable components. Students used persuasion and imagination, found allies, and built coalitions in and out of the school. Convening not one, but many conversations, students instigated curriculum rethinking, access and representation, the profession, institutional co-governance, and more.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Young Land Occupations and the Failure of Housing Policy in Brazil

  Housing Policy Debate · 2021 · 3 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Economic growth

  How suitable are federal housing policies and slum upgrading programs for those living in young land occupations? Scholars rarely ask this question because research and policy target well-established settlements that have acquired tenure security. In contrast, young land occupations are highly vulnerable, emergent settlements threatened with eviction and are not sufficiently visible to attract government and scholarly attention. Through a multiyear collaboration with activists, social movements, nonprofits, and residents of young land occupations in São Paulo, Brazil, this participatory action research elucidates who occupies these locations and why, where they come from, and the housing struggles they face. A survey administered to 906 households depicts land occupiers as uniformly very poor and vulnerable, unlike the low- to modest-income dwellers of consolidated informal settlements. An assessment of existing social housing programs emphasizes the need to develop housing assistance and upgrading programs specifically targeting the socioeconomic conditions of land occupiers, thus proactively supporting them.

  PublisherDOI

• The Judicialization of the Planning Process in São Paulo’s Informal Settlements: Enforcing Housing and Environmental Rights through the Courts?

  Journal of Planning Education and Research · 2020 · 16 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law

  This article examines claims about the judicialization of the planning process. How does the judiciary manage disputes between constitutional rights to housing and a healthy environment in São Paulo’s informal settlements? We scrutinize thirty-six legal cases from 2013 to 2016 in the State Court of Appeals, examining the litigants and their argumentations. The findings demonstrate judicial deference to planning. Court rulings defer to municipal plans by invoking separation of powers and budgetary constraints principles. The supremacy of the plan highlights the ethical responsibilities of educators and practitioners and has implications for housing and environmental activists in their organizing strategies.

  PublisherDOI

• Imag(e)ing the Urban Water Commons

  Journal of Architectural Education · 2020-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The necessity and desire to control water, a vital resource for life, have generated deep, irreversible territorial transformations. Resting on the banks of the Sabarmati River, the Indian city of Ahmedabad has long celebrated water as a driver of urbanity and inclusive citizenship. This essay builds on the many natures of the urban water commons and examine the ever-changing relationship of the river and its city as a productive breeding ground for architectural and urban design experimentation. The societal construction of alternative, collective water imaginaries starts by recognizing the many cultural, spiritual, and symbolic meanings around water, connecting us with an increasingly distant nature. It is this elusive condition of water that drives the studio pedagogy explored in this essay. The projects adopt different formats and disciplinary positions while reclaiming the designers' cultural agency to advance socioenvironmental agendas and instigate political action.

  PublisherDOI

• Tracing shoreline flooding: Using visualization approaches to inform resilience planning for small Great Lakes communities

  Applied Geography · 2019-10-22 · 15 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Methodology to Identify and Assess Agroecological Practices in Metropolitan Areas. Case Study, Concepción, Chile

  International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics · 2019-06-30 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  Urban agriculture (Ua) is being constantly reviewed because of its significant contribution to urban and metropolitan sustainability (mS). Within the approaches associated with Ua, agroecology stands out as a practice that places value on collaborative social networks. Emerging from grassroots organizations that focus on ecological production and food sovereignty, agroecology strengthens short production-consumption chains, therefore increasing the resilience of metropolitan systems, which are under constant threat by natural hazards. The focus of this research is to develop and apply a methodology that identifies underlying agroecological practices, describing their location, state of development, and potential contribution to sustainability within metropolitan areas. a theoretical framework is developed to distinguish agroecological practices from commonly practiced Ua; subsequently a proposed methodology is developed to identify and assess these activities based on the following criteria: forms of production, sociopolitical organization, and mS. This methodological approach is used to analyze agroecological practices present in the metropolitan area of Concepcin, Chile's second most important city, located over a territory with high presence of marshes, riverbeds, and wetlands. Conclusions identify as main strengths of agroecological practices their location on rururban interstices, together with their small scale of production; both aspects contribute to improving mS. Regarding weaknesses, the lack of appropriate planning policies and regulations threaten agroecological practices to disappear under the pressures exerted by contemporary urban development. finally, particular attention should be given to associative organizations, which have proven to enhance sustainable agroecological outcomes, by increasing employment generation, environmental preservation and local resilience.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ana Paula Pimentel Walker

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  13 shared

• Jonathan Levine

  Hadassah Academic College

  5 shared

• Jennifer Maigret

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  5 shared

• Rosina Bierbaum

  Global Environment Facility

  4 shared

• Susan Landfried

  A. Alfred Taubman Health Care Center

  4 shared

• Bin Zhang

  4 shared

• Yunsong Liu

  Peking University

  4 shared

• Krista Badiane

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

Education

• Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design, Graduate School of Design, Department of Urban Planning and Design

  Harvard University

  2008

• Master of Advanced Studies in Landscape Architecture, Landscape Architecture

  ETH Zurich

  2004

• Arquitectura

  Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid

  2001

Awards & honors

• ACSA Collaborative Practice Award (2019)
• AIA Michigan Design Awards (2013-2015)
• BSA Award Citations (2013-2014)
• ACSA Faculty Design Award (2012)
• Urban Design Academic Excellence award from Harvard Universi…