Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resource Frontier

With Kristian Saguin, University of the Philippines Diliman

In this presentation, Dr Saguin will examine urbanization as a frontier-making process through the example of Metro Manila in the Philippines and its adjacent resource frontier, Laguna Lake. Guided by an urban political ecological understanding of urban metabolism, he tracks two resource flows with particular resonance for Manila’s 20th century urban environmental trajectory—fish and floodwaters. Making visible the constellation of actors, practices, desires and materialities brought together to deliver vital resource flows for the city underscores the shifting assemblages and politics that sustain life in the city and produce imaginaries of possible urban futures.

Kristian Saguin is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of the Philippines Diliman. His work engages with urban, agrarian and environmental studies in various sites in the Philippines. He has published political ecological and urban research that examines livelihoods, environmental practices, resource politics and urban life at the peri-urban fringes and beyond. His book, Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resource Frontier, was published by the University of California Press in 2022 and received the 2022 American Association of Geographers Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography.

All are welcome!

The 2023 activities of the Philippine Studies Group at the York Centre for Asian Research, York University are supported through funding from the Philippine Consulate General in Toronto. For more information about the Philippine Studies Group:
https://ycar.apps01.yorku.ca/philippine-studies-at-york-university/