Urban agriculture experiments in Asia's metropolises are often spontaneous assemblages that unfold with diverse trajectories. Rather than being confined to the laboratories and field sites of state and market institutions, many such experiments escape or exceed the knowledge production spaces of technocrats, scientific professionals, and planners. Instead, knowledge is co-produced within a network of agentic actors, which also includes fledgling gardeners, local government officials, non-profit organizations, experienced rural farmers, culinary professionals, and even nonhumans. Some emergent networks are unlikely alliances forged across class lines, rural-urban divides, and political spectra. Spontaneous, diffuse, and polycentric, urban agriculture experiments complicate our understanding of the governance of urban experiments and urban environments. This paper explores the polycentric governance of urban agriculture experiments in Metro Manila, a highly dense and fragmented megacity in Southeast Asia. Drawing on observations in urban agriculture spaces and in-depth interviews with urban farmers and representatives from state and non-state institutions, this paper illustrates how polycentric urban agriculture experiments in Metro Manila reflect the ambivalences—both the promises and struggles—of urban experimentation. On the one hand, the socio-material relations emerging from urban agriculture experiments demonstrate transformative promises. On the other hand, while creativity and innovation sprout out of the metropolis's cracks and fissures like tiny seedlings of hope, many of them are ultimately stunted by Metro Manila's adverse political and economic realities. Whether these experiments can eventually influence urban governance and planning to improve the lives of Manileños remains a question.

While there is a long and varied history of research on urban density, there is little work examining how high-density urbanism (HDU) is perceived and experienced amongst marginalized residents. Yet, paying attention to how residents understand density offers important insight into what density is and to how it matters for cities. Drawing on research in one of the world’s densest and most unequal cities, Manila, we develop the concept of “density textures” to address this gap. We examine density textures through three key inter-related themes: negotiating space, the unruly crowd, and material substrates. We conclude with reflections for future research.

The resurgent interest in environmental questions in political geography has brought into focus its existing and potential intersections with related fields, including political ecology. Both fields share the core concerns of investigating state, territory, power, and political action around environmental resources; and both draw from a diversity of approaches and methods. In this chapter, I explore the convergences between political geography and political ecology through the vantage point of the urban, surveying two approaches to urban environmental change in urban political ecology and affiliated fields. The first tracks metabolic circulation, extended urbanization, and the state-resource-territory nexus through broadly neo-Marxian framings of the uneven production of urban spaces and environments. The second reviews a range of embodied and situated approaches from feminist, postcolonial, and Southern urbanist scholarship to demonstrate how diverse everyday practices reshape the politics of urban environments. I provide selected empirical examples for both approaches, including my own research on the urbanizing environments of Manila.

Land use dilemmas brought about by rapid urban growth present complex challenges in urban governance toward sustainable and inclusive cities. To this end, urban farming has been promoted as a way to improve food security, livelihoods, well-being, and ecological resilience in cities. Yet, it remains largely invisible in urban planning and policymaking on land use and urban development in the Philippines. This chapter takes the case of urban farming to illustrate how urban development, land use, sustainability, equity, and governance intersect in Metro Manila. In discussing current challenges in initiating, maintaining, and governing urban farming activities, it proposes ways to make urban decision-making regarding a fundamentally land use problem more inclusive and equitable. It argues for the need to incorporate urban farming into the sustainable urban development agenda to strengthen its place in urban governance, while emphasizing grassroots access and participation at various stages of decision-making.

In Manila proponents of smart urbanism offer solutions to daunting urban problems in the form of remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and digital mass communication. This article puts these proposals into theoretical and historical context and asks what it means to be a “smart city” amid a resurgence of authoritarianism in the Philippines and around the world. By putting the principles of science and technology studies in dialogue with those of critical urban geography, our analysis foregrounds the tensions between the generative potentials of “patuloy na pag-unlad” (continuous development) and the panoptic impulses of authoritarian capitalism.

As coastal communities across the Global South confront the multiple challenges of climate change, overfishing, poverty and other socio-environmental pressures, there is an increasing need to understand diverse coastal governance responses and livelihood trajectories from a comparative perspective. This paper presents a holistic investigation of the pressures coastal communities face in four countries and examines possible meeting points between bottom-up initiatives and top-down policies. We compare the experiences of eight fishing areas in Ghana, Tanzania, Thailand and the Philippines and ask how small-scale fishing communities perceive overfishing and other socio-environmental pressures; what factors determine the success and failure of coastal governance initiatives; and how different initiatives can be made congruent to improve coastal, rural development outcomes. Results from an extensive survey of 835 fisherfolk and semi-structured interviews with 196 key informants show that overfishing remains a significant driver of livelihood trajectories in the communities and that fisherfolk respond through informal mechanisms of collective action. Drawing from these diverse experiences, we propose viewing coastal livelihood trajectories through the integrated dimensions of socio-environmental relationships and coastal governance options and discuss implications that address institutional scalar flexibility, illegal fishing, and persistent marginalisation.

Infrastructure and the spatial practices that coalesce around them come to matter in multiple ways. Building on the legacy of splintering urbanism and subsequent appraisals, we explore the paradoxes of infrastructural spaces in a Global South city. In Manila, urban infrastructure plays a central role in enabling evictions in city spaces marked as “danger zones,” and in inhabiting “death zones” in the peripheries where evictees are resettled. This piece employs a relational view of the tensions between the dispossessive and sustaining work of infrastructure to extend the spatial metaphors of urban infrastructure and to illuminate political possibilities built around connections.

In this piece, I aim to extend the spaces and tensions of populist ecologies by examining their contemporary urban forms. In the Philippines, urban populist ecologies articulate a politics of discipline that mines discontent among urban residents and fuels antagonistic rhetoric against the undisciplined “others” who are often blamed for the city’s problems. Using the controversy over an artificial white sand beach in Manila, I explore how environmental conflicts, visions of urban futures and authoritarian nostalgia coalesce around strongman populist performances that reimagine the urban environment by appealing to people’s aspirations for resolving urban disorder.

Laguna Lake, the largest lake in the Philippines, supplies Manila's dense urban region with fish and water while operating as a sink for its stormflows and wastes. Transforming the lake to deliver these multiple urban ecological functions, however, has generated resource conflicts and contradictions that unfold unevenly across space. 

In Urban Ecologies on the Edge, Kristian Karlo Saguin tracks the politics of resource flows and unpacks the narratives of Laguna Lake as Manila's resource frontier. Provisioning the city and keeping it safe from floods are both frontier-making processes that bring together contested socioecological imaginaries, practices, and relations. Combining fieldwork and historical accounts, Saguin demonstrates how people—powerful and marginalized—interact with the state and the environment to produce the unequal landscapes of urbanization at and beyond the city's edge.

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This piece situates the challenges and opportunities for geography as a discipline amid the setting of Philippine higher education. By charting the discipline’s historical transformations and contemporary trajectories in the spheres of pedagogy, research, and service learning, it presents a particular picture of geography’s place and possible futures within a global South context. Despite its disciplinal marginality rooted in institutional constraints in the country’s higher education system, geography is at a crucial juncture in expanding its visibility and reach, and magnifying its relevance and transformative potentials in the Philippines.

The objective of this Forum is to complicate the usual depictions of Global South mega-urban regions. Neither the sure-fire means of realizing the aspirations of majority populations nor as a descent into chaos, the massiveness of Southern cities offers many different dimensions and implications.

In this article, we compare four fishing‐based areas in Thailand and the Philippines to examine if and how small‐scale fishing communities are able to escape marginalisation. Three questions guide our inquiry: (i) How have fishing communities been affected by overfishing, climate change and other pressures? (ii) What adaptive strategies have these communities employed to mitigate socio‐economic and environmental challenges? (iii) What has been the impact of these strategies on (escaping) marginalisation? Through a survey of 393 fishing‐based households and semi‐structured interviews with 59 key informants we find an uneven mixture of drivers, strategies and impacts. Respondents varyingly attribute declining fish catch to illegal fishing, overfishing, population increase, climate change and pollution. The case studies illustrate various degrees of adaptive successes that result from integration of top‐down and bottom‐up initiatives, and availability and access to livelihood strategies. However, the impact of adaptive strategies on overcoming marginalisation remains meagre and constrained by, among others, the power of illegal and commercial fishing and the absence of integrated spatial planning. We call for policy interventions and further research that takes into account the integration of top‐down and bottom‐up institutions, and the multiple dimensions and spaces of the drivers that shape fisherfolk marginalisation.

This paper introduces ‘beneficiary citizenship’ as a way to understand a form of urban citizenship that has emerged from shifts in state–citizen relations. Through the case of state-initiated urban community gardens in Metro Manila, it examines beneficiary citizenship as conditionally granting urban dwellers welfare, entitlements or recognition in the city in return for their transformation into good, responsible citizens. Beneficiary citizenship captures the dual forces of neoliberal technologies of government and alternative citizenship claims that are simultaneously present in various participatory and community-centred state projects. Case study gardens established in a resettlement housing project, in a poverty reduction programme and in a gated village in Metro Manila all seek to cultivate good citizen traits deemed worthy of being granted recognition in the city through a transformation of self and the community. Yet, beneficiaries in these projects also use their good gardener/citizen subjectivity to mobilise ends different from those intended by garden projects as technologies of government. Community gardens therefore become spaces where urban dwellers articulate citizenship by combining various strategies granted by their participation in the projects, exceeding attempts to order and contain urban life.

Urban metabolism refers to the socioecological exchange processes and transformations in cities. Different fields deploy the concept in various ways, rooted in nineteenth‐century work in biology and Marxist theory. Using urban metabolism as a metaphor, a research paradigm, or a methodological tool, studies have ranged from industrial ecological accounting of material energy flows in cities to a focus on the historical production of socionatures in urban political ecology. The multiple meanings and broad scope of metabolism have initiated debates on the usefulness of the concept but have also created spaces for interdisciplinary dialogues that integrate methods and approaches in understanding urban environmental change.

In this article, I examine the shifting political ecologies of governance of Laguna Lake, Philippines, in the context of historical and contemporary populist political rhetoric. Rodrigo Duterte, who was elected president in 2016 through a platform of change, brought national attention again to the lake by promising to give it back to the people marginalized by decades-long elite capture. This populist rhetoric is the latest in attempts to manage an urban resource frontier with conflicting demands and uses. By narrating a history of governance of Laguna Lake, I trace parallels between current and past strategies of addressing resource conflicts: from Ferdinand Marcos’s authoritarian rule in the 1970s and 1980s and the pluralist modes that followed to Duterte’s law-and-order vision of development. By comparing the populist narratives of Marcos and Duterte, I demonstrate that populist rhetoric in authoritarian forms entails the contradictory processes of politicization of the problem and depoliticization of solutions. Authoritarian populist narratives transform the framing of environmental problems through antagonistic politics even as solutions are constrained within existing depoliticized technologies of government that limit the spaces of contestations. Key Words: authoritarian, Duterte, Laguna Lake, Marcos, populism.

This chapter explores how urban political ecological approaches to nature-society relations can illuminate understandings of dynamic urbanization in Southeast Asia. It argues that environmental issues and challenges of the 21st-century city can be enriched through a serious engagement with urban political ecology themes, concepts and perspectives. The chapter provides a survey of the key themes and metaphors of urban political ecology and discusses two theoretical interventions where case studies of cities in Southeast Asia may provide empirical contributions. It provides empirical discussions of two moments in the urbanization of nature – everyday city-making and urban resource frontier production – to illustrate analytical merits of urban political ecological thinking using the Philippine case study of Metro Manila and nearby Laguna Lake. The chapter also explores urban political ecology approaches to examine the urbanization of nature in Metro Manila, a Southeast Asian megacity of more than 12 million people.

Urbanization has become a significant driver of aquaculture in the rapidly expanding cities of the global South. Using a case study of Laguna Lake and Metro Manila in the Philippines, this paper disaggregates the urban as a driver of aquaculture, and examines the social relations that structure urban-oriented aquaculture. It integrates access analysis with the value chain heuristic to identify how urbanization shapes domestic aquaculture value chains, and to map access mechanisms for firms and actors engaged in these chains. Macro-level urban processes drive aquaculture in at least four ways: as a source of demand for fish, as a source of input and capital flows, as a set of activities that transforms sites of aquaculture production, and as a sociocultural discourse. Micro-level mapping of access in the urban value chains shows a multitude of actors who derive benefits that range from direct participation in fish production and exchange to the indirect consumption benefits associated with lower-priced fish. Benefit and access mechanisms are unevenly distributed across the chain, and are configured and reinforced by social relations tied to place-based institutional contexts. Access analysis of urban value chains within the framework of urban drivers presents a means to evaluate the sustainability, poverty alleviation and development goals of aquaculture amid increasing urbanization.