ABSTRACT
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.
