University of the Philippines, Philippines
My work cuts across various socioecological questions in urban, agrarian and environmental studies. My book Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resoure Frontier (2022) explores urbanisation as a frontier-making process that extends beyond the city. Set in Manila and Laguna Lake, it weaves together ethnographic and historical accounts of the politics and paradoxes of sustaining urban life. It received the 2022 AAG Meridian Book Award and the 2024 Harry J. Benda Prize.
Through a political ecology lens, I examine livelihoods, resource governance, and everyday urban politics amid environmental change at the peri-urban interface in the Philippines. First, I have demonstrated how ecological specificities and social relations shape fisherfolk marginalization, coastal governance and vulnerability to hazards in aquaculture development.
Second, my work Laguna Lake analyses how cities produce resource frontiers. Engaging with urban metabolism I track flows of water, food and waste, and investigate how state governance strategies – including modern imaginaries of nature and authoritarian populism – manifest in urban peripheries. Recently, I have explored smart urbanism, land reclamation, and the energy transition around Metro Manila.
Third, my engagement with communities in Manila’s peripheries focused on everyday politics, resistance and movements surrounding peri-urban environmental transformation. Documenting responses to state initiatives such as urban farming, flood control infrastructure and urban redevelopment projects, I examine how people negotiate claims and citizenship. I also seek to understand practices of city-making through urban gardening and high-density urbanisms.