SEAC hosts Dr Kristian Karlo Saguin who will discuss his recent book Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resource Frontier, which was recently published by the University of California Press (2022). Dr Saguin will examine urbanization as a frontier-making process through the example of Metro Manila in the Philippines and its convenient resource frontier, Laguna Lake. Guided by an urban political ecological understanding of urban metabolism, he will track two particular resource flows with particular resonance for Manila’s twentieth 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. This event will take place online via Zoom.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Dr Kristian Karlo Saguin is an 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 examine 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 recently published by the University of California Press in 2022.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.