Urban Ecologies on the Edge

Laguna Lake, the largest lake in the Philippines, supplies Manilas 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 Manilas 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 peoplepowerful and marginalizedinteract with the state and the environment to produce the unequal landscapes of urbanization at and beyond the citys edge.