A community book read with Kristian Karlo Saguin, author of Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resource Frontier and winner of the 2024 Benda Prize.

Register here for the Zoom link. Participants are expected to have read the book.

Urban Ecologies on the Edge offers an innovative and theoretically groundbreaking perspective on the production and maintenance of new resource frontiers on the edge of a rapidly expanding city in the Global South. Using the case study of Laguna Lake in Metro Manila, Saguin demonstrates with methodological versatility the dynamic relationship between economic development and environmental management as diverse stakeholders attempt to access and control commodity flows within chains of urban provisioning. Through meticulous storytelling, the book artfully traces the intertwined socioecologies of floods, food, fish, fisherfolk, and infrastructures. With precision and clarity, it reveals how human and nonhuman actors contend for diverse and increasingly exhausted resources, while confronting risk and precarity that manifest in conflicting visions of the future sustainability of the lake and surrounding city.