Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Dr. Kristian Saguin from the University of the Philippines Diliman, who will discuss urbanization and resource flows in Metro Manila. Currently, Dr. Saguin serves as Associate Professor of Geography at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

In this presentation, I examine urbanization as a frontier-making process through stories from Metro Manila in the Philippines and its convenient resource frontier, Laguna Lake. Drawing from ethnographic and historical accounts in and beyond the city, I track two particular resource flows - fish and floodwaters - that have shaped Manila’s twentieth century urban development and environmental trajectory. Making visible the constellation of actors, practices, desires and materialities brought together to deliver these vital resource flows for the city underscores the shifting assemblages and politics that sustain life in the city and produce imaginaries for possible urban futures.

About the Speaker

Kristian Karlo Saguin is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of the Philippines Diliman who has engaged with various political ecological dimensions of urban and environmental change in the Philippines. He is the author of the Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila's Resource Frontier (University of California Press, 2022), which received the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies and the American Association of Geographers Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography.