Producing an urban hazardscape beyond the city

Abstract

Urban socioecological risk, like other urban metabolic processes, embodies relations between the city and the non-city. In this paper, I trace the production of urban risk within and beyond the city through the lens of the hazardscape using the case of Metro Manila and Laguna Lake in the Philippines. Building on recent interventions in urban political ecology that seek to map the terrains of extending urban frontiers, I examine the processes that construct city and non-city spaces in urbanization through flood control. I synthesize narratives of the material-discursive production of risk mediated by infrastructure with histories of landscape and livelihood change in an urban socioecological frontier to make two related arguments. First, discursive constructions of city and non-city and the material flows that connect them shape the production of urban ecological risk, with material consequences for non-city vulnerabilities. Second, infrastructure plays an important mediating role in the production of hazardscapes. The intersection of flows of water, discursive urban imaginaries in state plans, and livelihoods in Metro Manila and Laguna Lake exemplifies metabolic relations that reveal the spatio-temporal connections of cities with landscapes that make their functioning possible.

Uneven Urbanisation: Connecting Flows of Water to Flows of Labour and Capital Through Jakarta's Flood Infrastructure

“…This theorisation, we maintain, usefully complements an emerging scholarly interest to understand flood prevention infrastructure as intrinsic to and productive of urban unevenness (Cousins 2017;Meehan 2014;Ranganathan 2015;Saguin 2017;Schramm 2016). Geographers of urban floods and flood risks conceive of infrastructure both as the materialisation of unequal relations between elite and marginalised populations and as one of the mechanisms through which inequalities are reproduced.…”

“…Meehan ). Partly on the waves of a heightened interest in risk and vulnerability in the context of global environmental change (Douglas ; Schramm ), urban geographers are also developing an interest in flood infrastructure, trying to explain how it produces “unequal risk” (Collins ), “risky urban socionatures” (Ranganathan ) or “hazardscapes” (Saguin ) by socially and spatially reconfiguring flood risks and vulnerabilities, creating spaces of protection for specific people and purposes and simultaneously sacrificing or “destroying” other spaces and people.…”

“…In line with the observation of Angelo and Wachsmuth, the critical geographers' analyses of floods and flood infrastructure also seem to invest more effort in theorising and empirically teasing out the “socionatural moment”, than in thinking through the “Lefebvrian moment”. Mobilising different conceptual vocabularies, the stories about flood management in Tijuana, Bangalore and Metro Manila (see, respectively, Meehan ; Ranganathan ; Sanguin ) all convincingly demonstrate how the social and the natural are ontologically inseparable, and use this to re‐politicise urban flood management plans and infrastructures. The question of how to best theorise the power (Meehan ) or agency (Ranganathan ) of technologies (or “tools” as Meehan calls them) is a recurrent theme of this conversation, one that is energised by a desire to explore possibilities to do political work through more serious critical engagements with engineers and engineering.…”

“…Here, we are inspired by Saguin's analysis of how safety in the city of Manila is produced through the creation of risk in the city's hinterlands, most notably Laguna Lake. By following the water beyond the city, Saguin proposes a useful reading of the metabolic process of flood control as an exponent of the process of urbanisation (Saguin ). We take Saguin's proposal one step further, and argue that the relations between urban flood protection and uneven urbanisation do not just happen through flows of water, but are also produced by and productive of flows of capital, resources and labour.…”

Urban Political Ecology Beyond Methodological Cityism

“…Scholars such as Neil Brenner and David Wachsmuth have thus been highly critical of ‘methodologically territorialist’ approaches, which, in their view, treat the urban as a distinct, bounded settlement type that is separate from non‐urban zones located elsewhere (see Brenner, ; Brenner and Schmid, ; Wachsmuth, ). These interventions have been highly provocative and have already inspired others to take up their call in different forms (Arboleda, ; Rice and Tyner, ; Saguin, )…”