Urban Ecologies on the Edge

Making Manila's Resource Frontier

Kristian Karlo Saguin

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520382671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Laguna Lake, the largest lake in the Philippines, supplies Manila's 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 Manila's 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 people—powerful and marginalized—interact with the state and the environment to produce the unequal landscapes of urbanization at and beyond the city's edge.

PART ONE

Making and Remaking a Frontier

ONE

Birth of a Convenient Frontier

FICTION AND HISTORY have long documented imaginations of Laguna Lake as both a problem and a resource. Jose Rizal opens El Filibusterismo (The Subversive), his satirical novel about late nineteenth-century colonial Manila society, with an image of the white steamship Tabo navigating upstream along the Pasig River toward Laguna Lake.¹ The ship sails slowly as skippers and sailors attempt to negotiate the river’s meanders, its shallow waters, and the stretch of sandbars at the river’s mouth where it meets the lake. While most passengers crowd below the ship’s deck, the European elites and colonial officials sit shaded on the deck, gazing at the still waters as they debate how best to solve the problem posed by the silting river and the shallow lake. Among the proposals floated are using forced labor to dig a stream channel through the city and encouraging people to dig in the sandbars to gather snails as feed for the flourishing local industry of duck raising and the production of balut or fertilized duck embryo. The forced labor proposal brings up questions of whether the people might revolt against the Spaniards again, while the snail suggestion elicits a snobbish retort from one of the deck’s passengers: “If everyone were to breed ducks there would be an excess of balut eggs. Ugh! How disgusting! Leave the sandbars alone!” (Rizal, 2007, p. 10).

A parallel image opens Ishmael Bernal’s (1976) film, Nunal sa Tubig (Speck in the Water).² From a shot of smoke rising from a factory stack, the camera pans to a group of men dressed in white cruising on a speedboat. A white man and his local business partner gaze at the landscape as they speed across the calm lake waters, where scenes of traditional rural life continue: a slow passenger boat packed with people, a pair of women catching mudfish underneath clumps of water hyacinths, and men mending nets. Their boat stops in one of the aquaculture enclosures shown to have taken over the lake, as if to survey the lake as a potential business venture. The men nod in satisfaction, then they are interrupted by a threatening sky that forces them to return to shore. The camera then cuts to the vantage of villagers, many of whom scurry home as the winds pick up, to take shelter before an impending downpour. The harbinger of an approaching storm and the cut to disrupted village life signals the shift in the film’s focus from the nameless entrepreneurs searching for a business opportunity to the stories and struggles of villagers amid rapid social and environmental change in Laguna Lake in the 1970s.

Rizal’s first chapter alludes to state power, elite interests, and the work required in navigating and remaking lake and urban environments. The debates between the characters of the ship’s upper deck present a prelude to real twentieth-century state infrastructure projects that asserted a sense of control, even if illusory, over unruly and uncooperative lake nature intimately connected to the city. These massive projects attempted to solve the problem that the landscape presented and relied on an assemblage of techniques and imaginaries that simplified, effaced, and instituted novel arrangements while framing the lake as a problematic frontier ripe with opportunities. Bernal’s surveying entrepreneurs, meanwhile, represent the early days of the opening up of the lake as a frontier for commodification, when a scramble to build profitable aquaculture enclosures dispossessed and marginalized lake dwellers. The contrast between the men in speedboats and the timelessness of rural life in the villages reflects the conflicting imaginaries that would permeate early Laguna Lake development plans: the inevitable march of progress needed to replace the slower, traditional ways. The foreboding storm presciently anticipates the radical socioecological changes that accompanied aquaculture expansion and industrialization just a few years after the film’s release, which shaped the struggles of villagers living in a transformed environment.

Both fictional accounts mirror historical interventions by state and capital that sought to make Laguna Lake perform the work of a resource frontier. In the early 1960s, barely a decade after the end of nearly half a century of American colonial rule, the nascent Philippine state turned to Laguna Lake as part of its quest to spur national development. When Senator Wenceslao Lagumbay, a key proponent of legislation regarding Laguna Lake, stated in 1966 that “the development of Laguna Lake will make a dream come true,” he was echoing narratives of optimism of his time (Caliwag, 1966, p. 27). Politicians and statesmen were eager to transform the lake from its traditional subsistence fishing–based economy into a multi-use resource space attuned to the emerging needs of both rural and urban populations. These desires were situated within emerging imaginaries of national development and modern resource control that suffused postindependence state building.

This chapter traces the early periods of making Laguna Lake Manila’s resource frontier through state projects designed to extract and deliver vital resource flows. Frontiers have always been seen as spaces to be transformed to enable exploitation, drawing margins closer to the state’s territorializing power (Cons & Eilenberg, 2019). Imaginaries and new magical visions of place accompany their birth, conjured as sites of potential and desire while simultaneously marked as underdeveloped, unproductive, and empty (Li, 2014; Tsing, 2005). Laguna Lake has been imagined as a multi-use resource and framed as overexploited but also underutilized. These creative visions necessarily seek to erase existing knowledge relations through unmapping practices of simplification and legibility and by the introduction of modern solutions for a problematic nature that paradoxically result in newer ecological problems.

Elsewhere in the Philippines and throughout Southeast Asia, mid-twentieth-century frontier making was a history of vast lands at the margins being exploited and brought into the orbit of the state for resource extraction, often through the exercise of power and displays of violence (Cons & Eilenberg, 2019; Dressler & Guieb, 2015; Nevins & Peluso, 2008; Tsing, 2005). Laguna Lake is a distinct resource frontier in this regard as an urban resource frontier where techniques of rural development intersected with desires to provision the city. However, the history of frontier making shows similar processes of simplifying spaces and socioecologies and silencing other spatial and socioecological narratives that do not fit within state imaginaries of development and that subsequently haunt these very visions of modernity. The lake is imbricated in various scales of state political ecology tied to urbanization, modernity, and technoscientific knowledge of nature.

Laguna Lake has always been an important source of fish and crustaceans for its immediate surrounding region, with the opening scene of Rizal’s novel attesting to a long history of urban connections facilitated by the lake’s fluidity and productivity. The lake supplies the city with food and serves as a node in a water transport network that connects to the sea. Yet the lake environment has been seen as riddled with problems that have justified more state interventions, from its shallowing that made navigation difficult to its uniquely eutrophic character that has not been efficiently utilized. As a space of potentials, the lake served as a site for the postcolonial state recovering from the damage of war to flex its ambitious vision for development. Spurring Laguna Lake development as a resource, politicians would repeat over the years, was a dream waiting to be realized.

DEVELOPMENTAL DREAMS AND AUTHORITARIAN ANXIETIES

On July 18, 1966, the Philippine Congress passed Republic Act No. 4850, creating the Laguna Lake Development Authority (LLDA). In many ways, the LLDA was a unique and pioneering political body in the country: a self-sustaining, quasi-state corporation that aimed to develop and regulate Laguna Lake’s resources. Its jurisdiction covered an area on the scale of the watershed—including the whole Laguna Lake and the rivers that drain into it—and it became a precedent for other regional development projects on the basin scale (see figure 1 in the introduction).

Laguna Lake’s development was a dream waiting to be realized through modern principles of control of nature: “Control of the lake is an indispensable element for the proper physical planning and development” (Laguna Lake Development Authority, 1966, p. 2), as stated in a prospectus. The language of modern control and productivity permeated calls for efficient planning to take advantage of “the rich but untapped resources of the Laguna Lake Area,” which had yet to “be harnessed by a fully organized, long-range development strategy into an effective development event that will yield the best results” (Laguna Lake Development Authority, 1966, p. 6).

The “grand vision” and ambitious development plan for the lake involved agricultural, industrial, and tourism growth facilitated by reordering of the lake’s nature and its management. Reclamation, dikes, flood control, aquaculture, and other infrastructure and social development projects would eventually emerge, spanning two provinces and Metropolitan Manila, an administrative urban region that formed amid consolidated power under authoritarian rule in the 1970s. Technocrats, politicians, fishery scientists, engineers, foreign consultants, and military officials would populate the new bodies created to manage problems of this new space of resource management. Owing to its liminal location on the edge, Laguna Lake’s resource frontier making was framed as both a rural and an urban development problem.

The LLDA began as a modest organization that got off to a shaky start. It was understaffed and often ran into conflict within its ranks and with other local units under its jurisdiction (Cruz, 1982; Delmendo & Rabanal, 1982). Despite grand and ambitious modern goals of producing the lake as a multi-use resource set out in the 1966 legislation, it took a few more years before the LLDA secured financing and was formally organized on May 30, 1969, at the home of Senator Helena Z. Benitez (Florendo, 1969). It launched its first project a year later in 1970: the introduction of a new and more efficient way of producing fish through aquaculture.

Yet aquaculture was not the primary nor the most important developmental project of the LLDA, despite subsequent events that placed it centrally in resource management in the last half of the century. The year that the LLDA was signed into law, the Philippine government requested assistance from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to conduct scientific studies to assess the developmental potential of the lake as a water resource (Florendo, 1969; Laguna Lake Development Authority, 1966). Laguna Lake resource production had also been framed as dual-purpose control of water for the city: to help rid Manila of floods while supplying domestic water to meet future urban demand.

The immediate precursor of the LLDA’s efforts to manage metabolic flows of water was President Diosdado Macapagal’s (1961–1965) Program Implementation Agency, which sought to solve Manila’s persistent flooding through control of Laguna Lake’s overflow (Florendo, 1969; Macatuno, 1966). As with previous postwar plans of the state however, this project did not materialize, for a variety of political, financial, and technical reasons (see chapter 6). Macapagal’s successor, Ferdinand Marcos (1965–1986), expanded the initial plans from flood control to a broader development project (Macatuno, 1966). The high modern ambitions of development through control of nature promised by the LLDA’s creation would find a match in Marcos’s turn to centralizing authoritarianism. Declaring martial law in 1972, he sought to quell the threat of communist rebellion by consolidating oligarchic and military power through a conjugal dictatorship with First Lady Imelda Marcos (Mijares, 2017). Laguna Lake’s development trajectories would bear the imprints of the triple technocratic developmental features of Marcos’s authoritarian regime: the introduction of green revolution technologies, the promotion of export agriculture, and reliance on foreign borrowing (Boyce, 1993; Ofreneo, 1980).

By instituting infrastructural, livelihood, and regulatory interventions to address developmental problems, Laguna Lake became an arena for Marcos’s vision of development, playing a role in his desire to create a “New Society” out of the destruction of the old political and social order.³ The lake was a site of rural unrest during the martial law years (1972–1981), and Marcos’s New Society sought to suppress dissent while promoting development through modern projects. Marcos secured foreign loans to fund his large, grand infrastructure projects in Manila and elsewhere. The infrastructural obsession with grand structures—termed by Lico (2003) an “edifice complex”—was to be a showcase of authoritarian power and a display of the radical change promised by the New Society.

In Laguna Lake, this infrastructural obsession gave birth to a hydraulic control structure and several flood control structures, which along with an aquaculture development project and a cooperative development project were the major developmental interventions in the lake during the martial law years. Yet as high modern symbols of authoritarian excess, these projects also embody their contradictions and failures. Fish producers opposed the hydraulic control structure and were eventually successful in shutting down its operations. Flood control structures that seemed to have kept the city dry for a while broke down decades later and caused unprecedented disastrous damage. The aquaculture and cooperative development projects, despite millions of pesos in investments, were massive social development failures.

The martial law years under Marcos were also marked by rapid urbanization and a more explicit state recognition of urban problems. Fueled by migration from a troubled countryside, Metro Manila’s population more than doubled between 1950 and 1970 and again between 1970 and 1990, with many of these “surplus populations” finding homes in slums located on marginal and hazardous lands and often subject to state eviction (Karaos, 1993). The problem of feeding Manila, while historically nothing new (Doeppers, 2016), became quantitatively magnified during this time of rapid urban growth. The increasing pressure to produce Laguna Lake as a resource became more than a matter of rural development and was subsequently aligned with finding solutions to urban questions. The resource work that Laguna Lake was expected to perform—as a space to store stormwater, as a source of urban domestic water, and as a steady supplier of fish—was to be made possible by application of modern techniques of infrastructure and resource management.

Marcos was ousted through a people power revolution in 1986. Subsequent administrations adopted a variety of liberal and neoliberal modes of governance of the lake and resource production in general. However, the legacy of authoritarian rule and infrastructural interventions remains visible in the landscape and in the regulatory strategies for managing the lake’s resource problems. Perhaps no ...

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Subvention
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Frontiers of Urbanization
• Part One: Making and Remaking a Frontier
• Part Two: The Work of Urban Metabolic Flows
• Epilogue: Mutable Frontiers, Metabolic Futures
• Notes
• References
• Index