Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
10-2025
Abstract
Slum communities which compose an informal city offer a serious challenge to urban metabolism approaches that promise to be inclusive in confronting environmental injustice. In particular, urban political ecology (UPE) frameworks critically examine power structures and relational dynamics in the environment where objectionable injustices are identified and corrected. However, Holifield (2009) finds UPE limiting as it excludes marginalized communities and other important factors. The main reason Holifield highlights is the dominance of Marxist UPE frameworks that interpret environmental injustices narrowly as results of uneven social power relations and dynamics driven primarily by neo-liberal capitalist behaviors, institutions, and activities. Alternatively, he recommends the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) which looks into how actors, through forms and standards, put each other in context rather than the theory doing so from a determined a priori context. Against Holifield, I argue that a version of UPE could help achieve a more inclusive and equitable distribution of social power toward what Swyngedouw and Heynen (2003) construe as “emancipatory urban politics”. Here, those inhabiting spaces acquire the capacity to design urban environments in line with their aspirations, needs, and desires (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). My proposed UPE approach, if applied to the case of an informal city (e.g. Manila), opens possibilities of co-designing with communities where residents of an informal city are viewed and treated as actors, rather than passive recipients of social security or displaced settlers without “urbanization”. Notwithstanding its essential contribution to achieving a more inclusive and just environment in informal cities, I maintain together with Musango, et. al (2020) that co-designing with communities requires that we depart from SDGs, targets, and indicators towards engaged urban metabolism assessment practices.
Recommended Citation
urban political ecology, capabilities approach, slum communities, informal city, co-design, urban metabolism, emancipatory urban politics, environmental justice, actor-network theory, participatory design
