Title: Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City

Speaker: Allan Edward Lumba (CSEAS Visiting Research Scholar / Assistant Professor, Concordia University)

Abstract: Nationalist Artist of the Philippines Nick Joaquin once wrote, “The site of Manila was reclaimed from the sea—and the sea is still trying to get it back.” Three decades later, Manila is sinking at an alarming rate. This process, in which land vertically moves downward, is called subsidence. Subsidence is an increasingly dangerous threat to coastal cities around the planet and a particular threat to one of the densest populated areas in the world, metro Manila. Yet, the problem of subsidence is not simply the abstract threat of rising sea levels due to planetary warming. Instead, an often-occluded problem is the neoliberal corporatization of water management combined with the intensification and proliferation of extractive industries. As more of the traditional waterways have been diverted from Manila for commercial use, the city’s rapidly increasing population of migrants from elsewhere have turned to extracting more groundwater, decreasing the stability of the land beneath the city and causing the city itself to sink and crumble under its own weight. This talk situates the recent threat of subsidence within a longer history of racial and colonial capitalism in and around Manila. It will especially focus on a broader overview of political ecological and infrastructural conditions from the nineteenth century into the present, while simultaneously tracing social movements that have surfaced in relation to struggles over water and land in Manila’s edges.   

Bio: Allan E. S. Lumba is an assistant professor in the department of history at Concordia University (Tiohtiá:ke/Montreál). His book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Duke University Press, 2022), charts the historical intersections between racial capitalism, entangled colonialisms, and imperial money in the United States and the Philippines. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center and the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows. His current work on subsidence in Manila and elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific, has recently been awarded the multi-year Insight Development Grant (2024–2026) by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.