My project, “Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City,” is an interdisciplinary account of relations between humans and the other-than-human, between people and the built environment, between the private and the public, between the state and civil society. It is an infrastructural history, from 1945 to the present, of Manila’s alarmingly rapid rate of subsidence within record-breaking rising sea levels. My project considers human-induced subsidence—or the rate at which land moves evermore downward—to be at the conjunction of several historical legacies: environmental, capitalist, and colonial.
This material history necessitates a focus on historical records that tend to be overlooked because of the mundaneness of technical accounts. Research of infrastructural history entails consulting records of public works (especially water and waste management), transport systems—roads, railways, canals—but also ports and land reclamation projects, public housing, and commercial buildings. Research of infrastructural history also entails investigating the archives of technological and science records, especially as it relates to flooding and storms, commercialized use of water, local drinking water pollution, and the deforestation of mangroves trees. It is also a history of infrastructural project’s fundamental reliance on heavy industrial commodities, large machinery, and fossil fuel energy resources, revealing the deeply intimate connections between quotidian urban policy, subsurface litigation, regional security, and transnational webs of extractive economies.
Finally, the project is an infrapolitical history of the politically marginalized, focusing on movement organizers from the urban poor and different indigenous groups in the archipelago. Infrapolitics here refers to the kind of political activities of resistance that may go unrecognized or unseen by the formal political realm. This project builds on my first book, Monetary Authorities, which is a historical examination of U.S. imperial banking and currency, and the possibilities and limitations of Philippine decolonization. I will pursue questions around
decolonization, but in the so-called post-independence era. Inspired by the metaphorical margins of the postcolonial nation, I turn my focus instead on the geophysical margins where impoverished workers, infrastructural matter, and coastal ecologies co-constitute one another in new and unexpected ways.