Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-03: James Vandenberg on urban agriculture's role to strengthen the resilience capacities of cities

In 2013, critical human geographer Chiara Tornaghi asked this question: 

Is access to urban land for food-growing guaranteed across the spectrum of society? 

In the third Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2025, James Vandenberg looks into these issues. The talk will take place on the 21st of March 2025 at 5:30PM via Zoom. Titled Cultivating Urban Resilience with Urban Agriculture the talk is co-sponsored by the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) and the UP Department of Geography. 

The liveability and safety of cities is increasingly challenged by global polycrisis, that is, entangled crises with synchronizing and amplifying inter-system dynamics that produce novel emergent harms which are greater than the sum of their parts. Consequently, cities must prioritize multifunctional resilience strategies that improve their ability to cope and adapt with disruptions and transform structures and processes which limit their current or future adaptive capacities. Accordingly, the emergence of a range of novel urban agriculture practices, which extend beyond community gardens, to also include building integrated rooftop greenhouses and indoor vertical plant factories are increasingly acknowledged for their cross-sector and cross-scale urban resilience benefits. 

As will be discussed throughout the lecture, innovative approaches to urban agriculture have the potential to strengthen the resilience capacities of a city's social, environmental, economic, institutional, and infrastructural subsystems. However, questions remain as to how to ensure such urban agriculture driven resilience strategies are implemented equitability, take into account spatial and temporal trade-offs, and contribute to the harmonization of societal values and ecological justice. 

James Vandenberg is a 4th year Predoc in the Urban Studies Working Group, within the Department of Geography and Regional Research Department at the University of Vienna, Austria. After completing his BA in International Relations and Development at the University of British Colombia and the University of Amsterdam, he completed an Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters in Urban Studies which was included 4 semesters at 6 universities in Brussels, Vienna, Copenhagen and Madrid. His current research delves into the multifunctionality of Urban Agriculture to better understand the connection between food and resilience. This pursuit is aimed at illuminating strategies that help contribute to humanities ability to both feed the estimated 10 billion people expected to inhabit earth in 2050, while simultaneously preparing cities to adapt to the climate change impacts of a 2-degree world.

Presented by the Environment and Development Geographies (EDGE) research cluster by the UP Department of Geography, the talk satisfies most of the Social Development Goals of United Nations but especially #11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and #15 (Life on Land). 

To participate in the lecture, please click this link: https://tinyurl.com/2p9tahr4

Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2025-02: Annie Pacaña on wires as metaphors for hopeful urban entanglements

A map of lines drawn overhead, a landscape of wires power the city. Hanging on every post, crossing the sky, dangling in loops, it is a metaphor for entangled lives. The string of low and high voltage utilities, enabling telecommunication and internet connections, make up paragraphs of society's virtual proximity, physical distance, and emotional disconnection. Life’s inequalities are told in stark contrast of the density of wires in one location to the next.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series co-sponsored by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) presents Landscape of Wires, an artist talk by Annie Pacaña - a faculty at the UP College of Fine Arts. It is happening on 21 February (Friday) at 5:30PM via Zoom. The talk is in conjunction with Assistant Professor Pacaña's on-going exhibit, Live Wire, which runs from 14 February to 2 March 2025 at the NO Community-run Space (45 Matimtiman St., Teachers Village East, Diliman QuezonCity). It is also Geography's contribution to the National Arts Month (February).

While Live Wire celebrates the ephemeral yet embedded-in-life architecture that choreographs the linear entanglements of exigent wires interspersing Metro Manila's landscape, the talk is a continuation of Pacaña's earlier work Linescapes. With theoretical inspirations that range from Guy Debord and Michel de Certeau to Kevin Lynch and Rob Kitchin, Live Wire's genealogical similarity with Linescapes acknowledges various creative geographies as glimpsed from walking-in-the-city, psychogeography, flânerie, gestalt and countercartography. Like other artist-cartographer who engages with creative spatialities, Pacaña's talk discusses a landscape of urban wires that traverse the city that mimetically parallel random intersecting lives of individuals and collectives. Or as Pacaña claims: The city has become more legible in this alternate way of mapping urban experience (Pacaña, 2019, Creating Spaces of Contemplation from the City’s Chaos through Linescapes).

Annie Pacaña is a visual artist who contemplates urban experience, applying countermapping strategies in creating memory maps from the visual chaos of Metro Manila. She utilizes digital vector line drawings (linescapes), and photographic abstraction of urban forms (kaleidoscapes) to process and reimagine her experiences as she moves about the city. She creates photography-based, digitally-processed prints, collages, and moving image works translated into both outdoor and indoor immersive projections, TV display installation, and reflected and refracted light projection on found objects (car window and windshields). As a curator, she started Matereality in 2022, an exhibition platform for works exploring one’s lived experience through varying material explorations of artists who are mothers. In 2023, Pacaña initiated Sound Visuals (now on its fifth iteration), a platform to experience the intersection and exchange of moving image, music/sound art, and dance. With a background in graphic design, Pacaña began her artistic practice with her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. Her works explore psychogeography, investigating the city as the self while connecting with others thru transdisciplinary collaborations with other visual artists, contemporary dance choreographers, and sound artists/musicians. Pacaña is currently an assistant professor at the College of Fine Arts, and a director of the Office of Community Relations at the University of the Philippines (Diliman).

Pacaña is also involved in Art Fair Philippines 2025 which runs from 21-23 February 2025 at Tower Two | Booth 51, Core Contemporary Art, Ayala Triangle, Makati City. Core Contemporary Art presents Cross Currents at Art Fair Philippines 2025，a dynamic cross-cultural exchange between artists from Malaysia and Philippines. Within this framework, also discover an accompanying salon-style presentation, Surround Me With All The Beautiful Things, which delve into the human desire for beauty, examining how it shapes our perceptions, emotions, and connections with the world.

As in previous iterations, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series aims to bring various geography practitioners in the academy, civil society, industry and community to share their geography-informed practices that operate in multiple scales. This lecture is facilitated by the Media, Literary Geographies, and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research group of the UP Department of Geography. It also satisfies the Social Development Goals #4 (Quality Education) and #15 (Life on Land) of the United Nations Sustainable Development.

To participate in our Lecture Series, please register through this link or simply paste this to your URL: https://tinyurl.com/2yvufaey

IGU-CSRS: Call for Abstracts, Pt 1

32nd International Geographical Union-Commission on the Sustainability of Rural Systems (IGU-CSRS Colloquium) 

New Ruralities: Contestations and Iterations on Rural Spatialities

University of the Philippines Diliman & University of the Philippines Baguio

1-6 December 2025

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 

In the Handbook of Rural Studies (2006), Paul Cloke argued that the shift from the functional and political-economic lenses in studying rural studies, to a more socially-constructed framing where the “importance of the ‘rural’ lies in the fascinating world of social, cultural and moral values that have become associated with rurality, rural spaces and rural life” (2006, 21) opened the rural geographies to conceptual and methodological richness.

In recent decades, rural areas have undergone profound transformations influenced by factors such as globalization, technological advancements, climate change, migration, and shifting economic paradigms. These forces challenge traditional notions of rurality and spatial organization, compelling scholars, policymakers, and local communities to re-examine and redefine rural spaces. Additionally, rethinking established concepts and approaches in the study of the rural along with the recognition that, following Michael Woods (2009, 855), there is an “uneven capacity of rural geography in different national contexts to engage appropriate conceptual tools”. Rural spatialities, therefore, can benefit from the blurring of boundaries, the recognition of multiple rural relationalities, and the connections that are forged from these complex entanglements.

The idea of 'new ruralities' centers on the multiple meanings and dynamic character of rural systems, as tied to wider local, regional and international linkages and processes. New ruralities are about development trajectories that are created by new connections, opportunities, and innovations. They are about adaptation and resistance that facilitate the reproduction of rural identities and experiences. Lastly, new ruralities include new perspectives that illuminate unique spatialities of the rural across locations and contexts. 

The 32nd IGU-CSRS Colloquium provides a valuable platform for scholars, practitioners and policy makers to exchange ideas, share knowledge, and develop a deeper understanding of rural spaces to contribute to more informed and effective rural development strategies geared toward sustainability. 

The four (4) sub-themes cover a broad range of topics that reflect the complexities of rural spaces and their evolving nature in the context of local and global challenges:

1. ITERATIONS: recurring patterns, practices, and historical continuities

2. TRANSITIONS: structural, socio-cultural, economic, and environmental shifts

3. NEGOTIATIONS: navigation of policies, markets, and socio-environmental changes

4. CONTESTATIONS: conflicts over land, resources, identities, and power

We invite scholars, researchers, and practitioners to submit their panel, paper, or poster abstracts of not more than 300 words through this link: http://bit.ly/3CzPvzN. The deadline for submission is 21 April 2025. 

32nd IGU-CSRS Organizing Committee

E-mail:       igu.csrs.ph@gmail.com

Microsite:   https://sites.google.com/up.edu.ph/igu-csrs2025

__________________________

 

Texts Consulted

Cloke, P. 2006: Conceptualizing rurality. In Cloke, P., Marsden, T. and Mooney, P.H., (eds.), Handbook of rural studies, London: Sage, 18–28.

Woods, M. 2009. Rural geography: Blurring boundaries and making connections, Progress in human geography, 36(1), 125–134.

Woods, M. 2011. Rural geography III: Rural futures and the future of rural geography, Progress in human geography, 33(6), 849–858.