Green public spaces in the cities of South and Southeast Asia: Protecting needs towards sustainable well-being

The significance of green public spaces is well documented in relation to social inclusiveness, human health, and biodiversity, yet how green public spaces achieve what Gough (2017) has termed sustainable wellbeing is less understood. This contribution presents preliminary results from a study of green public spaces in four mega-cities of South and Southeast Asia: Chennai (the Republic of India), Metro Manila (the Republic of the Philippines), Singapore (the Republic of Singapore), and Shanghai (the People\u27s Republic of China), cities that have climates ranging from tropical, to subtropical and temperate. The conceptual framework brings together social practice theories with human development theories, methodological implications for the study of park usage, and Protected Needs. This study sets out to understand how parks satisfy human needs by uncovering practices in relation to activities and material arrangements. Central to the research design and sampling strategy is a desire to understand park-related practices in all of their diversity, and accounting for how different activities are carried out by diverse groups of people. The paper presents exemplary results showing that parks provide a space in which a multitude of needs are satisfied, and that parks cannot be substituted by other settings such as commercialized spaces. The paper will conclude by discussing tensions between types of park usage, and in relation to commercial encroachments on public space

Intermittent Departures, Returns, and the Incremental Acts of the Everyday: Paid Domestic Work and Insurgency in Sitio Sibol, Bohol

Our understanding of maids and their condition is confined within the current discourse of domestic labor exploitation and its general assumptions. This study presents an expansion of the discussion as experienced by residents of Sitio Sibol, Bohol including past experiences of NPA (New People’s Army) insurgency and counterinsurgency that partly played an instrumental role in shaping the maid’s experience. Informed by ethnographic research among former and current maids and their community in Sitio Sibol, this study problematizes how the changing context in the community affects the emergence and proliferation of local domestic work. It traces back the community’s history and analyzes both individual and collective experiences, attitudes, and practices as exercises of human creativity when faced with adversity and different conditions of injustice. The shared community life in the sitio established active and passive social networks; and changing political conditions shaped and illustrated the complex process of “pagpapa-maid” revealing realities of human costs usually unaccounted for

To flee, or not to flee : intersections of paid domestic work and insurgency in Central Visayas

Since the 1970s, a huge segment of the Bohol population, including the maids and other residents of Sitio Sibol, has been forced to seek employment outside the province. Past studies of domestic work often reach a conclusion tying paid household work and poverty as the only possible explanation for engaging in domestic service. Our understanding of their condition is confined within the limited discourse of domestic labor exploitation and its general assumptions of household workers as exploited and undervalued. This study presents an expansion of the discussion of paid domestic work which includes conditions of insurgency and counter-insurgency that partly played an instrumental role in shaping the maids experience.This thesis asks the following questions: how does the changing context in the community affect the emergence and proliferation of domestic work? How did entry to paid domestic work shape the consciousness and practices prior and under conditions of long running political insurgency? Conversely, how did the sitios everyday experience of poverty and insurgency shape the imagining and making of maids and paid domestic work? How did the experience of insurgency and paid domestic work underlie and form relations inside and outside the sitio?This thesis traces back the communitys history, its landscapes, and as embodied by the lives and journeys of the maids and other residents in the sitio. It analyzes both individual and collective experiences, attitudes and practices to better their conditions. Informed by ethnographic research among former and current maids, and their community of Sitio Sibol, paid domestic work, which appears to be invisible, chaotic and disorganized employment, is actually the complex outcome of efforts of persons in action immersed in the practical world and everyday life as they strive to live with dignity and maximize opportunities even in oppressive and conflict-ridden situations

Locating Leisure and Belonging in Metro Manila: From Hyper-conditioned Environments to Public Green Spaces

Leisure practices have implications for belonging. In Metro Manila, a rapidly urbanizing metropolis, leisure is becoming increasingly associated with the most ubiquitous hyper-conditioned environments: privately owned shopping malls. By decontextualizing the built environment from its natural and cultural settings, these malls present a challenge to establishing a sense of belonging within a metropolis. Yet, despite its ubiquity, the mall has not fully displaced outdoor spaces, especially public green spaces, as sites of leisure. What do leisure practices in these two seemingly contrasting environments reveal about belonging in a metropolis? Some answers to these questions are to be found in a socio-material reading of leisure spaces, which reveal how belonging is not only created by actors and social institutions but also by spaces, objects, technologies, infrastructure and the microclimate. On the basis of a qualitative study, our findings demonstrate why public green spaces are more conducive than hyper-conditioned environments for fostering a sense of belonging together and to the metropolis