Initial Publication Date: April 21, 2023

Mara Villaseca

PhD Student, City and Regional Planning, Knowlton School of Architecture

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About Me

Hi! I'm Mara, from the Philippines. My undergraduate training is in architecture and I've been a licensed Philippine architect since 2010. I've been teaching planning subjects to undergraduate architecture students in the Philippines since 2011 until I joined the Ohio State University as a PhD Student in City and Regional Planning through a Fulbright Fellowship. I was pursuing a Masters of ASEAN Studies which introduced me to Food-Energy-Water nexus studies in the Mekong region. This brought me to learn about urban metabolism which commonly intersects with FEW studies. I did my Masters thesis on the "Urban Metabolism of ASEAN Night Markets based on biological principles".

Focus of current FEW-Nexus-based education work

As a first year City and Regional Planning PhD Student, my main interest is in urban metabolism, through which several case studies on the Food-Energy-Water Nexus have been analyzed. At this stage of my academic inquiry, I am guided by a need to understand how the existing scholarship of urban metabolism can be adopted into equitable planning practice as a step toward sustainable development. There's a want for enriching the conversations on urban metabolism within the sphere of equity and planning, and I think studies through the FEW Nexus can augment this conversation. Particularly in the United States, I interpret that the scholarship and practice on equitable food access is ripe for analysis through frames of FEW Nexus. I intend to combine the frameworks of the FEW nexus with the mechanisms of biophilia as the main framework for my thesis. This is so I may investigate the dimensions of equity and planning throughout metabolic exchanges across broader (community-community) to local (community-individual) scales of food access as manifested by exchanges, specifically the exchanges of equitable food distribution. The main goal of the thesis is to flesh out these metabolic dimensions so they may be objectively encapsulated within urban metabolic impact assessment tools that are used in the planning practice.

FEW-Nexus-based education experience, expertise and interests

As an international student that is barely halfway through my PhD coursework, I can be an effective sounding board for concepts that the National Collaborative of Food-Energy-Water nexus body may wish to bring to the classroom. I am Southeast Asian by ethnicity, which allows me experiential perspectives that can enrich NC-FEW conversations.

As I take a mix bag of courses with undergraduates and master students alike, it becomes apparent to me through my experience that neither the FEW nor urban metabolism are common concepts to my peers, unlike the popular concept of sustainable development. Perhaps, because FEW is anchored on systems thinking, it is inherently interdisciplinary, and by that inherently complex, which means bringing it to the teaching sphere would most likely require unorthodox ways of instruction. In that regard, I have been teaching to architecture undergraduates since 2010 which gives me an odd advantage of having been a teacher and a student within the same era. As I progress through my PhD, I also have the opportunity of performing teaching assistantship roles. While I am yet to explore what I can do for FEW through that role, I am certain that I will be pursuing academia for the longer duration of my career when I return to Southeast Asia to perform my duties as an instructor. Before then, I still need to understand FEW in-depth. As I grapple as a researcher, I also need and hope to be linked to individuals whose bodies of work I can learn from, and hopefully contribute to in the long run.

Publications, presentations, and other references

  • https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cacint.2020.100055