This article examines how the popular consultations held in Piedras (2013) and Cajamarca (2017) (central Colombia) against the Colosa gold mining project-a foreign extractive initiative - served as sites for the production of vertical territory. I argue that territorial defenders did not use these legal mechanisms to protect a predetermined space, but to actively produce it. To capture this dynamic, I introduce the concept of the vertical continuum: the understanding, developed through political struggle, that territory cannot be divided into surface, subsurface and aerial domains governed by distinct legal authorities. This challenged the Colombian state's exclusive control over the subsoil and asserted that ordinary citizens should have a say in what happens across all layers of the territory they inhabit and defend. The article shows how defenders' vertical conceptualization of regional space, organized around the mountain and the aquifer as its most visible materializations, acquired legal and political force through the consultation results, which reconfigured municipal authority and enabled the sustained halting of the Colosa project. The article also advances a reconceptualization of popular consultations as legal-political technologies with a spatializing force, placing them in dialogue with literatures on social movements, the production of space, and the vertical turn. Together, these arguments show how movements for territorial and water defense become key actors in producing the vertical and volumetric worlds they seek to defend.
The Philippines' capital, Manila, is sinking. In response, the government has begun constructing New Clark City, an alternative capital when Manila becomes uninhabitable due to climate-related catastrophe. However, this proposed infrastructural solution has produced dispossession. This paper examines the complexities of addressing climate change through large-scale infrastructure while navigating Indigenous vulnerabilities in the Philippines. Using the concept of smart vulnerability, it analyzes how infrastructure intended to mitigate climate risks for Manila simultaneously displaces Indigenous communities such as the Aeta communities, whose land is appropriated for New Clark City. Through its construction, New Clark City becomes the site of competing vulnerabilities, where efforts to safeguard the national capital city clash with the forced displacement of Indigenous people from their land. The essay traces the materialities and discursive foundations of this tension by examining how the state utilizes mobilizes narratives of collapse, scientific knowledge and sustainability to justify the project. Together, these processes create a hierarchy of vulnerability in which Indigenous dispossession is obscured under the imperative of climate adaptation. Through this analysis, the essay sheds light on the entanglement of infrastructure, life and climate emergency in the Philippines, revealing how responses to environmental crisis can reproduce existing inequalities even as they seek to mitigate future risk.
