Contested spaces abound in cities in Southeast Asia due to the nature of interactions between spaces, places and households. The nature of this contestation may be read in broad terms as the juxtaposition of agricultural and non-agricultural activities in the landscape. This has resulted in mixed and intersecting livelihoods and patchy ecosystems especially around the urban fringe. Peri-urban aquatic food production systems are one such case. It is these senses of waste re-use aquaculture being on the ‘edge’ – on the edge of the city, at the margins of legality and hygiene, at the interface for consumers between the acceptable and the unacceptable, and out of place in terms of the urban space that it occupies – that this chapter explores.
