Discordant order: Manila's neo-patrimonial urbanism

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2020

2019

initiated several round-table discussions on the city, later inviting colleagues from other departments, such as English, Filipino, History, Sociology and Anthropology, and Economics to join the conversations. The discussions were enlightening, and became an opportunity for us to challenge our own understanding of the city, widening our perspectives and allowing us to expand the scope of our inquiries even as each of us remained within our own disciplinal assumptions and trajectories. The collection of essays in this book is the result of these exchanges. While the range of questions and research methods varied significantly, from the more concrete and empirical, to the more abstract and speculative, one senses that the essays do have shared concerns, and that they all struggle to make sense of the same phenomenon-namely, the city, and Metro Manila in particular. From the nine essays in this anthology, three themes eventually emerged, thus forming the sections of this book. In Part I: Contesting Spaces, our first three essays discuss the ways by which the city becomes the site of struggle for the allocation and ordering of spaces. In "Great Transformations: The Spatial Politics of Citybuilding Megaprojects in the Manila Peri-urban Periphery, " Jerik Cruz examines "transformations in the geographies of governance

City and Community, 2020

and economically?" (229). As novel and as pathbreaking as The New Noir is, Clergé ends with even more provocative questions. The cohesiveness of diasporic Blackness, the stability of the suburban form, and the vagaries of White reactions to non-White neighbors are all unknowns-not to mention the all-important X factor of Latinx residential patterns-but The New Noir takes a bold first step in launching this new field of research.

Urban Forum, 2020

As one of the densest cities in the world, Manila suffers from constant population overflow. Hardly any spot in the urban landscape is unpopulated. Successive governments argue that the population overflow has crippled or arrested the potential of Metro Manila. In response, governments have resorted to resettlement, displacing urban poor populations and emplacing them often in far-flung and desolate sites. While the justifications for resettlement projects have gradually changed in the past half-century, we argue that its practice constitutes certain continuities-the conscious and constant attempt to establish and maintain urban divides around binary notions of order/disorder, purity/danger, and wealth/poverty. While resettlement projects often fail to produce the desired outcomes, they still have effects. In the paper, we hone in on different scales of effects, namely the transformation of progressive politics; reconfigured class relations in Manila as well as in the resettlement sites; and the transformation of spatial-temporal configurations and modes of belonging. Keywords Metro Manila. Urban divides. Resettlement. Displacement. Urban poor As one of the densest cities in the world, Manila suffers from constant population overflow. Hardly any spot in the urban landscape is unpopulated. High rises go up Urban Forum

Kritika Kultura, 2019

This article discusses Nick Joaquin's Manila, My Manila (1989/1999) as an example of how his historiographical work tends to be more conventional in terms of the nationalism that dominates Philippine historiography, and has a more complex relationship to this discourse than existing analyses tend to suggest. While his veneration of the Spanish colonial period is indeed unconventional, his book leaves the main problem of nationalist discourse untouched as it maintains the essentialist notion of an identifiable national community projected backwards into time. The book fails to capitalize on the potential for disrupting national paradigms that city narratives offer. Rather than breaking up narratives of nationalism, it creates a new one, homogenizing Philippine history around a linear history of the city. It imagines Manila as the continuously endangered seed of the nation, which miraculously overcomes the multitude of threats thrown its way. While the narrative glosses over the inherent diversity of the nation, it also exposes an essentialist, teleological, and metaphysical historical vision. The ambiguity of Joaquin's vision, and of his relationship with the tradition of Philippine historiography, then, lies in his outward rejection of the essentialism inherent to nationalist notions on the one hand, and the determinism governing his homogenizing narratives on the other.

2018

Searching for Manila: Personal and Political Journeys in an Asian Megacity is an autobiographical travelogue based on a period I spent living and working in Manila, the Philippines in 2009-10, and on two subsequent visits to the city. The book, which is slightly abridged for this submission, addresses themes both personal (such as the difficult processes of deciding what to do with my life, of falling in love and of becoming a surrogate father) and political (the struggles of marginalised communities against official oppression, the impact of neo-liberalism on various aspects of Philippine society and the ideological reasons why Filipinos selectively remember national traumas). I interweave my lived, empirical experiences of people and places with data researched from other Manila-focused texts both historical and contemporary: novels, memoirs, travel books, media reports, statistical surveys and historiographical analyses. The critical commentary element of my thesis begins with an...

2019

The global privatisation of the built environment is seen as a contemporary theme leading to today’s range of socio-spatial disparities. This study investigates the historical roots of Metro Manila’s enclave urbanism using the spatially applied graph theory centralities of spatial network analysis, as part of the combined analytical methodology of space syntax theory. This uncovers repeating patterns of social exclusion and enclave configuration as Manila expands from its core. This study presents the effects of Daniel Burnham’s City Beautiful Plan, which tries to create a unified civic core, but instead leads to Manila’s decentralisation and suburbanisation. The parcellation of land following the Spanish colonial rule’s encomienda system becomes the basis for privatisation of the urban fabric. It also becomes the imprint of car-centric Metro Manila’s circumferential spine road, C4/Epifanio Delos Santos Avenue, and its string of private mixed-use enclaves, central business districts and exclusive gated villages. This study uncovers Metro Manila’s unnatural movement economy within these enclaves, as consumption (retail/services, catering/F&B) points-of-interest locations deviate from space syntax’s movement economies, and is instead internalised within large, air- conditioned building footprints (shopping malls and deep floorplate office blocks) with large car parking capacities. This study then (following current local policy arguing for it) uses spatial network analysis to model the effects of opening Metro Manila’s exclusive gated villages to the flow of vehicles to help improve access to Metro Manila’s commercial mixed-use enclaves/CBDs. The study illustrates that doing so would instead, probabilistically induce road demand and create more vehicular traffic and congestion. Using the same methods, this study instead offers a counterproposal, by identifying key gated villages for selective “opening” of gates and lifting of village restrictions to pedestrianise and induce a (hopefully – more palatable to the village residents) bottom-up “yellow-field” redevelopment. This study concludes by placing Metro Manila within space syntax discourse and reflects on how space syntax as a body of knowledge could be expanded, practiced and applied in the Philippine context.

Reading the Architecture of the Underprivileged Classes, 2014

13th International Space Syntax Symposium, 2022

The neo-liberal privatisation of the built environment into enclaves is a contemporary global theme leading to today’s range of socio-spatial disparities. Present-day Metro Manila has been hollowed-out, with a long-blighted historical core; and has seen most development turn its back from the Pasig River that carried trade and commerce during the Spanish colonial period. Most ‘modern’ economic activity has moved to the enclaves composed of business districts and gated villages outside of Manila; with long-range connectivity in the form of highways and tollways bypassing most of Metro Manila’s fine-grained core. This study investigates the historical roots of this enclave urbanism using the quantitative methods of spatial network analysis under space syntax theory. This study uncovers the underlying spatial configuration and structures beneath the order imposed by the Spanish on Manila. These include the centre of political control – the civic plaza and urban grid within the walls of Intramuros; outside of Intramuros, the mission church plazas centring local populations around the Bajo de la Campana, serving as the base of Reducciones labour control; the unintended consequences of the Spanish defensive and exclusionary posture, and marginalisation of the Sangley Chinese trader population; and the underlying importance of the Pasig River and its network of waterways in the commercial spatial network of Spanish Manila. This study focuses on using a quantitative approach to reveal how modern Metro Manila’s patterns of exclusion and privatisation has roots in colonial urban morphology, and how it can reconnect with the Pasig River for transportation and urban revitalisation.

2019

initiated several round-table discussions on the city, later inviting colleagues from other departments, such as English, Filipino, History, Sociology and Anthropology, and Economics to join the conversations. The discussions were enlightening, and became an opportunity for us to challenge our own understanding of the city, widening our perspectives and allowing us to expand the scope of our inquiries even as each of us remained within our own disciplinal assumptions and trajectories. The collection of essays in this book is the result of these exchanges. While the range of questions and research methods varied significantly, from the more concrete and empirical, to the more abstract and speculative, one senses that the essays do have shared concerns, and that they all struggle to make sense of the same phenomenon-namely, the city, and Metro Manila in particular. From the nine essays in this anthology, three themes eventually emerged, thus forming the sections of this book. In Part I: Contesting Spaces, our first three essays discuss the ways by which the city becomes the site of struggle for the allocation and ordering of spaces. In "Great Transformations: The Spatial Politics of Citybuilding Megaprojects in the Manila Peri-urban Periphery, " Jerik Cruz examines "transformations in the geographies of governance