Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
Not applicable
Notes
Pratt, Johnston, and Banta explore especially migration as a way to deal with displacement-induced stuckness within the resettlement site through the lens of “disposability” borrowed from Tadiar (2013).
Traveling from said relocation sites to Metro Manila often requires riding a provincial bus that traverses through expressways that connect Metro Manila to Northern and Southern provinces.
This strategy has led to Manila gulping up still more rural areas in a massive urbanization of the countryside. Parallel to this process, suburbanization of Manila’s countryside has equaled contributed to the disappearance of agricultural land (Ortega 2012). Ironically, this has led to the production of complex class relations on Manila’s fringe. We do not explore this dimension in this article.
1 USD corresponds to approximately P50 or in real economic terms to just under 2 months’ worth of minimum salary.
This section is built on Salome Quijano’s thesis work. All quotes appear in her thesis that she successfully defended in 2019 (Quijano 2017).
See for example Abad (1991)
For a similar description of hunger after resettlement, see Hammar (2017).
Other emic names of relocation settlements point to the same sense of marginalization. Hence, from the roof tops of some of the houses in Bagong Silang, one can get a glimpse of “Lost City” that for years had not electricity and very little public transport.
The Barangay is the lowest tier of local government in the Philippines. Bagong Silang in the largest single barangay in the country.
Pathwalks are the center of social life in Bagong Silang. They are narrow paths lined with houses where much social activity take place.
For analysis of Bagong Silang politics, Jensen and Hapal (2014).
Jeepney’s are the most common public transport vehicles connecting the entire city. It holds twenty people and go on predesignated routes. They have become emblematic of Manila (Gustavson 2012).
Data for this section can be found in elaborated form in Jensen (2014)
Equivalent to USD 50.00 or a quarter of the minimal salary in the Philippines, which only apply to graduates in the formal economy.
This analysis draws on Nancy Munn (1992) who suggests in her study of the Gawa that particular space-time configurations order the world and the future in intelligible ways.
References
Abad, R. G. (1991). Squatting and scavenging in Smokey Mountain. Philippine Studies, 39(3), 263–286.
Abinales, P. N. (1996). The revolution falters: The left in Philippine politics after 1986 (Vol. 15). SEAP Publications.
Ballesteros, M., & Egana, J. (2013). Efficiency and effectiveness review of the National Housing Authority (NHA) resettlement program. Quezon City: Philippine Institute for Development Studies.
Bello, W., Kinley, D., & Elinson, E. (1982). Development debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines. San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy.
Berner, E. (1997). Defending a place in the city: Localities and the struggle for urban land in Metro Manila. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Berner, E. (2002). Learning from informal markets (Vol. 233). Oxford: Development and Cities: Essays from Development Practice.
Caldeira, T. P. (2017). Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), 3–20.
Cheng, D. (2013). The Politics of Pipes: The Persistence of Small Water Networks in Post-Privatization Manila. [Accessed 15 Sept 2016]. Retrieved from: https://escholarship.org/content/qt1tr5t83z/qt1tr5t83z.pdf?t=mtfdfz
Choi, N. (2015). Impacts of displacement on urban livelihoods: A railway project in Metro Manila. Development in Practice, 25(5), 643–654.
Choi, N. (2016). Metro Manila through the gentrification lens: Disparities in urban planning and displacement risks. Urban Studies, 53(3), 577.592.
De Wit, J., & Berner, E. (2009). Progressive patronage? Municipalities, NGOs, CBOs and the limits to slum dwellers’ empowerment. Development and Change, 40(5), 927–947.
Department of the Interior and Local Government. (2014). Hope shines upon Metro Manila’s Informal Settlers under ‘OPLAN LIKAS’. [Accessed 1 Oct 2016]. Retrieved from: https://www.dilg.gov.ph/news/Hope-shines-upon-Metro-Manilas-Informal-Settlers-under-OPLAN-LIKAS/NC-2014-1018
Doherty, J. (1985). The Philippine Urban Poor. Philippine Studies Occasional Papers, 8.
Doshi, S. (2013). The politics of the evicted: Redevelopment, subjectivity, and difference in Mumbai’s slum frontier. Antipode, 45(4), 844–865.
Garrido, M. Z. (2019). The Patchwork City: Class, space, and politics in Metro Manila. University of Chicago Press.
Hammar, A. (Ed.). (2014). Displacement economies in Africa: Paradoxes of crisis and creativity. Zed Books Ltd..
Hammar, A. (2017). Urban displacement and resettlement in Zimbabwe: The paradoxes of propertied citizenship. African Studies Review, 60(3), 81–104.
Hammett, D. (2017). Introduction: Exploring the contested terrain of urban citizenship. International Development Planning Review, 39(1), 1–13.
Hapal, K. (2017). Interrogating community organizing in an urban poor community: The case of Bagong Silang, Caloocan City. Quezon City: [Unpublished Master Thesis] College of Social Work and Community Development, University of the Philippines, Diliman.
Hapal, K., & Jensen, S. B. (2017). The morality of corruption: A view from the police in Philippines. In S. Jensen & M. Andersen (Eds.), Corruption and torture: Violent exchange and the everyday policing of the poor (pp. 39–68). Aalborg: Aalborg University.
Harms, E. (2013). Eviction time in the new Saigon: Temporalities of displacement in the rubble of development. Cultural Anthropology, 28(2), 344–368.
Harvey, D. (2003). The right to the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(4), 939–941.
Hedman, E. L. E. (2006). In the name of civil society: From free election movements to people power in the Philippines. University of Hawaii Press.
Holston, J. (2009). Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton university press.
Isin, E. F., & Nielsen, G. (2008). Acts of citizenship. Zed Books.
Isin, E. F., & Turner, B. S. (2007). Investigating citizenship: An agenda for citizenship studies. Citizenship Studies, 11(1), 5–17.
Jefferson, A., Turner, S., & Jensen, S. (2019). Introduction: On stuckness and sites of confinement. Ethnos, 84(1), 1–13.
Jeffrey, C. (2010). Timepass: Youth, class, and the politics of waiting in India. Stanford University Press.
Jensen, S. (2014). Stunted future: Buryong among young men in Manila. In Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality. Temple University Press.
Jensen, S. (2018). A world of significance: Equality, ritual and violence in a Manila fraternity. In Jensen and Vigh (eds) Sporadically radical: Ethnographies of organized violence and militant mobilization, 147-166.
Jensen, S. (2020). Afterword. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology.
Jensen, S., & Hapal, K. (2015). Policing Bagong Silang. In H. Kyed & P. Albrect (Eds.), Policing and the politics of order-making (pp. 24–39). London: Routledge.
Jensen, S., & Hapal, K. (2018). Police violence and corruption in the Philippines: Violent exchange and the war on drugs. Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 37(2), 39–62.
Jensen, S., Hapal, K., & Modvig, J. (2013). Violence in Bagong Silang. DIGNITY, International Series on Torture and Organized Violence, 2.
Karaos, A. M. (1993). Manila’s squatter movement: A struggle for place and identity. Philippine Sociological Review, 41(1/4), 71–91.
Kerkvliet, B. J. (2002). The Huk rebellion: A study of peasant revolt in the Philippines. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Kolling, M. (2019). Becoming favela: Forced resettlement and reverse transitions of urban space in Brazil. City & Society, 31(3), 413–435.
Kolling, M., & Koster, M. (2019). Introduction: Betrayal and urban development across the globe. City & Society, 31(3), 326–340.
Koster, M., & Nuijten, M. (2012). From preamble to post-project frustrations: The shaping of a slum upgrading project in Recife, Brazil. Antipode, 44(1), 175–196.
Magno-Ballesteros, M. (2000). Land use planning in metro Manila and the urban fringe: Implications on the land and real estate market. Philippine Institute for Development Studies Discussion Papers, 2000-20.
Mbembe, A. (2001). On the postcolony (Vol. 41). University of California Press.
McCoy, A. (1994). An anarchy of families: State and society in the Philippines.
Munn, N. D. (1992). The fame of Gawa: A symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society. Duke University Press.
National Economic and Development Authority. (2014). Philippine development plan 2011–2016 midterm update. Pasig City: National Economic and Development Authority.
National Housing Authority. (2011). First Oplan LIKAS. [Online]. [Accessed 1 Oct 2016]. Retrieved from: http://nha.gov.ph/news/articles/1st_oplan_LIKAS.html
Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Duke University Press.
Ortega, A. (2012). Spatialities of population change, mega-urbanization and neoliberal urbanism: The case of metro Cebu. Philippine Population Review., 11(1), 41–71.
Ortega, A. (2016). Neoliberalizing spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, transnational migration, and dispossession. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press.
Pabico, A. (2004). Thousands of evicted families go hungry in resettlement sites. Philippine center for investigative journalism. [Accessed 1 Oct 2016]. Retrieved from: https://old.pcij.org/stories/thousands-of-evicted-families-go-hungry-in-resettlement-sites/
Pratt, G., Johnston, C., & Banta, V. (2017). Filipino migrant stories and trauma in the transnational field. Emotion, Space and Society., 24, 83–92.
Rao, U. (2010). Making the global city: Urban citizenship at the margins of Delhi. Ethnos, 75(4), 402–424.
Salmi, J. (2019). From third-class to world-class citizens: Claiming belonging, countering betrayal in the margins of Ahmedabad. City & Society, 31(3), 392–412.
Shatkin, G. (2007). Collective action and urban poverty alleviation: Community organizations and the struggle struggle. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Sidel, J. T. (1999). Capital, coercion, and crime: Bossism in the Philippines. Stanford University Press.
Tadiar, N. X. M. (2005). Fantasy production: Sexual economies and other Philippine consequences for the new world order (Vol. 1). Hong Kong university press.
Tadiar, N. (2007). Metropolitan life and uncivil death. PMLA, 122(1), 316–320.
Wacquant, L. (2008). Territorial stigmatization in the age of advanced marginality. In Symbolic power in cultural contexts (pp. 43-52). Brill Sense.
Warburg, A. B., & Jensen, S. (2018). Policing the war on drugs and the transformation of urban space in Manila. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0263775818817299.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest
Code Availability
Not applicable
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jensen, S., Hapal, K. & Quijano, S. Reconfiguring Manila: Displacement, Resettlement, and the Productivity of Urban Divides. Urban Forum 31, 389–407 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-020-09399-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-020-09399-0