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.
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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.
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-020-09399-0