Reconfiguring Manila: Displacement, Resettlement, and the Productivity of Urban Divides
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Reconfiguring Manila: Displacement, Resettlement, and the Productivity of Urban Divides Steffen Jensen 1 & Karl Hapal 2
& Salome
Quijano 2
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
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. 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
* Karl Hapal [email protected] Steffen Jensen [email protected] Salome Quijano [email protected]
1
Department of Politics and Society, Global Refugee Studies, Aalborg University, Fredrik Bajers Vej 7K, 9220 Aalborg East, Denmark
2
College of Social Work and Community Development, University of the Philippines - Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines
S. Jensen et al.
everywhere and the suburban sprawl extends further and further out (Ortega 2012). Furthermore, rivers, floodgates, empty spots, train tracks, bridges, and smoldering landfills—however small and seemingly uninhabitable—attract people with no other access to land. The results are traffic congestion, floods after torrential rains, wrecked livelihood, and, so the authorities claim, arrested development and unrealized potential for Manila. The governmental attempts to realize the potential of Manila has taken different forms throughout the past five decades since the early 1960s when urban growth began to present a problem leading to the first evictions and demolitions of squatter areas (Karaos 1993). Among the drivers for urban evictions that we can identify are counterinsurgency during the Marcos era to quell a revolutionary uprising, health and environmental concerns, congestion and development-induced needs for space and infrastructural projects, and neoliberal gentrification and metropolitan ambitions of world-class status (Choi 2015; Ortega 2012, 2016). While these modes of legitimization are important for how various urban struggles unfold, the consequence for those
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