Manila

The focus of this article is on Metropolitan Manila (or simply Manila), a region spanning 619 square kilometers and comprising sixteen cities and one municipality: specifically, the cities of Caloocan, Las Piñas, Malabon, Manila, Mandaluyong, Marikina, Makati, Muntinlupa, Navotas, Quezon City, Parañaque, Pasay, Pasig, San Juan, Taguig, and Valenzuela, and the municipality of Pateros. Metro Manila was constituted by presidential decree in 1975, but its constituent cities are significantly older. It is the Philippines’ largest urban area, with a population of about thirteen million in 2015, as well as the country’s economic core, producing 37.5 percent of the national gross national product (GDP). Socially and spatially, however, it is not at all like the rest of the country, given its relative wealth and spectacular inequality—the latter owing less to the extent of inequality than to its spatial organization, a particularly intensive form of class segregation where upper- and middle-class residential and commercial enclaves abut the informal settlements of the urban poor as a general pattern. This landscape took shape as a result of four processes: rapid population growth beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, monumental city-building under the Marcos regime, democratization, and urban restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s. These processes constituted what are perhaps the city’s two main social actors, the urban poor and middle class. These labels are more conventional than accurate. Most of the “urban poor” are not poor by official standards, and the term “middle class” is much too vague. These groups find definition relationally, particularly in space, as “squatters” (slum dwellers) and “villagers” (enclave residents). This division, while fundamentally spatial, elaborated around the divide between formal and informal housing, has become the most important social division in the city since the late 20th century. Hence this article considers each group in some depth. While Metro Manila’s importance to the Philippines is clear, lamentably it has been largely overlooked as a source of urban theory. Manila provides an example par excellence of “late urbanization.” Analytically, it belongs with a set of cities in Latin America and Southeast Asia having undergone rapid population growth in the mid-20th century, resulting in urban landscapes distinguished by precarious work and informal housing. Second, it represents a particularly vivid case of urban space and social relations being restructured by market forces. The commodification of land and labor has proceeded relatively unimpeded in Manila, and class dynamics have crystallized in space relatively uncomplicated by racial and ethnic, religious, and other lines of division. As a result, class contention is especially intense, and class segregation is extreme. We might see in this landscape one possible urban future.