Expelled to Peri-Urbia: Spatial Narratives of Mega-Urban Accumulation, Dispossession and Socialized Housing in Manila

• In Event: Urban Exclusion in Southeast Asia - Sponsored by the Southeast Asia Council (SEAC)

Abstract

Peri-urban regions are often depicted as mere spectacles that arise from the mixing of urban and rural landscapes. Moving beyond such purely descriptive accounts, this paper underscores the power-laden relationships involved in the production of peri-urban spaces and demonstrates the highly politicized nature of peri-urbanization. Drawing from the case of Metro Manila, touted as one of the hottest real estate markets in the Asia-Pacific, I show how Metro Manila’s economic growth has hinged upon the expulsion of Manila’s informal settlers into the peri-urban fringe. The alliance of state and market forces, which collude with each other in the conversion of public lands where many informal settlement communities are located, has produced the large-scale movement of informal settlers into peri-urban wards, where they populate profitable public-private projects developed by the national housing agency, local government and property developers. This process entails the demolition of thousands of informal settler homes, a practice legitimized by their relocation into public-private socialized housing projects in far-flung barangays (villages) in the peri-urban fringe. The narratives of their displacement illustrate a turbulent mega-urban expansion of Manila whose highly-celebrated metropolitan growth is undergirded by the exclusion and dispossession of informal settlers and their expulsion to the peri-urban fringe. While so many accounts of peri-urbanization depict the process as a kind of natural form of growth or urban expansion disconnected from human forces, I show how peri-urban spaces are actually the product of deeply political—and extremely unequal—processes.

Author

• Arnisson Andre C. Ortega, University of the Philippines Diliman