Urban Studies, Vol. 41, No.

12, 2469–2484, November 2004

Planning to Forget: Informal Settlements as

‘Forgotten Places’ in Globalising Metro Manila

Gavin Shatkin
[Paper first received, July 2003; in final form, April 2004]

Summary. As Metro Manila’s economy has become increasingly integrated into global flows of
trade and investment, it has also experienced a shelter crisis, as the number of people who cannot
afford legal housing and consequently illegally settle in informal settlements has increased in both
absolute and percentage terms. This paper discusses such informal settlements as ‘forgotten
places’ in the global era. It makes two arguments. First, it argues that this shelter crisis is
inherent to globalising cities in developing countries, as a contradiction emerges between the
extensive redevelopment and rising property values that accompany ‘global city’ development
and the shelter needs of low-income people. The second is that informal settlements have
increasingly been forgotten by urban planners despite this housing crisis, as planners have
consciously abandoned place-based poverty alleviation efforts based on the rationale that they
are no longer tenable in the global era.

In the waters opposite the Manila Inter-
national Container Port, extending more than
1 km into Manila Bay, is a seawall that
protects the port from the typhoons that regu-
larly hit Metro Manila. Visible only to dock-
workers and seagulls, the seawall is home to
a remarkable settlement of houses made of
wood, tin, concrete and scavenged materials
built directly onto the wall, or on stilts on
either side. This settlement is home to sev-
eral thousand families, many of which are
dependent on the port itself for employment.
It formed in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
when the growing number of workers at the
port found it increasingly difficult to find
affordable shelter in the Manila housing mar-
ket. It contains a dynamic economy—water
vendors ply the narrow path that is formed
by the top of the seawall and residents walk-
ing home from work can stop at the small
grocery stores that line the route for soap,
beer or fresh fish from the bay. The settle-
ment goes largely unnoticed and unserviced
by local government, except of course in the
weeks before elections, when local politi-
cians visit and express their intentions for the
redevelopment of the area. Typhoons regu-
larly destroy some of the houses and these
are rebuilt with local labour and resources.
This settlement symbolises the role of the
urban poor in Philippine society—their cen-
tral role in the country’s efforts to build an
export-oriented economy in response to the
challenge of globalisation, their political and
social invisibility and the hazardous and pre-
carious nature of the settlements in which
they reside. Informal settlements like this
house approximately 40 per cent of Metro
Manila’s population and this number has in-
creased steadily in both absolute and percent-
age terms in the past two decades (Berner,

Gavin Shatkin is at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, 2000 Bonisteel Boulevard, Ann
Arbor, Michigan, 48109-2069, USA. Fax: 734 763 2322. E-mail: shatkin@umich.edu.
0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/04/122469–16 © 2004 The Editors of Urban Studies
DOI: 10.1080/00420980412331297636
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2470
1997, p. 22). Their residents, who make their
living as taxi drivers, schoolteachers, factory
workers, vendors and in myriad other occu-
pations, provide vital services in Metro
Manila’s economy. Yet they also face a con-
stant threat of eviction from their homes and
displacement to remote areas far from access
to employment. Unlike the settlements on the
seawall, most informal settlements are not
out of sight—in many places, they spill over
into public view and popular consciousness,
clustered underneath an overpass, on an un-
developed lot on a residential street or
propped on stilts above a canal. Yet, consid-
ering their central role as sources of shelter
for the urban poor, their invisibility in
government plans and policies is remarkable.
This paper will discuss informal settle-
ments in Metro Manila, and elsewhere in
Asia, as ‘forgotten places’ in the era of
globalisation. It will put forth two main argu-
ments. The first is that the globalisation of
Metro Manila and other cities in Asia has
contributed to a growing housing crisis that
is evident in the increasing difficulty that
low-income urban residents face in accessing
legal shelter close to sources of livelihood
and in the rising threat of displacement faced
by many informal settlements. This argument
is not intended to contradict the evident in-
crease in incomes among all strata of society
in most globalising cities in Asia, but rather
to point out that growth has also fostered a
growing contradiction between widespread
urban redevelopment and consequent rise in
property values, and the shelter needs of a
growing contingent of urban poor who are
dependent on the urban economy (Berner,
1997; Smith, 2002). The second argument is
that the settlements of the poor have increas-
ingly been forgotten by urban planners and
policy-makers despite this housing crisis.
Specifically, planners and policy-makers
have consciously abandoned place-based
poverty alleviation efforts that arguably hold
the most promise for addressing shelter
needs, based on the rationale that such efforts
are no longer tenable in the global era.
The first section of the paper will develop
a theoretical framework for understanding
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GAVIN SHATKIN
the relationship between the globalisation of
cities, social inequality and the housing cri-
sis, and will present evidence from Metro
Manila. The second section will detail the
process through which informal settlements
have been forgotten in urban planning and
policy as a consequence of the influence of
the globalisation discourse in urban policy.
Social Inequality in Globalising Cities
There has been remarkably little theoretical
or empirical examination of the impact of the
globalisation of cities in developing countries
and resultant spatial, political and social
change, on low-income urban residents. The
predominant view in Asia, which is propa-
gated by governments and international aid
and lending organisations and accepted
among many academics, is that economic
growth associated with the export of manu-
factured goods has led to decreased poverty
and an improvement in shelter conditions of
all sectors of society (Pugh, 1995, p. 38;
Ruland, 1996; Pernia and Quising, 2003,
p. 403). An alternative viewpoint, embraced
by many advocates for the urban poor in
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and
academia, is that the development of an ex-
port-oriented economy has led to downward
pressure on wages, environmental destruc-
tion and the dislocation of communities of
the poor, resulting in increased immiseration.
This paper argues that, while incomes are
certainly rising in the globalising cities of
Asia, low-income residents are nonetheless
experiencing an unprecedented shelter crisis.
Specifically, spatial change associated with
globalisation has resulted in skyrocketing
property values in central cities and changing
patterns of employment that have translated
into increases in the cost of (legal) housing,
increased distances between places of em-
ployment and residence, and a deterioration
of the urban environment. These changes
have disproportionately affected the poor.
Hence a paradox exists. The urban poor in
many cities now have unprecedented access
to televisions, stereos, washing machines and
other consumer products—a survey of the
 PLANNING TO FORGET
largest informal settlement in Metro Manila
conducted in the mid 1990s, for example,
revealed that 87 per cent of households had a
television set (URC, 1998). Yet the poor lack
access to one basic necessity—centrally lo-
cated urban space. Their continuing lack of
tenure security, and persistent threats to their
physical and psychological well-being posed
by the transport and environmental crisis fac-
ing cities, raise the question of whether in-
creasing incomes have in fact led to a
meaningful improvement in quality of life.
This section will first expound a theoretical
framework for understanding the relationship
between globalisation and the shelter crisis,
and the next section will discuss the case of
Metro Manila.
A growing literature has elucidated the
relationship between the globalisation of cit-
ies, spatial change and social inequality
(Wilson, 1997; Sassen, 1998; Smith, 2002).
While much of this literature is based on the
experience of cities in the US, Europe and
Japan, many of its central observations are
applicable to developing countries as well.
Its fundamental insight is that urban develop-
ment in market economies is inherently un-
even. Globalisation itself represents efforts
by capital to take advantage of technological
innovations in telecommunications and trans-
port to lower the cost of production by seek-
ing cheaper land, labour and natural
resources in increasingly peripheral loca-
tions, while simultaneously attempting to
maximise the exchange value of goods and
services by expanding markets (Sassen,
1998; Marcuse and van Kempen, 2000b).
Scott et al. (2001) point to the emergence of
what they call ‘global city-regions’ as the
logical outcome of these impulses under the
technological advances that have marked the
global era. As new technologies have facili-
tated the movement of goods, people and
information, manufacturing facilities have
decentralised as corporations have sought
cheaper land and labour in suburban sites
both in the developed and developing coun-
tries. In contrast, many corporate office func-
tions have become increasingly centralised in
the central business districts of a few major
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2471
cities. They favour such sites because they
have concentrations of financial and business
service companies that corporations require
to co-ordinate international trade and invest-
ment, and to deal with the complex financial
and legal arrangements (for example, those
associated with the outsourcing of production
and with mergers and acquisitions) that char-
acterise contemporary business (Sassen,
1991).
Researchers have posited that these trends
have exacerbated inequalities in large cities
in several ways (Sassen, 1998; Scott et al.,
2001):
—Increased investment in commercial and
office real estate in central business dis-
tricts has led to inflated land prices. In
addition, global cities are generally char-
acterised by a polarisation of incomes be-
tween low-wage service-sector and
manufacturing jobs and high-paying pro-
fessional positions. The poor have conse-
quently been forced to compete with an
increasingly wealthy professional class for
limited residential and commercial real es-
tate close to the city centre. These trends
have resulted in urban redevelopment,
gentrification, and displacement of the
poor.
—The urbanisation and industrialisation of
areas outside municipal boundaries have
weakened political support for environ-
mental and wage regulation, and for pro-
tection of workers’ rights to organise, as
local governments in metropolitan regions
have come under pressure to compete with
each other for corporate investment.
—The rapid expansion of global city-regions
has led companies to seek new sources of
low-cost labour. In the developed coun-
tries this has taken the form of immigrant
labour, while in developing countries, it
has led to accelerated rural–urban mi-
gration (although immigrant labour has be-
come important in some developing
countries as well, as is the case with Cam-
bodian and Burmese labourers in Thai-
land). Both immigrants and rural-urban
migrants face barriers to upward mobility
2472
due to their lack of integration into urban
economies and, in the case of immigrants,
tenuous legal status.
The development of global city-regions in
Asia has been shaped by the unique space
economies of cities in the region. Much aca-
demic attention has focused on the develop-
ment of ‘extended metropolitan regions’
(EMRs) around primate cities in Asia, as
manufacturing investors have favoured
greenfield sites close to the infrastructure
concentrated in central cities (Ginsburg et
al., 1991). McGee (1991) has coined the
term desakota to describe the combination of
industrial, residential and agricultural land
uses that have emerged in rice-growing re-
gions surrounding Asia’s globalising cities.
He argues that these regions are magnets for
export-oriented manufacturing investment
and have been one key to the success of
Asian economies. As peripheral regions in
metropolitan areas have industrialised, multi-
national corporate headquarters and business
service firms have concentrated in central
cities. This has driven up real estate values
and led to considerable redevelopment.
These patterns of urbanisation have had a
number of implications for the urban poor. In
central cities, these changes have fostered
what Smith (2002) has termed a ‘crisis of
social reproduction’ that he argues is com-
mon to all globalising cities. Specifically,
there is
a fundamental geographical contradiction
between the dramatically increased land
values that accompany the centralisation
of capital in the core … and the marginal,
exurban locations where workers are
forced to live due to the pitiful wages on
which capital centralisation is built (Smith,
2002, pp. 435–436).
In developing countries, the manifestations
of this contradiction include the proliferation
of informal settlements as the sole form of
shelter available to many, the massive dis-
placement of low-income residents from cen-
tral-city locations, extremely long commutes
and crisis levels of air pollution caused by
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GAVIN SHATKIN
traffic congestion. These phenomena have
placed severe strains on many low-income
households and threaten to undercut the
growth of urban economies. It has been esti-
mated, for example, that 3 million people
were displaced by urban redevelopment
projects in Seoul during the 1980s and that
high-rise development displaced 100 000
people within a 15-km radius of the centre of
Bangkok between 1984 and 1988 (Douglass,
2000).
Quality of life among low-income people
in desakota regions has also been affected by
these changes. Academic discussions of the
desakota phenomenon have largely cel-
ebrated its positive economic and social ef-
fects. Indeed, these regions present new
opportunities for social and economic ad-
vancement for some, most notably young
women who have historically played a mar-
ginal role in the cash economy, but who are
the preferred employees of multinational
companies. However, contrary to McGee’s
depiction of largely non-conflictual processes
of industrialisation and urbanisation, the de-
velopment of desakota regions represents the
outcome of intense contests between govern-
ment officials, private-sector actors, local
communities and workers over land conver-
sion, environmental regulation and labour re-
lations. Widespread land conversion has
displaced agricultural communities and fos-
tered environmental destruction that has
made farming untenable in many areas
(McAndrew, 1994). In the area of labour
relations, Kelly (2001) demonstrates the
close collaboration of multinational and
domestic investors, local government
officials, the managers of industrial estates
and village and community leaders in cre-
ating local labour control regimes that have
successfully thwarted efforts at political mo-
bilisation and unionisation of workers.
Hence the spatial trends that have ac-
companied the globalisation of Asian cities
have created a distinct set of issues of social
inequality. The dramatic redevelopment of
central cities has made access to centrally
located land increasingly difficult, while the
industrialisation of previously rural regions
 PLANNING TO FORGET
has displaced agricultural communities and
provided only limited economic opportunity
for workers. Of course, the phenomena of
lack of legal land tenure and informal hous-
ing are not unique to globalising cities. Cities
in less globalised portions of the world, most
notably Africa, also have significant housing
issues that are attributable to similar
causes—high land costs caused by the
scarcity of centrally located land and the
large number of very low-income people
who are dependent on work in the city cen-
tre. What is distinct about the context of
informal settlements in globalising Asia is
their continued proliferation in a context of
economic growth, the dramatic redevelop-
ment that accompanies globalisation and its
implications for displacement, and the en-
vironmental crisis brought on by rapid
growth. The next section will discuss the
outcome of these forces in Metro Manila.
Shelter and the Urban Poor in Globalising
Metro Manila
While Metro Manila’s economy has been
oriented towards international trade since
colonial times, its integration into the global
economy as a site for export-oriented manu-
facturing began during the presidency of Fer-
dinand Marcos in the late 1960s and early
1970s. During the 1980s, the corruption of
the Marcos dictatorship and the political in-
stability of the reformist Aquino administra-
tion that followed slowed the globalisation of
the Philippine economy. A surge of foreign
direct investment began in the early 1990s,
however, and manufacturing exports rose
from US$10.79 billion in 1990 to US$38.08
billion in 2000 (figures in 2000 dollars) and,
by the latter date, manufacturing accounted
for about 88 per cent of exports (NSO,
2004). The country has experienced
significant economic growth and GNP grew
7 per cent in 1996 (Kelly, 1997). The Philip-
pines experienced less impact than its neigh-
bours during the Asian financial crisis of the
late 1990s and economic growth had recov-
ered to the 3–5 per cent range by 1999 and
2000 (NEDA, 2001).
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2473
The Philippine government has pursued an
aggressive strategy of ‘global city-region’
development as part of its economic develop-
ment efforts, despite a rhetorical commit-
ment to interregional equity. Government
plans have called for a concentration of infra-
structure and social investment in Metro
Manila and its surrounding region.
Specifically, the provinces of Cavite, La-
guna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon, known
collectively as CALABARZON, have been
targeted as the country’s core industrial re-
gion. National investment in infrastructure in
CALABARZON exceeded $1 billion during
the 1990s and plans call for an additional $3
billion in coming years (Kelly, 2000). As
Kelly (2000) notes, all 11 major transport
projects listed in the Medium Term Philip-
pine Development Plan (1993–98) target
Metro Manila and its surrounding region.
The result has been a dynamic of spatial
development that exemplifies the characteris-
tics of a ‘global city-region’ in a highly
primate urban system. Metro Manila and its
surrounding region’s share of exports has
mirrored the increasing share of manufactur-
ing in the nation’s exports, rising from 65 per
cent in 1988 to 83 per cent in 2000 (Pernia
and Quising, 2003). In 1998, 60.6 per cent of
the jobs in economic zones regulated by the
Philippine Economic Zones Authority
(PEZA) were located in two provinces—
Rizal and Quezon—that accounted for less
than 5 per cent of the national population
(Kelly, 2001). As a result, urban develop-
ment has leapfrogged beyond the boundaries
of Metro Manila and two-thirds of the total
hectares converted from rural to urban uses
in the country between 1988 and 1997 were
in the CALABARZON region (Magno-
Ballesteros, 2000). At the same time, corpo-
rate headquarters and business services firms
have concentrated in a handful of urban
mega-projects built by private developers in
central-city areas, particularly in the Makati
central business district, which houses the
vast majority of the nation’s headquarters of
multinational corporations, and the Ortigas
Centre in Mandaluyong, which houses the
headquarters of the Asian Development Bank
2474
and several major MNCs. The increase in
exports has also resulted in a rapid growth in
investment in finance, insurance and real es-
tate, particularly in central-city areas such as
Makati, Pasig and the southern portion of
Quezon City (URC, 1998). The consequence
of these trends has been the extensive devel-
opment of international standard office
space—in Makati—for example, the office
stock rose by 37 per cent between 1992 and
1998 (Cornelio-Pronove and Chang, 1999).
This office space in development has gone
hand-in-hand with commercial and residen-
tial development catering to the needs of a
growing class of wealthy professionals.
These spatial trends have exacerbated the
inherent insecurity of tenure in informal set-
tlements. Such settlements rely on govern-
ment tolerance of their presence on public
land, or on private-sector actors who are
waiting for future land appreciation, and
therefore decide to forestall the cost and legal
complication of eviction, or perhaps gain
revenue in the short term by illegally renting
land to the poor for housing. In the hot
property markets that prevail, however, pres-
sures for land development are intense. Land
values in central-city areas rose 25 per cent
annually in the early and mid 1990s and,
according to one study, land appreciated
6000 per cent in central Makati and 8000 per
cent in the Ortigas Centre area between 1987
and 1996 (URC, 1998). The national govern-
ment has simultaneously undertaken a num-
ber of land-intensive infrastructure projects
aimed at improving the climate for invest-
ment and enhancing Metro Manila’s image
as a ‘global city’. These include the
expansion of the ring road system, the
construction of two new light rail lines and
a major planned rehabilitation of the severely
polluted Pasig River. These projects are pro-
jected to result in the displacement of tens of
thousands of people. While no precise num-
bers are available, a non-profit advocacy
organisation documented 101 cases of evic-
tion between 1997 and 2000 that affected
25 881 families, or approximately 150 000
people (UPA, 2000). Representatives of the
organisation estimate that they are able to
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GAVIN SHATKIN
document less than half of actual demoli-
tions.
One consequence of increasingly restricted
access to centrally located land appears to be
an increased concentration of the urban poor
in fringe areas of the city. During the 1960s
and 1970s, the largest agglomeration of in-
formal housing was in the Tondo Foreshore
area, adjacent to the Manila International
Container Port in Manila, at the centre of the
Metro Manila region. Currently, the largest
agglomeration is located in the National
Government Centre (NGC), more than 10 km
to the north-west of the Makati and Manila
central business districts. Here, some
300 000 people have established residence
on 650 hectares of land intended for the
development of a new national capital. A
survey conducted in one part of the NGC in
1998 found that 50 per cent of residents had
moved there from elsewhere in Metro
Manila, suggesting a movement of popu-
lation from inner-city areas to the urban
fringe (Shatkin, 2001). A survey of com-
munity leaders of informal settlements in two
cities in Metro Manila found that leaders in
the centrally located city of Manila were
much more likely than those in Quezon City
to perceive an immediate threat of eviction of
the community (Shatkin, 2003). Likewise,
settlements in Manila were more likely to be
located on hazardous land, such as in the
easement along railroad tracks or roads, or
built on stilts along canals or on Manila Bay.
Hence it appears that the movement of the
poor to the urban fringe is occurring in part
due to the eviction of communities in central-
city areas and in part due to the superior
quality of housing and better tenure security
on the urban fringe.
In the CALABARZON region surround-
ing Metro Manila, spatial change is leading
to a different set of issues. While the greater
availability of land has meant that most low-
income residents have generally been able to
access housing through legal means, there
has been a widespread conversion of agricul-
tural land to industrial uses. The decline of
agricultural work has exacerbated out-mi-
gration of CALABARZON residents to
Metro Manila and to overseas contract work
 PLANNING TO FORGET
even as the region’s population has grown
with in-migration both from Manila and
poorer provinces (Kelly, 2000, pp. 105–113).
The dislocation of the urban poor to fringe
areas has contributed to the city’s growing
transport crisis, as a growing number of low-
income commuters travel from the fringe to
the city centre for work. One indicator of this
is an increase in the number of registered
buses from 8315 in 1995 to 12 170 in 2000
and annual rate of 8 per cent that far outstrips
Metro Manila’s rate of population growth.
Epinifio de los Santos (EDSA) Avenue, the
city’s primary ring road, is permanently
choked with traffic. At less than 10 km per
hour, average traffic speeds are among the
lowest in Asia and average round-trip com-
muting times of the urban poor exceed two
and a half hours (UNCHS, 1996; URC,
1998). Nevertheless, government invest-
ments in the transport system have focused
on expanding the radial road system, con-
structing toll roads and the development of a
light rail transit system. These improvements
have disproportionately benefited automobile
owners and wealthier commuters who can
afford the high cost of light rail travel.
The data on the social impacts of the
globalisation of Metro Manila are inconclus-
ive, yet they suggest unprecedented chal-
lenges facing low-income communities.
These include the persistent threat of disloca-
tion, longer and more hazardous journeys to
work, an increased cost of living and ex-
posure to a variety of environmental hazards
both in the community and through air pol-
lution. The next section will argue that they
face yet another challenge—the ‘forgetting’
of the shelter needs of the poor in policy and
planning.
The Selective Memory of Urban Planners
and Policy-makers
Globalisation has brought an intensive focus
in the realms of policy, business and
academia on the global exchange of people,
goods, money and culture. Castells (1989)
has framed this phenomenon as the domi-
nance of the ‘space of places’ by the ‘space
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2475
of flows’, as the interests of people rooted in
place have increasingly been subverted and
‘forgotten’ in the drive to make places at-
tractive for investment, jobs and the ‘right
kind’ of people. Others have observed that
this dominance of the ‘space of flows’ is not
an immutable process but rather a conse-
quence of decisions undertaken consciously
by actors in positions of authority. This sec-
tion of the paper will discuss the ‘forgetting’
of informal settlements in Metro Manila, fo-
cusing on three groups of actors: national
government bureaucrats and politicians who
largely control development resources, and
who have formulated Philippine develop-
ment policy; actors in local political econom-
ies who implement local planning and policy,
and who control popular access to decision-
making at the local level; and development
specialists at the World Bank and other inter-
national organisations. It will argue that re-
cent political and administrative reforms
undertaken by national governments in the
Philippines and other developing countries,
frequently with the encouragement and sup-
port of both international aid organisations
and local economic and political actors, have
resulted in the abandonment of place-based
poverty alleviation strategies. It will further
argue that these reforms were explicitly
framed as a response to the demands of the
global era for increased economic efficiency
and fiscal austerity. It will begin by dis-
cussing the roots of such reforms in develop-
ment theory, then will discuss their outcomes
in the context of Metro Manila.
Neo-liberalism, the ‘New Policy Agenda’,
and Loss of Memory
Since the late 1980s a ‘new policy agenda’
has emerged in both the theory and practice
of urban management in developing coun-
tries (Burgess et al. 1997). This agenda has
been championed by international organisa-
tions such as the World Bank and widely
adopted by developing country governments.
It adopts a neo-liberal framework of analysis
that views the role of cities as engines of
globally oriented manufacturing-led econ-
2476
omic growth. This perspective came into
vogue as governments in developing coun-
tries sought to stimulate growth through inte-
gration into the global economy and was in
many cases imposed on governments through
structural adjustment conditions attached to
World Bank and IMF lending. The new pol-
icy agenda continues to identify urban pov-
erty alleviation as an important policy
objective (World Bank, 1991, p. 9). How-
ever, it marks a significant shift from the
place-based strategies, such as sites and ser-
vices, squatter upgrading and land banking,
that formed the core of the World Bank’s
shelter strategy during the 1970s and 1980s.
With a strong focus on increasing economic
efficiency, the new agenda eschews govern-
ment intervention in the urban economy and
emphasises the need to enhance the role of
the market in all aspects of infrastructure and
service delivery. This change is described
concisely in a recent World Bank publication
During the 1980s, urban development
projects … became reoriented towards
strengthening policy, financial, and institu-
tional frameworks. Housing assistance—
for example, shifted from shelter
investment to the reform of housing-
finance policies, and the restructuring or
dismantling of housing banks and public
housing agencies. The [World] Bank be-
gan devoting a much larger share of its
lending to municipal development projects
that aimed to effect broad capacity-build-
ing and financial reforms within municipal
government, coupled with credit lines to
support investments and help municipali-
ties establish credit records (Freire, 2001,
p. xix).
The new approach endeavours to enhance
access to shelter and stimulate community
improvement in several ways. First, the liber-
alisation of markets for land and building
material is intended to increase competition
and drive down prices. Secondly, govern-
ment responsibility for housing is to be de-
centralised to local government units in order
to achieve Tiebout’s (1956) ideal of con-
sumer choice, through which citizens can
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GAVIN SHATKIN
hold local elected officials accountable by
voting them out of office or ‘voting with
their feet’ by leaving inefficient jurisdictions.
Finally, organisations of civil society are to
play an increased role in shelter in order to
lower community improvement costs by tap-
ping the financial and labour resources of
residents. In this view, the role of national
governments in urban management should
focus on encouraging private-sector-led
economic growth through macroeconomic
management, economic development boost-
erism and the development of trunk infra-
structure required by export-oriented
investors such as roads, airports and con-
tainer ports. Furthermore, subsidies for ser-
vices to the poor should be limited, targetted
and designed to enhance the role of the pri-
vate sector.
The shift to ‘whole-sector’ strategies and
local government capacity building has been
rationalised based on a number of criticisms
of place-based interventions such as public
housing and squatter upgrading and sites and
services programmes. Specifically, these ap-
proaches are criticised for requiring consider-
able subsidy, for their inability to move
beyond pilot projects and achieve broad scale
and impact, and for being prone to issues of
corruption and mismanagement. Yet the new
approach raises its own set of questions.
First and foremost, the insistence of the
new policy agenda on the primacy of market
measures in community improvement disre-
gards the potential market failure which is at
the centre of the ‘crisis of social repro-
duction’ identified by Smith (2002) and oth-
ers. Particularly in central cities, extremely
high land prices and the intense competition
for available land seems to preclude market-
based solutions. Secondly, the empowered,
democratised local governments envisioned
as key actors in shelter delivery are likely in
fact to have little structural interest in the
improvement of poor communities. This is
true for two reasons. First, as Peterson (1981)
stated more than two decades ago, the im-
perative to cut taxes while providing services
to attract capital to localities places severe
constraints on the ability of local government
 PLANNING TO FORGET
to implement social welfare initiatives. This
is particularly true where decentralisation re-
sults in ‘unfunded mandates’, placing local
governments under severe fiscal constraints.
Secondly, particularly in economies like that
of the Philippines, where land-based élites
have historically wielded significant political
power, politicians themselves frequently
have personal economic and political inter-
ests that are in conflict with their role in the
social provision of housing.
Finally, the new policy agenda places na-
tional governments in a contradictory pos-
ition with relation to informal settlers. In
their focus on fostering efficient land use,
cutting government spending and developing
infrastructure, the interests of national devel-
opment planners often come into direct
conflict with those of low-income communi-
ties which are occupying potentially valuable
land and calling for increases in government
support for local development. Coupled with
the dismantling of national-level ministries
and departments that deal with housing and
community development, this fosters a situ-
ation in which national government agencies,
while espousing an anti-poverty agenda, are
likely to be ambivalent towards the settle-
ments of the poor.
In sum, the new policy agenda has resulted
in a ‘loss of institutional memory’ regarding
the settlements of the poor, as the rhetoric of
economic growth and prosperity for all
through incorporation into the global econ-
omy masks the reality of shelter poverty. The
process of forgetting is a product of a num-
ber of phenomena: the perception in many
national governments that neo-liberalism is
the only viable model of development, the
powerful role of international aid and lending
organisations in propagating this notion and
the influence of economic and political inter-
ests, both domestic and international, that
stand to benefit from industrialisation and
urbanisation through a neo-liberal agenda.
Planning to Forget in Metro Manila
Naerssen et al. (1996) caution us to dis-
tinguish between the ‘structure’ and the ‘sys-
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2477
tem’ of urban planning and policy-making.
In other words, we must not conflate the
stated logic and purpose of planning institu-
tions and actions (the structure) with the
actual relation of these institutions and ac-
tions to the socioeconomic and political con-
text in which they are embedded (the
system). In Metro Manila, as in many other
cities in developing countries, primate cities
represent the epicentre of national economies
and are consequently the site of intense
conflict over the spoils of urban develop-
ment. Urban policy is one arena in which this
conflict takes place. This section will discuss
the changing relationship between urban
politics and the urban poor in Metro Manila,
from the regime of Ferdinand Marcos until
the present time. While informal settlements
were treated as enemies of the state under the
Marcos regime, they have been largely ne-
glected and forgotten in the post-Marcos pe-
riod despite the persistent pro-poor rhetoric
of successive administrations. This process
of forgetting is related to institutional and
political reforms undertaken by the Philip-
pine government in recent years, which in
turn reflect the changing political economy
of development in a globalising Metro
Manila.
As with other Philippine institutions
whose power he was able to usurp, Marcos
used the administration of Metro Manila as a
means to control grassroots mobilisation and
thwart the aspirations of the Philippines’ lo-
cal landed élite (Pinches, 1994; Naerssen et
al., 1996). His objectives in policy and plan-
ning in Metro Manila were largely fourfold:
to control the spread of the rural communist
insurgency to Manila; to exert an aura of
power and progress to Filipinos and the
world through large urban development
projects; to use land use planning and con-
trols as a means to reverse the upward mo-
bility of potential political competitors
amongst the local landed élite; and to reward
loyal cronies with lucrative urban develop-
ment projects.
Marcos accomplished these objectives
through two measures. First, he created a
system of urban neighbourhood assemblies
2478
(barangay) through which he was able to
monitor and manipulate grassroots mobilis-
ation (Caoili, 1988). Secondly, he progres-
sively centralised urban management. In
1976, the Metro Manila Commission (MMC)
was created with Marcos’s wife Imelda as
the appointed Governor. The MMC replaced
the Metro Manila Committee, which had pro-
vided a loose framework for co-operation for
the 17 cities and municipalities that made up
the Metro area, with a powerful entity that
had comprehensive authority in all aspects of
metropolitan development. The Marcos fam-
ily consolidated their power over urban de-
velopment yet further in 1978 when Imelda
was appointed Minister of Human Settle-
ments in a powerful new ministry that was
charged with formulating a national urban
development strategy. With these structures
in place, the Marcos family dominated the
development of the Metro Manila region. A
master plan for the city was completed in
1976 and called for the rationalisation of land
use, expansion of road and rail systems, new
zoning regulation and the development of
new industrial sites and new towns in order
to draw development away from Metro
Manila to its periphery. Several high-profile
infrastructure projects, as well as the con-
struction of major public buildings, were ini-
tiated in the 1970s.
The Marcos regime viewed informal set-
tlements as potential bases for an urban in-
surgency and as eyesores that acted as a
repellent to foreign investment, and an esti-
mated 400 000 informal settlers were evicted
under Martial Law (Pinches, 1994). Yet the
regime’s efforts to placate the poor and to
exhibit its benevolent and progressive nature
to the world community led it to increase
housing expenditures significantly during the
Martial Law period (URC, 1998). In 1975,
the National Housing Authority (NHA) was
founded to house the poorest 30 per cent of
the population. Its efforts were generally
misguided. The Bagong Lipunan (‘new so-
ciety’) Sites and Services programme, or
BLISS, sought to provide medium-rise hous-
ing for the urban poor. The programme re-
sulted in only 2500 units, however, as Imelda
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GAVIN SHATKIN
Marcos’ insistence on design flourishes such
as the use of expensive terracotta roof tiles,
and alleged corruption in the contracting pro-
cess, led to high construction costs that made
the project untenable for mass production
and unaffordable to the poor (Pinches, 1994).
In the late 1970s, the regime undertook a
major effort at upgrading as a pilot project
for the World Bank’s new approach to shel-
ter improvement and established 253 ‘areas
for priority development’. Eventually, how-
ever, only approximately 10 per cent of the
designated areas benefited significantly from
the project. More promising was the develop-
ment of Dagat-dagatan, a major in-city relo-
cation project for residents of the Tondo
area, Manila’s largest informal settlement,
which was undertaken in large part due to a
community-based movement that had man-
aged to influence the World Bank’s urban
development specialists.
In sum, the Marcos regime’s efforts at
shelter improvement were intended more as
instruments of public relations and opportu-
nities for corruption than as meaningful pov-
erty alleviations strategies. Since the end of
the authoritarian regime, a series of reform-
oriented governments have justifiably sought
to dismantle the vestiges of the Marcos
regime. Despite these efforts, however, the
scale of Marcos’ community improvement
efforts has arguably not been duplicated
since.
The Corazon Aquino government, which
emerged from the anti-authoritarian People’s
Power revolt against the Marcos regime in
February 1986, came to power in part
through the promise of strengthening poverty
alleviation efforts. In the months following
her ascendancy, hundreds of thousands of
people flooded into Metro Manila and il-
legally settled where they could, hoping that
their claims to shelter would be validated by
the new government through legalisation of
tenure. Early initiatives of the new govern-
ment seemed to validate this hope, particu-
larly a presidential proclamation that set
aside about half of the 650-hectare National
Government Centre in Quezon City for the
90 000 informal settlers that were living
 PLANNING TO FORGET
there at the time. Yet this initiative was never
fully implemented and the budget for urban
community development fell as the Aquino
government was beset by budget shortfalls
and political instability.
In fact, every Philippine government since
the fall of Marcos has, with some variation in
the level of sincerity and commitment, de-
clared urban poverty alleviation a central
focus of public policy. Their efforts, how-
ever, have been shaped by a number of cir-
cumstances, including: the lure of the success
of export-oriented development through mar-
ket liberalisation in neighbouring south-east
Asian countries; a powerful popular desire to
cast off the vestiges of authoritarianism left
behind by Marcos; the increasing assertive-
ness of international aid and lending organi-
sations in insisting on decreased government
spending and fiscal austerity; and the emerg-
ing influence of a middle-class and business
sector who believe their economic fortunes
to be tied to the globalisation of the national
economy. These circumstances have driven
the Philippine government towards a neo-lib-
eral vision in national development policy.
One consequence has been the adoption of an
urban development framework that, perhaps
more than that of any other country, exem-
plifies the ideal outlined in the World Bank’s
vision of the ‘new policy agenda’. The
Philippine government has cut its budget,
decentralised the provision of infrastructure
and services, and focused on attracting in-
vestment through the development of trunk
infrastructure.
The country’s poverty alleviation strategy
is consistent with this agenda, as described in
the most recent Medium-term Philippine De-
velopment Plan
Central to winning this fight [against pov-
erty] is macroeconomic stability and sus-
tained growth of income and employment
across sectors, socioeconomic groupings,
and regions. Reliance on free enterprise
and markets is vital. Development efforts,
however, must carry a social bias as a
balance to pro-growth strategies (NEDA,
2001, p. 2).
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2479
Specifically, the Philippine government has
focused its urban poverty alleviation mea-
sures on two main strategies. The first has
been the decentralisation of responsibility for
urban poverty alleviation to local govern-
ments, which recent legislation frames as a
means to make policy and planning more
accountable to grassroots actors. The Local
Government Code of 1991 devolved most
responsibility for planning, infrastructure and
service delivery to elected governments at
the province, city and neighbourhood
(barangay) levels. At the same time, the
primary tools of the Marcos regime in hous-
ing and urban development, the MMC and
the MHS, have been replaced by a weakened
Metro Manila Development Authority
(Naerssen et al., 1996). Hence, all 17 cities
and municipalities that make up Metro
Manila, as well as those in its surrounding
region, are now largely responsible for their
own land use planning and the initiation of
social housing efforts. The central role of
local governments in shelter and poverty al-
leviation is reinforced in the Urban Develop-
ment and Housing Act (UDHA) of 1992, a
landmark housing bill, which mandates that
local governments conduct an inventory of
unused land and set some aside for afford-
able housing (PHILSSA, no date).
Secondly, the national government’s strat-
egy for socialised housing has focused reso-
lutely on improving provision through the
private sector
Intervention in the housing markets shall
aim to improve the efficiency of that mar-
ket, with the private sector taking the lead
in the production and financing of housing
units. Where necessary and to the extent
that the government’s fiscal position may
warrant, efficiently targeted subsidies will
be utilised to make those units affordable
(NEDA, 2001, p. 120).
The role of the NHA, the main government
agency engaged in the direct provision of
housing, has been significantly downgraded
and it is currently primarily engaged in mod-
est efforts at assisting in the relocation of
settlements located in hazardous areas and
2480
those displaced by government infrastructure
projects. The primary housing agency under
the new system is the Housing and Urban
Development Co-ordinating Committee
(HUDCC), which is charged with co-ordinat-
ing the activities of a number of agencies that
deal with housing finance and land use regu-
lation, as well as the NHA. Government
housing subsidies have been limited and
have focused primarily on improving access
of individuals and community-based organi-
sations (CBOs) to credit for housing and
community development. During the 1990s,
the national government’s allocation for
housing generally amounted to less than 1
per cent of the budget and the bulk of this
funding was dedicated to credit for upper-
and middle-income housing due to concerns
about the poor cost recovery of low-income
housing lending (NEDA, 2001).
The most promising approach to housing
the urban poor has been the Community
Mortgage Programme (CMP), through which
the national government provides subsidised
credit to CBOs to purchase the land they
occupy and redevelop community infrastruc-
ture. In accordance with the decentralisation
effort, local governments and NGOs are ex-
pected to organise communities to implement
the programme. The programme has been
quite successful at legalising tenure in some
informal settlements with relatively modest
levels of subsidy and at amortisation costs
that are generally affordable to most resi-
dents. However, it has reached less than 5
per cent of informal settlers in Metro Manila.
There are several reasons for its limited im-
pact, including: the difficulty of applying the
programme in central-city areas where land
prices are high; the difficulty of finding ap-
propriate relocation sites for settlements on
hazardous land; the refusal of many owners
to sell their land; the difficulty of organising
communities; and the resistance of local gov-
ernments to co-operating with CBOs in such
efforts (Berner, 2000, p. 562).
In all, the new policy framework has ex-
perienced limited success in addressing the
housing crisis facing the urban poor. While
the government points to an increase in the
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GAVIN SHATKIN
number of government-assisted housing
units, this assistance has increasingly taken
the form of shallow subsidies in the form of
concessionary interest rates for housing that
is usually not targeted to the poor. In the
meantime, the number of informal settlers,
and their proportion of Metro Manila’s popu-
lation, have steadily risen. While estimates of
the population of informal settlements are
never entirely reliable, research indicates that
such settlements housed approximately
700 000 people in 1968, 1.7 million in 1980
and 4 million in 1997, representing about 20
per cent, 24 per cent and 40 per cent of the
population of Metro Manila respectively
(Hollnsteiner, 1976; Ramos-Jiminez et al.,
1986; UN, 1991; Berner, 1997).
This limited efficacy of the recent reforms
in addressing the shelter crisis is attributable
to a number of factors. The first is simply the
steady decline in resources dedicated to
housing and community development. Sec-
ondly, local governments have often proved
resistant to investing financial and human
resources in informal settlements due to both
a lack of both funding and political will.
Decentralisation has meant that local govern-
ments must rely increasingly on revenue gen-
erated through local property taxes and
localities that lack commercial and office
facilities therefore often lack the fiscal ca-
pacity to address housing issues. In the city
of Navotas—for example, one of Metro
Manila’s most resource-poor local govern-
ments has devoted only one half-time staff
member to the concerns of the municipality’s
80 000 informal settlers. Population densities
are extremely high and there is little avail-
able publicly held land, making in-city re-
settlement unlikely. Yet many informal
settlers are dependent on jobs in the munici-
pality’s fishing-based economy. In the city of
Pasay, local politics was for a long time
dominated by Mayor Pablo Cuneta, who was
also the city’s largest landowner and devel-
oper. By most accounts, his dealings with
informal settlers were coloured by his per-
sonal stake in the land they occupied and
CBOs regularly experienced harassment.
 PLANNING TO FORGET
Finally, the recent reforms in urban policy
have meant that there is simply no longer a
centralised entity charged with ‘remember-
ing’ the settlements of the poor, with under-
standing the nature and causes of the
affordable housing crisis and with formulat-
ing strategies for addressing it. HUDCC’s
role is not so much to plan and formulate as
it is to co-ordinate the activities of a number
of other agencies. These agencies, which in-
clude the National Home Mortgage Finance
Corporation, the Home Insurance Guaranty
Corporation and the Home Development
Mutual Fund, operate under a predetermined
mandate to focus on housing finance alone
and are under fiscal pressures to maximise
cost recovery.
The post-Marcos era has not, of course,
been entirely devoid of efforts to address the
concerns of the poor. Post-Marcos adminis-
trations have recognised the persistence of
urban poverty, but have largely limited new
initiatives to symbolic, populist gestures.
Perhaps most notable in this regard was the
administration of President Joseph Estrada,
who rode to power on a populist anti-poverty
agenda. His Lingap para sa mahirap pro-
gramme, which was presented as a major
new anti-poverty initiative, sought to provide
comprehensive services to the 100 poorest
families in each city and province in the
country. The results were widely ridiculed in
the popular press—the impossible effort to
identify the most destitute families was badly
mismanaged and, once implemented, the pro-
gramme reached less than one-tenth of 1 per
cent of the country’s poor (Choguill, 2001).
Estrada made other, more significant ges-
tures, but these were short-lived. In 1998, he
hired a respected sociologist from the Uni-
versity of the Philippines, who had also been
active in non-governmental housing activi-
ties, as Presidential Advisor on Housing and
Chair of the HUDCC. In the face of an
intensive lobbying campaign by the real es-
tate and development industry, however,
Estrada replaced her with a new Housing
Advisor from a private-sector background in
finance.
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2481
Conclusion
This paper has argued that, while a shelter
crisis is inherent to the globalising cities of
the developing world, governments have
viewed socialised housing and community-
based infrastructure delivery as incompatible
with the objective of global city status. The
residents of the settlement on the seawall,
and other informal settlements in Metro
Manila, consequently face a paradox. The
Philippine government extols the virtues of
the global economy and hails workers in
export sectors, such as the porters, guards,
drivers and cleaners at the Manila Inter-
national Container Port, as heroes in the
Philippine development effort. Yet existing
policies and programmes provide little hope
for improvements in shelter for these same
workers. For example, the CMP, while
beneficial to many communities, has little
meaning for residents of the seawall, who are
compelled to remain close to the port that
sustains them economically and who face an
impossibly expensive housing market in the
area surrounding their place of employment.
Hence, while the urban poor themselves have
not been forgotten, the settlements in which
they reside have been.
The paper has further argued that the for-
getting of the poor is not an immutable pro-
cess, but rather a consequence of conscious
decisions made by influential actors. The im-
plication is that these decisions could have
been, and can be, made differently. In the
heady early days of the Aquino administra-
tion, the president formed the Presidential
Commission on the Urban Poor (PCUP), an
agency tasked with directly organising low-
income areas for shelter and infrastructure
improvement. Former anti-Marcos activists
were employed as community organisers and
were fielded in settlements throughout the
Metro area and elsewhere in the Philippines.
In an outcome reminiscent of the Community
Action Programs in the US in the 1960s, the
activities of the PCUP almost immediately
engendered opposition from local govern-
ments and business interests, as community
organisers soon began to engage in political
organising around issues of land tenure,
2482
speculation in land and lack of government
attention to the infrastructure needs of infor-
mal settlements (Karaos, 1995). The PCUP
has since been largely stripped of its original
mandate.
While it is impossible to know what
might have happened if the PCUP had been
allowed to carry on its mission, its remain-
ing vestiges act as a reminder of alternatives
that have not been pursued. The Philippine
government argues that a return to the focus
on place-based interventions prominent dur-
ing the Marcos years is fiscally irresponsible
and likely to lead to inefficiencies in the
housing market. However, it is apparent that
structural issues related to the globalisation
of Metro Manila have limited the effective-
ness of the ‘whole-sector’ approach. First,
issues of land inflation related to investment
and speculation imply a need for more sub-
stantial government subsidy for affordable
housing and intervention in land markets.
This might be achieved—for example,
through measures to reform the property tax
system to discourage speculation, or by
deepening the impact of the CMP by in-
creasing subsidies or providing greater pol-
itical support to communities in negotiating
for land. Secondly, there is an apparent need
to deal with structural issues that inhibit
political participation by the poor, most no-
tably the failure of many local governments
to carry out their responsibilities in the area
of affordable housing. It is here that the
PCUP model is instructive as a potential
role for the national government in intensi-
fying oversight of local government and
providing greater political support to grass-
roots organisations. Finally, the social and
economic costs of the shelter crisis, and the
impact of the deterioration of the urban
environment on public health, raise ques-
tions about the sustainability of a market-
driven approach to housing delivery. This
indicates a need to reassess the costs and
benefits of government involvement in tra-
ditional place-based approaches to shelter
improvement, such as community upgrad-
ing.
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GAVIN SHATKIN
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