Economic Anthropology 2015; 2: 22–41 DOI:10.1002/sea2.

12016

Unsettling Urban Marketplace

Redevelopment in Baguio City,
Philippines
B. Lynne Milgram

Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences, OCAD University, Toronto, ON M5T 1W1, Canada
Corresponding author: B. Lynne Milgram; e-mail: lmilgram@faculty.ocadu.ca

Urban public marketplaces in Global South cities host a vibrant mix of retail and wholesale trade. Yet local-to-national governments increasingly
promote sanitized and privatized urban spaces by privileging modern retail outlets (malls and supermarkets) and discouraging “traditional”
livelihoods (street vending and market stalls). These political decisions dramatically disrupt the public market trade that has provisioned
urbanites for decades. To address this issue, this article analyzes how retailers working in the renowned Baguio City Public Market, northern
Philippines, sustain their livelihoods given that Baguio City’s first phase of market redevelopment failed to meet their needs (e.g., insufficient
store size and banning enterprises). Problematizing legal–illegal work and urban public space use, I argue that public marketers engage
everyday and insurgent public space activism to protest their disenfranchisement. Although marketers generally have achieved selected
demands, some have benefited more than others. Thus, I suggest that we consider not only marketers’ resistance but also the uneven political
landscape within which they work—the power differentials among and between marketers and the state. The extent to which variously
positioned marketers can realize livelihood rights highlights the unpredictability of civic engagement and “extralegality” when competing
ideologies clash over access to urban public space, legal–illegal practice, and appropriate urban provisioning.

Keywords Philippines; Legality–Illegality; Urban Public Space; Marketplaces; Politics Of Resistance; Power

Jane Cachan,1 a Baguio City Public Market retailer, 45 years old, and a widow with two children, has
been selling salt and charcoal in the market since 2002. Jane purchases the charcoal from her brother,
who also wholesales this commodity to other market sellers, and she buys her salt in 45 kilo sacks
from regional wholesalers who regularly travel to Baguio City from the neighboring lowland provinces.
Maintaining diverse and personalized sources for one’s goods in a competitive market, Jane explains,
“ensures I receive the quality and volume of products I order, when I need them.” Jane repackages the
salt into smaller bags, which she sells for 5, 10, and 25 pesos.2 When a customer purchases a 25 peso
bag of salt, Jane includes a small bonus amount to singularize her sale. She says, “When consumers ask
me about my salt, I explain that it is a fresh product from Pangasinan province and that it is cleaner and
less processed than the more expensive salt they buy in the supermarket. I try to personally engage my
customers, giving them the information they need and, of course, encouraging them to shop again at
my store.”
As enterprises such as that of Jane Cachan highlight, public marketplaces in cities of the Global South
are vibrant constellations of economic, social, and political life provisioning the consumption needs of
residents and tourists at retail and wholesale levels (Davis, 1973; Little, 2004; Manalili, 2005; Yessenova,
2006). Yet, as Global South countries move to modernize, local-to-national governments increasingly
promote regulated, privatized, and sanitized urban spaces. These visions privilege the construction of

22 © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved

 Unsettling Urban Marketplace Redevelopment

Figure 1 Market stalls sell fresh produce in the new Block 3 building in the Baguio City Public Market, Baguio
City, Philippines. Photograph by the author.

modern retail outlets, such as shopping malls and supermarkets, while discouraging or even destroying
what governments view as “traditional remnants” of entrepreneurial trade, such as marketplaces,
informal stalls, and street vendor activities (Brown, 2006; Goh & Bunnell, 2013; Matejowsky, 2008;
Reardon & Swinnen, 2004). Such initiatives limit urban livelihood options by restricting business
opportunities (locations and operating times) and replacing older buildings that enable flexible space
use with more prescriptive modern “boutique” structures. As Kinga Pozniak (this volume) similarly
argues for postsocialist Poland, governments believed that by redesigning the “cityscape,” they could, in
effect, “forge new forms of social relations.”
This article addresses these issues by analyzing the channels through which retail marketers in
the Baguio City Public Market—the wholesale and retail hub for fresh produce in northern Luzon,
Philippines—sustain their “provisioning” relationships (Narotzky, 2005) given that the city’s current
market redevelopment plan fails to respond to vendors’ livelihood needs. Retailers working in the
Baguio City Public Market’s Block 3 building (Figure 1), the first section of the market to be renovated,
complained that they were not sufficiently consulted on the new building design. This oversight resulted
in the construction of inappropriately small retail spaces, zoning discrimination, and the elimination of
particular types of enterprises (e.g., coconut processing and cooking food). To protest the new Block
3 building plan, retailers engaged in “everyday” (Kerkvliet, 2009) as well as “insurgent public space”

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B. L. Milgram

activism (Hou, 2010:1). During building reconstruction, they moved their businesses into public streets
bordering the market, and later, within the new market building, they expanded their operations into the
public aisles between stores. In so doing, retailers created sites of potentiality to secure their livelihoods
and recapture the socioeconomic vibrancy they want markets to hold. Working through selected legal
and “extralegal” avenues (Smart & Zerilli, 2014), marketers’ dispute with the government’s conventional,
codified notion of “form follows capital” (Hou, 2010:6) succeeded in reconfiguring the municipal master
plan that promoted a privatized, gentrified, and securitized urbanism aimed at privileging more well-off
residents.
Indeed, to sustain their livelihoods, Baguio City Public Market retailers felt they had little choice but
to engage such “guerrilla urbanism” (Hou, 2010:15). In 1995, the municipal government awarded the
market redevelopment contract to a private Manila-based company, UNIWIDE. Marketers immediately
challenged this outsourced initiative by launching a series of civil lawsuits and appeals that continue,
20 years later, to thwart city action (Refuerzo, 2009:1, 43). Baguio City councilors, frustrated with delays
to their development agenda, and to demonstrate strong leadership just before the May 2010 election,
introduced a new incremental strategy to develop the market in sections beginning with the Block 3
building—a marginalized site the city had not kept in good repair. As implementation of the Block 3
project required only UNIWIDE’s permission, it passed quickly through city council without the public
hearings required for the larger market redevelopment plan.
Block 3 retailers favor market improvements as long as their voice is part of the planning process.
Thus, while I question whether existing laws are good or inadequate, correctly used or misused, I suggest
additionally that Block 3 marketers’ everyday and insurgent advocacy to secure their businesses raises
the questions, Who has rights over public space use? What is the extent of equity among marketers’
access to these rights? Although operationalizing different forms of resistance has given marketers,
generally, the power to achieve selected demands, some sellers have been more effective than others
in realizing this potential. I suggest, then, that considering not only the nature of marketers’ resistance
but also the uneven political landscape within which they work can reveal valuable insights about the
various forms of power specific individuals command and their points of intersection—the power
among retailers and the power between retailers and the city government (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Nader,
1997). As Walter Little (this volume) similarly argues about urban public regulations in Antigua, vertical
and horizontal spatial governmentality, in effect, leads to differently positioned actors being able to
fashion multiple sites of power and options for action.
To address the aforementioned issues, I collected data for this article from 2009 through 2013. Dur-
ing this time, my research assistant and I conducted 72 interviews with Block 3 market store leaseholders,
men and women, ranging in age from 27 to 74 years old, but the majority of marketers with whom we
talked were 30–63 years of age. We interviewed marketers in their stores in the older Block 3 building in
2009 and 2010, in their roadside relocation sites in 2011, and in their new stores within the reconstructed
Block 3 building in 2012 and 2013. We also conducted interviews with public market administrators and
with selected Baguio City government councilors, including following their Facebook pages, and we
consulted the Baguio City Hall Records and Research Offices to chart municipal policies regarding street
and public market vending. In addition, we have been able to attend many of the monthly meetings of the
Baguio City Public Market Authority (BCMA), at which committee members establish and revise the
public market guidelines. As market vendors sell seven days a week, we have had ample opportunities
to casually and repeatedly talk with and observe marketers to augment our formal interviews.

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 Unsettling Urban Marketplace Redevelopment

To contextualize the implications of these development initiatives within the Baguio City Public
Market, I review studies on the politics of resistance, urban public space, and legal and illegal practice. By
keeping Baguio City marketers’ actions in the foreground, my research highlights why long-established
systems of public market trade are in a state of flux and the driving forces marketers use to fashion their
livelihoods’ constant reshaping and perseverance given the prescriptive state forces that consistently
work to eradicate their enterprises.

Insurgent public space activism and everyday politics of resistance

Scholarship on the organization of cities demonstrates that urban planners often privilege purposeful
design that fashions space in response to the needs of a corporatist economy and to subordinate urban
form to the logic of profit (Cohen, 2004; Dannhaeuser, 1997; Matejowsky, 2000, 2008). But in the
Global South, as economic liberalization policies of the 1980s forced more urban residents to seek
other-than-formal-sector jobs, questions about access to and rights over public space use grew.
The concept of “urban public space” identifies all types of physical space to which people have access
or use rights, whether in public, private, communal, or unknown ownership, including vacant private
land (Brown, 2006:10; Smith & Low, 2006). In the Global South, as private space for the urban poor is
restricted, urban public space becomes an essential resource for plural livelihoods that, as such, challenge
governments’ dominant “for the people” spatial value system (Brown, 2006:27–28; Cross & Karides,
2007). Thus, in place of the utopian vision of a democratic public space open to all (Young, 2002), urban
public space today is more often a site of exclusion and an expression of power and political control (Hou,
2010:3) emerging as both a physical boundary and a material setting (Douglass & Daniere, 2009:3).
Indeed, in his analysis of the growth of malls worldwide, Barber (2001:203) argues that the privatization
and commercialization of space have turned our “complex multiuse public spaces into one-dimensional
venues for consumption.”
By extending their businesses into adjacent market streets and public market aisles, Baguio City’s
Block 3 retailers, through “insurgent public space” activism (Hou, 2010:1), defy government con-
trol, transforming these sites into conflict zones. Building on theories of “insurgent citizenship”
(Holston, 2009), Hou’s (2010:1) concept realizes “expressions of alternative social and spatial rela-
tionships” that support diverse and inclusive options for public space access and use. By identifying
the related actions of “appropriating” and “transgressing,” Hou (2010:13–14) additionally assists us
in understanding the strategies actors use to transform public space use and meaning. While “ap-
propriating represents actions and manners through which the meaning, ownership, and structure
of official public space can be temporarily or permanently suspended” or repurposed, “transgress-
ing represents the infringement or crossing of official boundaries between the private and public
domains through temporary occupation,” thereby producing new meanings and relationships (Hou,
2010:13–14).
In this light, Harvey’s (2006:279) concept of “relational space” similarly captures how actors validate
their claim to so-called illegal spaces in public areas. By paying legally regulated rental fees to the Baguio
City treasurer to secure their street and market aisle occupations, Block 3 retailers craft new relations of
exchange that convert “absolute” or city-owned spaces into “relational spaces.” This initiative, in turn,
creates a tension among space-use-value categories that enables the political struggle retailers require to
realize their aims (Harvey, 2006:279). In this light, Franck and Stevens (2007:4) theory of “loose space”
also captures how marketers trouble so-called appropriate space allocation. Here loose space facilitates

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B. L. Milgram

“unintended uses of urban public space that can loosen up the dominant meanings of specific sites,”
facilitating “new perceptions and behaviors.”
The concept of everyday politics and resistance additionally assists situating how marginalized
individuals assert their rights to livelihood regarding the public sphere. Kerkvliet (2009:232) defines
everyday politics as “people embracing, complying with, adjusting, and contesting norms and rules
regarding authority over, production of, or allocation of resources and doing so in quiet, mundane, and
subtle expressions and acts that are rarely organized or direct.” Everyday politics, activated through
channels that include “support, compliance, modifications and evasions, and resistance,” are often
carried out by individuals who feel they have little choice but to choose such actions to protect their
livelihoods (Kerkvliet, 2009:233). Block 3 marketers activate such everyday forms of resistance, albeit
sometimes in rather direct ways, by renting more than one store location or by changing the type of
goods they sell, both of which were prohibited in the original market guidelines.

Legal–illegal practice
The disjuncture between state laws and the logistics of entrepreneurs’ self-employed and often
other-than-legal market trade highlights the “fuzzy or contested boundaries” between the domains of
“legality” and “illegality” (Smart & Zerilli, 2014:222). Because different urban players—consumers,
businesspeople, government officials, and institutions—tend to apply their own “local interpreta-
tions” of “legality” and activate different degrees of law enforcement and adherence, Smart and Zerilli
(2014:222–223) suggest that the term “extralegality” can more applicably help us understand “activi-
ties beyond the strictly legal”—initiatives operationalized not only by rulers but also by the ruled, who
are more commonly the focus of illegalities. “Extralegality,” they argue, comprises three domains, “the
illegal; the informal; and the not-yet-(il)legal, the latter involving issues to be decided by a legal system”
(p. 222), which continue to shape urban landscapes and organization in both visible and under-the-radar
ways. On one hand, state representatives often allow activities to continue when they know such actions
are illegal if officials can derive some benefit—an “illegal” situation Smart (1999:104) has also termed
“managed persistence” (see also Smart & Zerilli, 2014:225–226). During Block 3 reconstruction, for
example, although municipal laws ban street vending, the BCMA, the municipal body responsible for
public market operations, permitted displaced retailers to occupy public streets and charged them rent
to do so, thereby increasing income for the city treasury. Baguio City marketers, in turn, believe that
their initiatives may be considered illegal because they defy formal political policy, but they also feel
that their actions are acceptable, or “licit,” as they are not driven by an “organizational logic to break
national laws” (Abraham & van Schendel, 2005:4). Marketers explain that they have the right to earn a
viable living through their personal labor, resources, and ingenuity—a situation Smart (1999:104) has
identified as “ambiguous persistence” of illegality. As Carolyn Nordstrom (2007:98) says about one of
her research respondents, “Tiago doesn’t think in terms of being legal or illegal; he thinks in terms of
development. What works best, given the circumstances at hand?”
To capture the complexity of people’s livelihoods, which may be simultaneously legal–illegal and
formal–informal, means focusing on the particular social and political “construction and contestation of
the ‘limits’ or boundaries of different forms of il/legality” and how distinctions among the “legal, illegal,
and not-yet-legal” remain “subject to ongoing struggle,” depending on specific circumstances (Smart &
Zerilli, 2014:225–226; see also Abraham & van Schendel, 2005:4–5). Extralegal forms arise, as needed,
along a local-to-global continuum articulating with alternative and coexisting frameworks, depending

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on different urban players’ economic–political power. Such circumstances reflect the paradoxical
situation in Baguio City, where the laws governing the legality or illegality of public market trade are
variously enforced, ignored, or negotiated.

Baguio City and its public market

In the early 20th century, the American colonial government in the Philippines established Baguio
City as its mountain summer resort to escape the hotter lowland temperatures. Baguio City, a center
of 300 thousand, is the government, education, and administration hub for northern Luzon’s five
mountain provinces, and its extensive public market, offering wholesale and retail sales of fresh produce,
manufactured goods, and regional crafts, supports businesses throughout the region. The city is home
to more than 15 colleges and universities that, along with its government services, retail stores, and new
shopping malls, provide the customer base those starting new businesses seek.
Most businesspeople, however, must negotiate individualized strategies to realize the potential of this
urban market because of the government’s “logic of patronage” and systemic corruption (Hutchcroft &
Rocamora, 2012:98). Indeed, since the 1986 restoration of democratic government in the Philippines,
successive national leaders have failed to institute comprehensive economic and political reforms that
effectively act “on behalf of the public interest”; instead, state policies continue to support projects
that tend to benefit favored corporate interests and to promote antipoverty programs that rarely come
to fruition (Hutchcroft & Rocamora, 2012:98–99; see also Balisacan, 1995). Although the Philippine
government’s structural adjustment polices have succeeded in opening up to greater competition and
efficiency economic sectors formerly accessed primarily by the politically privileged, Philippine leaders,
to date, have not constructed the basic political and economic foundations required for the state to fulfill
even a minimalist role in economic transformation (Faustino, 2014).
Within such an economic and political climate, it is not surprising that the Baguio City Public
Market remains one of the first places new immigrants and unemployed residents search for work
when formal-sector jobs are not available (see Milgram, 2013). The extensive Baguio City Public Market,
located in the heart of the city’s Central Business District, was formally established in 1913, shortly after
the 1909 founding of Baguio City.
From the 1960s, steady urban growth led to the replacement of makeshift market stalls with cement
block and stone buildings. Market building sections Blocks 1 and 2 are organized into product-specific
zones for fruit, vegetables, rice, housewares, cut flowers, souvenirs, and tobacco (Figure 2). In the early
1970s, the Maharlika Livelihood Center and the Marbay buildings were constructed to house regional
crafts and cooked food services. Shortly afterward, in an effort not only to meet rising consumer
demands but also to accommodate the growing number of ambulant street vendors selling in the
market’s upper Hilltop section, the city erected two smaller mixed-use buildings, Blocks 3 and 4, and
offered permanent business leases to the area’s itinerant vendors who could afford them.
Block 3’s formative history emerges as one of ad hoc organic growth. The first simple structures of
galvanized iron and concrete block grew as marketers captured adjacent vacant roadside spaces, enabling
their relatives to establish businesses for which they subsequently built more permanent structures.
Before its demolition in 2010, Block 3 offered services and lower-cost goods to both consumers and
resident vendors. These included small restaurants, stores selling alcohol, basic packaged groceries, fresh
produce, tobacco and betel chewing products, and preparation facilities for marketers cooking snack or
street foods that they sold on-site and consigned to ambulant vendors selling throughout the market.

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B. L. Milgram

Figure 2 Map of the Baguio City Public Market buildings. Diagram by the author.

Retailers uniquely organized Block 3 stores, however, to offer a mixed but complementary grouping
of services among neighboring stores, distinctive from the product-specific zones in Blocks 1 and 2.
Retailers worked together to pair different but corresponding products within a circumscribed area,
enabling consumers to purchase most of the things they might need for one family meal in one general
location. Block 3’s rabbit-warren arrangement of businesses enticed shoppers to sleuth out its bargain
goods and services, although the neglected building remained in ill repair.
In 1992, Baguio City’s Committee on Marketing, Trade, and Commerce prepared an integrated
market redevelopment plan stipulating that any future construction had to adhere to an overall scheme
(Eraguro, 1992:12, 21). In 1995, the city council approved Ordinance 038, which provided guidelines
for a “design, build, and lease” program of development (City Council of Baguio City, 1995), and
Manila-based shopping mall builder UNIWIDE won the contract to redevelop the market. Given the
substantial employment the public market provides, this municipal and controversial announcement
was widely covered in local newspapers (Baguio Midland Courier, 1995a:13, 1995b:8). Members of
the Baguio City Public Market Vendors Association, fearing they would lose the favorable rights
ingrained in their long-held city leases, advocated instead for a “design, build, and own” plan (Baguio
Midland Courier, 1995a:13). In the latter arrangement, marketers would have more power over the
location of their stores, rent and leasing terms, and market organization. As noted earlier, since 1995,
market association members have launched a series of lawsuits and appeals that, to date, have blocked
UNIWIDE’s and the city’s development plans (Agoot, 2009; Baguio Midland Courier, 2008a, 2008b). To

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circumvent these obstacles, municipal officials obtained permission from UNIWIDE to incrementally
redevelop the market, starting with Blocks 3 and 4.

Block 3 building redevelopment: Implications for space use and livelihood

The demolition order for Block 3 was approved in April 2010, just before the May 2010 election. Block 3
marketers explained that they suspected city councilors were planning some initiative for their building
because in February and March 2010, the Office of the City Treasurer did not allow them to renew their
yearly rental permits, costing 250 pesos per month (US$5.55). From February and March until the end
of August 2010, when Block 3 was demolished, retailers continued to conduct business, while municipal
officials held their permits in abeyance. As one Block 3 marketer explains, “Business is business in the
market. A business permit is just that—a piece of paper—but not having a permit does not mean we
cannot continue to operate our enterprises.” In the Philippines, where under-the-table payments to
market officials are common transactions (Faustino, 2014), such statements evidence the elastic gradient
between legal and illegal practice.
Although some vendors had been periodically consulted on the new building plan, they were
surprised when, on Friday, August 20, 2010, at 5 p.m., they were told to vacate the building because
it would be demolished early that Sunday morning. This timing meant that city hall offices would be
closed, preventing marketers from seeking legal action to block this initiative. The formal notice advised
retailers to dismantle their own stalls to retain their personally owned building fixtures. With such short
notice, however, many marketers were unable to find sufficient storage space for their stock, let alone
for their fixtures, while others who were out of Baguio City that weekend risked losing most of their
products. Early Sunday morning, city workers erected barricades around Block 3 and bulldozed the
entire building and any goods remaining inside.
Following demolition, the city offered Block 3 marketers the option to relocate their businesses
temporarily to the unused Abattoir building located outside the Central Business District. Marketers,
predictably, refused to move to an area with little business potential. Instead, they immediately occupied
spaces on Zandueta Street, a busy public thoroughfare bordering the former Block 3 building (Figure 3).
Retailers explained that the city’s top–down action left them little choice but to exercise such insurgent
resistance by relocating their enterprises to this lively street location. That only 25% of the legally regis-
tered Block 3 businesses were able to establish alternative selling spots along Zandueta Street highlights
the challenge to marketers’ livelihoods. Those traders engaged in cooking street foods, such as fried
bananas and sweet steamed rice cakes, composed the largest group of disenfranchised sellers, because
the facilities they require for food preparation and wholesaling could not be accommodated by street
sites. Other displaced sellers set up businesses in local transportation roadside waiting shelters that pro-
vided protection for their goods. They rented storage spaces in nearby buildings, carried their stock
between the two locations, and consigned goods to ambulant vendors who sell throughout the mar-
ket. Still other marketers conducted business via cell phones. Texting their preferred customers, they
accepted orders in advance and arranged meeting places in the market. Many former Block 3 traders,
moreover, found themselves relegated to itinerant street vending, playing “cat and mouse” with police
and risking confiscation of their goods (see Milgram, 2011). The Block 3 building demolition, then,
resulted in instances of inclusion and exclusion among marketers. Those holding more power, as discrete
as it may be due to better capitalization or personal networks, were able to more effectively exercise alter-
native, albeit “illegal,” trade options (Abu-Lughod, 1990:43), such as securing interim street-selling sites.

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Figure 3 Marketers displaced from the demolished Block 3 building sell their goods along Zandueta Street. The
new Block 3 building, lacking exterior walls, is in the background. Baguio City, Philippines. Photograph by the
author.

Once the Block 3 vendors who had obtained Zandueta Street sites physically moved into these
extralegal spaces, vendor association leaders actively lobbied city hall councilors through letters,
petitions, and personal visits for legal permission to maintain these locations. By the end of September
2010, Block 3 marketers’ requests were granted, and they began paying their daily 20 peso (US$0.45)
rental fee. By successfully “space hijacking” Zandueta Street sites and then gaining municipal permission
to do so, marketers legitimized their street occupation by “repurposing” or “appropriating” these public
spaces (Hou 2010:1, 13). In effect, they repositioned this public realm into what Michael Rios (2010:100)
terms “assertive space”—a space that is “politicized to challenge existing codes and symbols” and assert
“minority group claims.”

Design of the new Block 3 building

Periodically, during the six months before the Block 3 building was demolished in August 2010,
members of the BCMA held meetings with market association leaders to obtain feedback on the design
of the new building. But retailers like Christine Talango, a longtime vendor, stated that her input, like that
of other marketers, went largely unheeded. Christine explained, “I told committee members that I sell
a variety of different types of dried fish and eggs (e.g., chicken, quail, salted, preserved, and duck). The

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Figure 4 A Block 3 marketer has expanded her egg and dried fish business over four “benches,” or allotted
spaces. Baguio City Public Market, Baguio City, Philippines. Photograph by the author.

small concrete platform provided for our produce and the lack of any storage space cannot accommodate
my variety of goods (Figure 4; see also Figure 5). This means I must rent off-site storage, hire porters to
transport my goods, and pay taxi fare if the storage area is far from the market—extra expenses and
extra work.”
In the old Block 3 building, the size of the stores varied correspondingly to the needs of businesses.
But in the new building, rather than circumscribed store premises, each marketer, as Christine notes,
conducts business from similarly sized concrete platforms that measure only 1.2 m × 60 cm, smaller
than the originally planned size of 1.6 m × 1.2 m. “More business sites mean more rental income for
the city,” hardware marketer Robert Batton explained. He continued, “I call these new display areas,
benches. These structures are not even spaces. We were once store owners with the status that having
one’s own walled premises imparts; now we are bench owners.” The BCMA placed further restrictions
on businesses by implementing the “one-family, one-space rule.” Christine explains, “We have asked
committee members for permission to rent any unclaimed benches or sublease unwanted spaces, but
our requests to date have been denied.” While association leaders continue to lobby for such formal
permission, some stall owners with enough capital, such as Christine, have just subleased several
adjoining benches as these became available, paying under-the-table rates higher than the standard
1,000 peso (US$22.25) monthly fee (Figure 4). Christine explains, “I need to display the full range of my

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B. L. Milgram

Figure 5 Retail store extension in the new Block 3 building. Baguio City Public Market, Baguio City, Philippines.
Photograph by the author.

products if my business is to succeed and thus I feel justified in renting extra space when the opportunity
arises, even if the BCMA tells me it is ‘illegal’ to do so.” That Christine has the capital to access such
extralegal options highlights the power differentials among marketers, although all retailers face similar
top–down business challenges (Figure 5).
Lisa Tayad, a marketer who sells prepackaged processed fish products, identifies other building
shortcomings, such as the absence of protective exterior walls resulting in insufficient shelter for vendors
during the long rainy season from May through December (see Figures 1 and 3). For protection, vendors
have erected their own assorted, and often secondhand, tarpaulins, prompting marketer Carol Iban to
lament, “Our market already looks like a resettlement area. The layout reminds me of town flea markets
where itinerant vendors set up temporary daily displays. We are Block 3 storeowners and leaseholders,
not occasional flea market vendors.”

Securing stalls in the new building

Indeed, from the outset, Block 3 marketers faced challenges in relocating their businesses to the
new building. In February 2011, the BCMA informed Block 3 vendors that they would have to
apply for their retail sites through a “draw-lot” or lottery process and, in so doing, contradicted the
earlier understanding that vendors holding leases in the former Block 3 building would be entitled to

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spaces in the new building. This policy raised immediate concerns given the new building’s 134-space
shortfall—463 current spots versus 597 former spots. All vendors had to complete new applications with
accompanying documentation: barangay (neighborhood) clearance to confirm city residency, Baguio
City voter registration card, business permit, and declaration of type of business operation. These new
application requirements disqualified some former Block 3 sellers, such as those who had moved to
less expensive housing just outside the city limits. Similarly, some marketers could not afford to pay the
lump sum amount of 1,200 pesos (US$26.60) required to renew their business permits as well as pay
the back rent (240 pesos per month, or US$5.33) owed from the period when the original permits were
held in abeyance. Given the disruption to their sales, many marketers had failed to save funds for this
payment and thus had to arrange personal loans, often at high interest rates, or forfeit their right to file
an application. Some sellers questioned whether these new guidelines had been introduced to eliminate
claims to retail sites given the shortfall in the number of available spaces.
In June 2011, I attended a city hall meeting at which BCMA members avidly discussed the Block
3 store assignment irregularities. The mayor confirmed that insufficient information sessions had been
available to marketers regarding the lottery application process. “The BCMA-drafted directives were
obviously not well outlined,” the mayor stated, “given the number of appeals accumulating on my
desk. But now that the stall-allotment process is almost complete, we are not going back.” The mayor
confirmed, “Before we start the next development phase for Block 4, the legal office will review and
revise the space assignment and rental permit guidelines to avoid repeating these problems.” The mayor’s
words, however, and his choice not to correct the situation held little comfort for former Block 3 vendors
who were denied commercial sites (Agreda, 2011:1). Such steamroller action by the city government
jeopardizes urbanites’ rights to the range of citizen benefits for which they are eligible. This includes not
only their right to claim livelihood spaces but also their right not to be subjected to undue displacement
and spatial segregation (Douglass & Daniere, 2009; Low & Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2005:18–22).
Once marketers were awarded a Block 3 bench space, moreover, a host of other business problems
arose. Retailers, for example, did not know where in the new building their businesses would be located
as the BCMA did not complete the product-specific zoning of the new building until July 2011, although
vendors had started applying for their spaces in February. The resultant Block 3 plan predictably
organizes product-specific sections, as occurs in Blocks 1 and 2, thereby erasing the business edge Block
3 retailers had developed by selling different but complementary products in side-by-side stalls. Losing
this marketing strategy means that Block 3 vendors increasingly rely on the loyalty of their customers
and on devising innovative business practices.
The Block 3 sellers who successfully secured store sites also remain concerned that they will lose
business to the ambulant vendors who continue to sell along neighboring Zandueta Street—both those
who had been street vendors earlier and the recently displaced Block 3 retailers who have had to
turn to street selling. Street vendors can sell the same goods as Block 3 marketers, but at cheaper
prices, because the former do not pay the higher monthly business rent of 1,000 pesos (US$22.25)
now charged to Block 3 enterprises (BCMA, 2012a). Competition between street and market vendors
existed earlier, but because the previous monthly market rent was only 250 pesos (US$5.25), as
one Block 3 vendor explained, “There was enough business for both groups because our business
expenses were manageable given the volume of our sales. We believe the police will not be able to
rid the streets permanently of ambulant vendors as they have repeatedly failed to do so in the past”
(Milgram, 2011).

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B. L. Milgram

The BCMA, as noted, also excluded businesses such as small restaurants and enterprises that cook
snack foods, maintaining that the new Block 3 retail sites cannot accommodate the space required for
such food preparation. In so doing, the BCMA essentially eliminated the livelihoods of many longtime
sellers who provided meals to both shoppers and marketers. Similarly, marketers who extract and sell
coconut milk and pulp were also, at first, banned from the Block 3 building, as the market superintendent
argued that the new building’s limited drainage capacity could not accommodate the waste resulting
from coconut processing and food preparation (Opiña, 2011a:1). Coconut marketers thus initially
processed their products off-site, an initiative with its own challenges, until they could regain the right
to continue their original enterprises, as I discuss in the following section.

Advocating for livelihood

Immediately after moving into the new building in late 2011, Block 3 marketers responded to these
livelihood challenges by increasing the bench-size display space for their goods. Many retailers built
vertical metal-frame walls behind their benches, and those occupying aisle locations also erected end
walls. Most marketers attached horizontal plywood extensions to the tops of their platforms and,
by enclosing their under-the-bench space with lockable doors, they could secure their goods. These
structures give businesses a stronger visual presence and enable retailers to display more of their stock
in an open storage arrangement (Figures 5 and 6). Marketers also engaged more edgy channels of
activism, such as subleasing additional retail spaces, as we saw with Christine’s egg and dried fish
business (Figure 4), using extra leased spaces only for storage and changing the types of products they
sell, all of which contravene the market guidelines (City of Baguio, 2000–2001). Intent on maximizing
their retail sites, marketers completed these expansion initiatives before obtaining official permission to
do so.
Retailers’ subsequent lobbying of market officials to maintain their expanded but extralegal premises
successfully culminated in mid-2012 in a rental agreement with the Office of the City Treasurer via the
BCMA. In this agreement, marketers pay an additional daily charge of 20 pesos (US$0.45) for each type
of store extension they construct, and off the record, market officials have tended to overlook other
infractions, such as subleasing. Although Block 3 retailers have successfully operationalized their retail
expansion options, they cannot assume these opportunities will continue in the future. In his research
with Mexican street vendors, Cross (1998:35) identifies a similar situation he terms “semiformality.”
Applying Cross’s argument to the Baguio City Public Market case highlights that although the BCMA
has agreed to implement regulations such as granting permission to Block 3 retailers to expand their
stores, it has not, in fact, changed any formal laws (Cross, 1998:35). Within such a “semiformal” sphere,
government toleration and regulation are “concessions rather than rights, and semiformal regulation
can often change when the state feels that the system no longer meets its interests or new strategies for
control of informal activities emerge” (Smart & Zerilli, 2014:229). The potential vulnerability of Block 3
retailers’ hard-won victory demonstrates the underlying power differential between marketers and the
state, despite the opportunities marketers have realized.
Indeed, my ongoing conversations with different Block 3 marketers in the new building evidence
the innovative initiatives they have activated to mitigate business challenges within constraints of such
“semiformal” regulation. Robert Batton, for example, the hardware marketer noted earlier, in his late
forties, with four adult children, grew up assisting his mother in the market business she had established
in the 1950s. Robert’s mother first worked as an ambulant vendor along upper Hilltop Road and, in

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 Unsettling Urban Marketplace Redevelopment

Figure 6 Block 3 hardware and tool marketers extend their product displays in the Baguio City Public Market,
Baguio City, Philippines. Photograph by the author.

the late 1980s, obtained a Block 3 stall. In 1990, when the company Robert had worked for as a radio
technician went bankrupt, he took over his mother’s business. Using some of his severance settlement,
Robert changed the store’s stock from fresh produce to small farming equipment and household
hardware (e.g., kitchen utensils, shovels, axes, and scrap iron). Robert’s long family history in the public
market fuels his advocacy to ensure the viability of his enterprise (Figure 6).
Robert obtains his stock from Divisoria, Metro Manila’s largest wholesale market, and he also
sources goods from independent blacksmiths who regularly supply hardware retailers. Robert’s steady
cash flow—a profitable net income of 600 pesos a day (US$13.35)—enables him to employ a young boy
as an assistant. In a customary arrangement, the sales assistant lives with Robert’s family, receiving room
and board in addition to his monthly pay of 2,500 pesos (US$55.55), the standard salary for live-in sales
help. During the year that Robert maintained his Zandueta Street roadside location, the assistant slept
inside the store to guard the stock. Robert explained that as inconvenient as his roadside stall was, he
preferred those generous two-by-three-meter premises to the “minimally useful Block 3 bench space”
he now occupies.
Robert continues, “In the new building, my display space is so limited I have literally built my own
store by constructing metal-frame walls around my bench. Although I balance the shovels against the
front of the bench, there is still insufficient space to display all of my products” (see Figure 6). In addition,

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B. L. Milgram

Figure 7 The secondhand clothing marketers in Block 3 extend their product displays into the aisles in the Baguio
City Public Market, Baguio City, Philippines. Photograph by the author.

Robert’s business, like those of his four neighboring hardware retailers, is currently hidden behind the
mushrooming secondhand clothing section (Figure 7). Thus, in early 2013, in an effort to revive his
sales, Robert subleased an additional retail space with street exposure, agreeing to pay the inflated, and
technically “illegal” but widely applied, 5,000 peso (US$111.10) monthly rent to do so. Although his
operating costs have increased, Robert is confident that this second, more accessible store location will
enable him to regain some of the customers he may have lost after moving into his smaller premises.
As Robert explains, “My prices are still low and my customers welcome the practical advice I offer on
construction.”
As noted, marketers who operated small restaurants, cooked and sold snack foods, and processed
coconut products initially lost their Block 3 leases because the new building’s water and drainage systems
could not accommodate the waste these activities generate (Opiña, 2011a:1, 2011b:2). Marketers who
extract fresh coconut pulp and milk—basic cooking ingredients—had assumed that Block 3 spaces
would accommodate their businesses, and, indeed, many had secured retail spaces by indicating they
would be selling fresh produce. These retailers thus had to circumvent the initial ban on processing their
goods on-site.
Gloria Martinez, for example, after spending 2 years in Singapore as a domestic helper, returned to
Baguio City in 2006 to invest her savings in a Block 3 coconut-processing business that was for sale.

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Gloria explained that she had developed personal business agreements with lowland coconut suppliers,
and it was financially unfeasible for her to arbitrarily choose another product to sell and expect to
be competitive. While awaiting the Block 3 reconstruction, Gloria’s roadside stall was consistently
busy with regular customers (see Figure 3). Gloria employed two assistants, for whom she supplied
food, accommodation, and a 3,000 peso (US$66.60) monthly salary. In her street site business, Gloria
purchased one small truckload (approximately 1,500 pieces) of coconuts each week from a lowland
wholesaler and rented storage space for her stock in the neighboring Block 4 building. She paid 20
pesos (US$0.45) per coconut regardless of size, selling them each for 25 (small) to 30 (large) pesos
(US$0.55–0.65), and she extracted the pulp and milk as a complementary service. If customers took
only the coconut pulp, she sold the coconut milk separately, by the glass, making an additional five pesos
per coconut. This business earned Gloria a profit of about 600 pesos (US$13.35) per day and potentially
800 pesos (US$17.75) on busy weekends.
Once Gloria relocated to the reconstructed Block 3 building, she had to extract the coconut pulp
and milk at home, pack these products into plastic bags, and transport them to the market. Although
this strategy enabled Gloria to continue her business, it was far from ideal. She explained, “Customers
are accustomed to choosing their own coconuts. I hope my clients will remain loyal to me if they lose
control over this personal part of the purchasing experience.”
Throughout 2012, Gloria worked with the five other Block 3 coconut processors lobbying BCMA
committee members for a policy change. Indeed, before she and fellow marketers secured verbal
permission in August 2012 to process their coconut products on-site (Office of the City Treasurer,
2012), they had already expanded to full-service operations along an unused end wall of the Block
3 building. Located near the wet (meat and fish) section, this location accommodated the required
drainage facilities, enabling her business to successfully continue as it had done in the former Block
3 building and subsequently from her roadside location (Figure 8). Indeed, Gloria even arranged to
sublease unused neighboring spaces for storing her extra stock.
Other Block 3 retailers operating struggling businesses continued to lobby the BCMA to rezone the
product-specific sections, enabling them to change the type of goods they sell (BCMA, 2012a). Foremost
among the marketers requesting this product change were those selling upland Baguio vegetables (e.g.,
broccoli, cabbage, carrots, and beans), as these sellers face keen competition from the many vegetable
retailers and wholesalers already working in other market sections.
Indeed, since the opening of Block 3 in 2011, the number of marketers who have changed their stock
to secondhand clothing, for example, has continued to increase at the expense of other product offerings
(Figure 7). Many Block 3 retailers looking to shift their business focus have capitalized on Baguio City’s
long-standing reputation as the northern Philippine hub for the secondhand clothing trade—a notoriety
that ensures attention to their goods, albeit amid competition (see Milgram, 2008). In this light, the
market superintendent’s August 2012 survey of past and current Block 3 enterprises indicates that
almost 50% of the 463 Block 3 marketers have changed the type of products they sell without obtaining
formal permission to do so (Office of the City Treasurer, 2012). In response to Block 3 marketers’
requests, the BCMA passed Resolution 009-2012 on October 4, 2012 (BCMA, 2012b). This bylaw
“legalizes” marketers’ right to change the types of products they sell, grants the reinstatement request
of coconut processors, and enables stores to serve food as long as most of the food is prepared off-site.
The implementation of Resolution 009-2012 evidences how retailers’ “extralegal” actions materialize
“multiple legalities both within and beyond the legal/illegal divide as defined by state and international

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B. L. Milgram

Figure 8 A coconut-processing business within the new Block 3 building of the Baguio City Public Market, Baguio
City, Philippines. Photograph by the author.

law,” as well as a “plurality of sources of authority” (Smart & Zerilli, 2014:226). Here, Block 3 marketers
garnered the power to change the rules of the game—a more advantageous achievement than their
earlier gain securing municipal permission to expand their retail premises, but within “semiformal”
terms that leave them potentially vulnerable to losing this concession in the future.
Bargaining in the “shadows” of the law (Nordstrom, 2007:xviii), Block 3 marketers thus estab-
lish different forms of “assertive space” (Rios, 2010:99). In so doing, they set a precedent for
other-than-formal-sector urbanites who are similarly seeking room for legal maneuvering that can facil-
itate their right to livelihood.

Conclusion: Recentering public market livelihoods

Excluded from meaningful consultation about Block 3’s redevelopment, marketers devised initiatives to
reclaim some of the business they had lost with the move into the new building. They obtained municipal
legitimatization to reinstate previously banned enterprises and to permit retailers to change the goods
they sell; they negotiated the right to expand the physical premises of their spaces and succeeded in
having the market manager overlook minor infractions, such as subleasing multiple bench sites and
using some spaces for storage rather than for retail sales. Block 3 retailers’ everyday and insurgent
actions, then, create what Hou (2010:2) terms “self-made urban spaces, reclaimed and appropriated

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 Unsettling Urban Marketplace Redevelopment

sites” that provide “new expressions of collective realms in the contemporary city” and “challenge the
conventional, codified notion of public and the making of space.” Indeed, the “everyday urbanism” that
marketers have activated creates a “zone of social transition and possibility” (Crawford, 2008:9) that can
lead to unexpected economic opportunities. Walter Little (this volume) identifies a similar situation in
Antigua when he argues that the city government’s urban regulations targeting street vendor control, in
some instances, actually enabled vendors to realize new business options.
The channels through which Block 3 marketers have sustained their livelihoods, moreover, highlight
that retailers are selective about what they appropriate from the government’s ideology and what they
discard, operationalizing what Farha Ghannam (2002:21) terms a “politics of selection.” The relationship
between the Baguio City municipal government and Block 3 marketers, then, is not one based solely on
antagonism and resistance to formally legislated measures but rather one that also includes negotiation
and compliance, enabling marketers to drive some of the strategic decisions of the state, as evidenced
by the Baguio City government passing Resolution 009-2012. Indeed, Block 3 marketers’ advocacy
has created a more informed municipal approach to the Block 4 renovation—lessons in market
redevelopment that Block 4 marketers hope the city applies in on-the-ground practice (Agreda, 2011:1).
The Baguio City government’s reconstruction project for the public market has emerged as a
politically charged arena in which the municipal agenda for controlled, appropriate development has
been contested and struggled over, even though people routinely encountered situations that indebt,
entrap, and alienate (Gupta, 1995:379). That effective change, in fact, transpired through insurgent and
everyday activism as well as through negotiation underlines the porous nature of imposed top–down
rule and the complexity of civic engagement when competing ideologies clash over access to urban
public space, legal–illegal practice, and appropriate urban provisioning.

Acknowledgments
Financial support for this research has been provided by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (2008–11, 2012–16) and from OCAD University. In the Philippines, I am affiliated with the Cordillera Studies Center
(CSC), University of the Philippines Baguio, Baguio City. I thank my CSC colleagues for their support, and I thank my research
assistant, Corinna Villeneuva, who assists me in the Philippines and informs me of events during the year. I also thank the volume
editors and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article. To the many marketers who
answered my numerous questions, I owe a debt of gratitude.

Notes
1 All personal names of people are pseudonyms.
2 The exchange rate I use is $1.00 = 45 Philippine pesos.

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