Abstract
Marco Garrido’s manuscript on class and spatial politics in Manila, The Patchwork City, is an important contribution to our discussions on the present and future of urban spaces in large cities of the global South. It is a well-written, carefully researched, and analytically sharp intervention into the nature of contemporary urban exclusion. A broadly ethnographic book that also draws on interviews, archival research, and quantitative data, it takes seriously the idea that class is relational. Making sense of a city that is a patchwork of slums and middle-class enclaves and defining the relationships between them is the topic to which most of the book is dedicated.
The book’s main argument, most broadly, is that urban restructuring and attendant patterns of exclusion in Manila have played out in a form distinct from the imagined prototypical global North pattern of polarization and disappearing middle: rather, what we see is a “thickening” of middle sectors along with intensifying segregation between interspersed middle and poor sectors. Making sense of this social and spatial class division and how it is experienced across the boundary sheds light on the nature of politics and democracy in the city. The experience of a resident of a middle-class enclave (a “villager”) is one of a sense of siege or threat from nearby slum dwellers; slum dwellers, on the other hand, experience discrimination and enclosure as boundaries are imposed. Middle-class enclaves increasingly develop “gates, walls, and other spatial boundaries” (p. 111) that feed a sense of stigma among the urban poor.
The book’s second half is dedicated to how these spatial and class divisions give rise to political subjectivities. On one hand they give rise to a particular brand of middle-class narrow-mindedness and authoritarianism, as the middle classes see the poor as dupes and complain of “too much democracy.” The poor, on the other hand, find appeal in populist politicians like Joseph Estrada as long as they feel recognized in sincere-seeming political discourse. These fundamentally incommensurate political subjectivities help explain Filipino political dynamics that oscillate between populist politicians (like Estrada) and those, like current strongman Duterte, who give voice to authoritarian sentiments as solutions to the problems of democracy.
The book invites two sets of questions that it does not quite address and, to be fair, are probably beyond the boundaries of the manuscript. First, there is a set of questions having to do with colonial legacies and their relationship to class cleavages. Garrido admits the book’s blind spot toward “social identities based on ethnicity or provincial origin, religion, and civic association” (p. 8) and wisely avoids imposing a U.S.-style “racial” valence on his evidence. But it is well documented that standards of beauty in the Philippines are deeply colonial ones, that mestizo elites tend to be fairer and more European in appearance than the poor, that there are ethnic social hierarchies, and that Tagalog abounds in epithets related to phenotype. Do these sentiments ever coalesce into a color line? Or, perhaps more accurately, how do these sentiments interact with the intimate and sharp kinds of class discrimination that the poor experience? Do they figure into the sense of threat that middle-class enclave residents describe? Some of the book’s most moving passages have to do with examples of discrimination and perceived slights by the poor, and it was hard not to wonder if they overlapped in some way with ethnic or phenotypical hierarchies.
The second unaddressed area is that the book has little to say about emancipatory movement mobilization that might challenge the logic of spatial segregation or organize coalitional politics across the dissensus of class boundaries. The criticism that is sometimes leveled at Partha Chatterjee’s analyses of politics in India (or their applications elsewhere) is that they underplay the possibility of that kind of political agency. There is some discussion about the limits of Left strategies in the face of poor people’s political subjectivities (for example, p. 235), but in the end Garrido admits having “trouble imagining” (p. 239) categorically equal interactions across the gulf of class divisions. Again, it might be that such spaces or politics do not currently exist; but for this reader at least, the question that remained was whether the edifice of class reproduction is so solid it shows no cracks or whether its seeming solidity is partially an artifact of the analytic framework.
These are less criticisms than simply the kinds of questions a good book can occasion. And this remarkable book has many virtues: it is a carefully researched case study that has a global set of referents; the ethnography is nuanced and evocative; it does not study the poor or middle classes in isolation; it explicitly returns class dynamics to bear on spatial divisions; it engages in theoretical dialogue with a broad set of interlocutors, from de Tocqueville to Chatterjee; and it very insightfully illuminates dynamics elsewhere, from São Paulo to Kolkata. I expect this book to become a reference for urban sociology moving forward, not only for its insights on Manila, or its model for global South cities, but as an exemplar of how to do good urban sociology.