Discordant order: Manila’s neo-patrimonial urbanism

Public chaos and private order

Streets are a fractal of the larger patterns of urban society. The kinds of order they embody replicate the kinds of order to be found at higher and lower levels of a social system. To take a simple example: a back street that runs parallel with Katipunan Road in Quezon City. Quezon City is one of a multitude of urban centres that make up the Los Angeles-like morphology of Metro Manila. ¹ The street in question has no unusual character. Like numerous thoroughfares adjacent to a major road artery, the older residential property in the street is gradually giving away to multi-storied apartments and medium-rise retail and commercial property. In any typical street it is the small things that stand out. In this Quezon City street, it is the quality of tiling at the entrance of one of these new medium-rise buildings. It catches the eye because it has a finish that is often lacking in Manila buildings. This is a city where the ready availability of very cheap labour means that employers and developers habitually use untutored hacks in place of skilled hands. To the passer-by, the building entrance looks immaculate. Yet, what is equally evident is the public frame of this polished craftwork. The building entrance abuts a commonplace Manila footpath – a crumbling wreck of a pathway. In the micro-world of the street, in one quick step, the passer-by moves from the smooth space of the regular tiled portico to a striated space filled with enough irregular-shaped rises and falls to make a contemporary mathematical topologist gleeful in perpetuity.

While the mathematician may find undulating topologies fascinating, the walker finds them annoying. The typical footpath in Manila, if it exists at all, is difficult and frustrating to negotiate. It is almost always an instance of obstructive distortion. The state of the footpaths is representative of the travails of public space in the Philippine city. To cross the threshold into a private building is often exhilarating for someone on foot, because it means escaping the dented topology of walking space into space organized around more classical, and more emotionally satisfying, geometries.

Classical geometries of space – be they Euclidean, Gothic, Cartesian, or post-Euclidean – are the invisible sub-structure of a visible order. Euclidean solid geometry, Neo-platonic Gothic geometry, Descartes’ coordinate geometry, and cubist-type n-dimensional geometry are key building blocks that define a city’s pattern rationality. This applies at every level – from the microcosm of the tile to the macrocosm of the city plan. The reason for the success of autopoietic city building based on geometric form is that human beings find such patterns deeply satisfying. Patterns are a bridge between emotion and reason. The qualities that patterns represent are encapsulated in the idea of beauty. These qualities – such as grace, elegance, and economy – are both descriptions of reason and objects of feelings. How a city, from path to street to block, and beyond, is designed is a work of collective affective rationality. Through the template of patterns, the collective force of a city over generations engages in an act of collective design. The successes and failures of the demiurgic project are dependent on many factors – most of them lying beyond conscious manipulation or legislation. The greatest test of demiurgic success is the quality of public space. Public space that ‘works’ is a pure expression of collective reason. Such space is accessible to, enjoyed by, amenable to, and representative of everyone in the society. It is deeply satisfying space.

Public space is a force that shapes the collective demiurge. The demiurge in turn gives shape to public space. This circularity often breaks down in practice. When that break occurs, the result is what we see in cities like Manila. There are good, attractive, interesting spaces in the city – but, for the most part, they are not public spaces. Good space in Manila is mostly private space, like the portico of the building described before. It is the space of private houses and apartments, university campuses, and gated communities. Some of these spaces are attractive – certainly many are pleasant. Yet they mostly appear as places of relief from the cracked topology of public space and the stresses of negotiating it. Gates and walls almost universally protect these private spaces. Where people can afford it, ubiquitous armed guards patrol the threshold between public and private. The Philippines is possibly the first society in the world to have universalized the gated community. The most visible emblems of this are the walled communities of the wealthy. But, unlike California where it is only the wealthy who want to retreat behind gates into sanitized invisibility, everyone except the utterly dispossessed in the Philippines erects gates and fences and walls around their property and around themselves. Even the most modest dwellings are gated with ceiling-high wrought-iron fences. Rich and poor alike have their own security guards and private armies.

Filipinos have even learnt to burrow into pocket space while on the move. Anyone who can afford it drives an automobile to avoid having to walk around the streets. The private car is probably more prized than even the private residence. Immaculately maintained and mostly new, Filipino cars on the road act like mobile bubbles of sanctuary from unpalatable public space. In the car, drivers and passengers escape the discordance of the streets behind the almost hermetic seal of the bubble. The search takes at least two forms by car and by phone. In both forms these are private solutions to public problems, and indeed driven by the absence of the public altogether.

Moreover, the search for the hermetic seal is driven by real practical considerations. The dispossessed of Philippine society cause constant anxieties for the possessed. Interestingly, this is not only the fear that the propertyless might steal property. Ownership is defined as much by use as by legal fiat. Any property that is not developed can be squatted upon and once a squatter has established him or herself, the nominal owner, should he or she wish to develop the land, is obliged to pay the squatters to move on. Anxieties are also created because the dispossessed – with nowhere else to go – occupy streets and parks for the purpose of shelter and business. Street hawkers colonize footpaths and roads to sell their wares; unused bits of public land are taken over by shanty dwellers. Through this process, what is nominally labelled as ‘public space’ is privatized by a kind of subaltern colonization with a concomitant array of complex rents to be paid by each of the stakeholders who are constantly redefining these liminal spaces. Examples abound but two can suffice here. The street vendor pays rent to the shopowner whose frontage they occupy (even though nominally the footpath is state property). The squatting vendor also pays ‘fines’ to the parking inspectors and the local policemen. Should the vendor successfully entrench their business they can sell it to others – usually new incoming families from the provinces. A second example is that of the parkers at busy intersections in peak hour traffic who receive commissions (from jeepney and FX taxis on the side streets wishing to enter the main avenues) to pay ‘fees’ to the traffic policemen to change the traffic directions. The cumulative effect of these informal, labyrinthine and highly imaginative private solutions and strategems is to surround public space with an aura that is uncanny, an aura that is present in its absence. What makes it uncanny is the inability of anyone to decide whether the space they are in is really public or private. The uncanny leaves people on a knife-edge, psychologically speaking. Living in a world permeated with uncanny meanings induces a sense of unaccountable fear and loathing – unaccountable because it has no clear source. It is fear and loathing induced by an irresolvable ambiguity that occurs when public and private meanings merge, or take on the characteristics of each other.

In Philippine life, the most private of space – the household – is filled with other people: friends, relations, and servants. Private never means privacy. Indigenous and medieval Spanish notions of the crowded house dominate. The always-filled private realm has a pseudo-public character. The family is the commons. Public life, in a mirror image of this, has a pseudo-private character. The most successful contemporary public spaces in the Philippines are the malls. Here, again, public and private merge. The malls are like cars – glass-and-metal bubbles. Like the car they are private spaces; but like the street they are also public, or at least a simulacra of the public. The malls have their gates and the ubiquitous guards that regulate entry into the insulated bubble space. All social classes flock to them. They have replaced many of the traditional locales for promenading, socializing, even for religious services. In a tropical climate, the air-conditioning of these bubble spaces has become almost a public good. We should not overstate the uniqueness of this. Markets have long been key public spaces. One of the important functions of the European medieval church was to act as a protector for markets set up nearby. Nonetheless, the contemporary mall is an oddly private public. It is a very popular congregational space. Yet it is privately policed. Moreover, it is a public space where the public theatre of government and opposition is absent.

Greek, Roman, medieval civic, Renaissance and European colonial markets were always interweaved with municipal, legal, religious, educational and scientific public spheres. The mall, in contrast, is the plaza privatized. In the mall-dominated city, what disappears is a visible centre where markets are collocated with assemblies. Movie-going and charismatic religious assembly are among the few congregational activities to be found in the malls. The flipside of this is that formal and informal assembly space in Manila is scarce. This helps explain the fact that, in the last decades of the 20th century, it was the streets – in particular, the great EDSA Avenue ² – that were the principal gathering place for opposition to government misrule. Streets function perfectly well as civic places on the occasion of massive outpourings of public feeling. In such cathartic moments, pedestrians momentarily reclaim the streets from the automobile. However, such ‘assemblies of the whole’, the dream of direct democracy, are normally rare events. What is interesting about the Philippines is that it experienced a succession of ‘assemblies of the whole’ at peak moments through the 1980s and 1990s – something quite exceptional in world-historical terms. Yet the country was not able to replicate this public wellspring in either the workings of its legislative assemblies and executive councils or in its artistic and scientific publics.

The fundamental reason for this is that public and private spheres in Manila have been reversed. So that while the private mall has become the public space par excellence, ordinary governance and politics, which is systemically corrupt, is for all intents and purposes a vast private bailiwick. So much so that, in the minds of the idealistic fraction of the professional middle class, non-government organizations have come to be the exemplars of public service. This fuzzy in-distinction between public and private permeates all Filipino institutions. The public arts are almost entirely in the hands of private collectors. Charismatic religion, with its emphasis on pietism, has made considerable in-roads into the terrain of traditional Catholicism. Pietism is private religion. It substitutes the affections of the heart for the public grace of beauty. The sentimentalization of the public sphere is captured perfectly in maxims such as the popular one that describes Manila as ‘the city of our affections’. The classroom is socially esteemed but its imperatives of grades, qualifications, and teaching also colonize the public sphere of science. ³ Japanese-style private tutoring constitutes a shadow industry that underscores and amplifies this. Journalists incessantly speak in the first person, and often in a pseudo-pietistic style. At the same time, the great congregational public theatres for arts performances and science conferences are under-valued and under-resourced. The ethos of a privatized society is reflected even in the virtual world. Private text messaging on mobile phones is pervasive in the Philippines. All social classes use it. Meanwhile the public web space of internet pages languishes for want of interest and upkeep. ⁴

In a more general sense, public work is privatized. This is nowhere clearer than on the bottom rungs of Philippine society, where hard labour for little reward is the norm. Labour is privatized work. It is subject to few public standards – conspicuously missing are enforceable trade, consumer, and professional standards. Labour is survival work. A labouring society produces little in the way of effective trade unions or skill-based association. It likewise produces little in the way of congregational work: the performative, theatrical, or public work of those who advance the arts and sciences. In such societies, labour is intuitively preferred to any schemes that might rationalize labour. ⁵ The gangs that cut sugar cane or rake leaves for a body and soul-destroying pittance might be eliminated with machines. But even those who criticize the pitiable condition of the labouring poor do not want to eliminate labour. They object to the cheapness of labour or the unemployment of labour, but not to the act of labour itself – even if on balance the making, distributing, marketing, and selling of machines creates many more and better jobs than labour rationalization destroys. At the end of the day, a labouring society simply prefers labour. To do otherwise would be to turn labourers into public workers and public actors whose votes and loyalties cannot be purchased and who are not quietistic or pietistic.

But, if this were to happen, who would be the gatekeepers who keep guard on the threshold between the fractured nature of the streets and the sentimental sanctum of the private world? Only a labouring society can afford the all-pervasive gatekeepers in their starched uniforms representing the social authority that pretends to parse private from public in a society where nobody is really sure anymore where the boundaries are. Gatekeeping in this society is one of the commonest forms of labour – and one that is valued because it is not back breaking. It is one step removed from the street and the field. It gives some dignity. But it is also a via media of great illusions.

The Spanish period: Inside and outside the gate

Where did the imaginary of the gated society come from? In the Philippines’ case there are a number of overlapping precedents for it. The Chinese cultural preference for the chaotic street and the hidden order of garden and home is one important precedent. ⁶ The Chinese have long been an influential minority in the Philippines. ⁷ The Spanish, who were the principal colonizers – inventors in deed and naming of ‘the Philippines’ ⁸ – also brought with them their own notions of hidden order and public discord. If the mix of street chaos and the hidden order of the garden was an orthodox ethos for the Chinese, in the Spanish case the mix of discordance and order was a heterodox influence, perhaps even a mildly heretical one. It echoed the very subtle heterodox Islamic influences on Spanish Catholicism. (We should not forget that the Spanish Inquisition was directed against the large numbers of Islamic and Jewish converts to Catholicism.) Islam was a major influence on Spanish urban culture. In Islamic conceptions of urban order, order is hidden in private pocket-like or slot-like spaces of internal courtyard gardens and in the inner sanctums of private dwellings. Sanctity in this sense is private, not public.

Officially the Spanish view of order was ‘Augustinian’. The public edifices of church-and-plaza were keystones of Spanish colonialism throughout their empire. ⁹ In the official Spanish view, church-and-plaza was a kind of designed order based on Augustine’s distinction between the chaos of the City of Man and the lucidity of the City of God represented by the Church. Spanish religious orders Christianized the Philippine archipelago. They also urbanized the archipelago. Christianity and urbanity were twins. This was a function of the explicitly material sub-stratum of Greek-Latin-Christian civilizing processes. ¹⁰ Symptomatic of this civilizing pattern, there were 17 church-and-plaza complexes alone in the Old Manila of the Spanish Era. In actual practice, though, the symbolic centre of Spanish rule in the Philippines was not a great plaza but the Intramuros – the historic walled city of Manila, where the public sphere was sealed off in a stone container.

Governor-General Miguel Lopez de Legaspi began work on this great castellated Spanish colonial urbs in 1571. ¹¹ The practical reason for fortification was the threat from local tribes, Chinese pirates, Muslim raiders, and Spain’s European rivals (the Dutch, British and Portuguese). But this fortification soon turned into a symbolic system as well. In the 1580s, the Jesuit priest Antonio Sedeña designed a 2.75-mile stone wall surrounded by inner and outer moats that encased Spanish military, educational, hospital, and commercial institutions. The project was finished in the early 1590s, under Governor-General Perez Dasmariñas, whose four-year rule was distinguished by huge compulsory labour projects using Filipino and Chinese labour. The city ‘within walls’ (the literal meaning of the Latin ‘intra muros’) was accessible via eight gates. Outside this gated space was the realm of the indios, the native Filipinos. Inside were constructed many beautiful colonial buildings, based on Spanish Renaissance and Baroque and Mexican models. Interestingly, though, the imaginary of the walled town was not specific to the Spanish. The site of Manila had been earlier a fortified town of the native Tagalogs.

The Spanish colonized Manila as a doorway to East Asia. It was safe-haven entrepôt for their galleon trade between Mexico and China. This global connection was jealously regulated. Until 1834, trade was reserved to the Spanish. ¹² Other Europeans and the Muslims were kept out. Hardly any indigenous Filipinos learnt Spanish, the international language of the portal city. ¹³ Instead, religious education promoted local languages and the cultivation of local elites. In many ways the global port of Manila was a closed world. Manila became a city where the portal-threshold was also symbolically and practically a gated community. This was a place where the universal (Catholic) city and its public significations of church-and-plaza were suborned to the imaginary of a castellated and garrisoned space. The garrison mentality subtlety over-determined the universal city.

Manila, of course, was not the Philippines. Nonetheless, the intra muros model profoundly influenced the development of the archipelago as a whole – certainly of the other key colonial portal cities such as Vigan, Cebu City, and Zamboanga. On a very practical level, movement in and between islands was difficult. Notably absent in the Spanish era was a well-developed infrastructure of public roads and harbours – or, later, railways. This is significant because it is this kind of public infrastructure that encourages traffic on a large scale between inside and outside. All great public realms, however they are articulated – be they church-and-plaza, temple-and-agora, museum-and-mall – require portal-and-network infrastructures to under-gird their symbolic structures. ¹⁴ These portal-and-network infrastructures deliver the traffic – and the turnover – of persons, goods and ideas that allow public space to be continuously filled and emptied. Because of its necessary defensive qualities, garrison or castellated space tends to militate against portal-and-network infrastructures, most especially those that are very porous and that permit a high level of crossing of domain boundaries.

A garrison, by virtue of its function, is a closed system. A closed system is built on the careful regulation of what comes in and what goes out. Such a system is never entirely shut off from its environment, but at the same time neither does it have a porous relationship with that environment. Closed systems rest on a strong distinction between the good inside and the bad outside. Open systems, in contrast, relativize the distinction between inside and outside. Spanish-era Philippine society developed around a series of institutions that strongly distinguished between an over-valued inside and an under-valued outside, e.g. between government (inside) and populace (outside). Where the church-and-plaza model relativized the distinctions between domains – e.g. between the domains of the mundane and the transcendent, the faithful and the faithless – the intra muros model presupposed that what was crucial was whether a person was ‘on the inside’ in between ‘the walls of the domain’. The inside – the inscape – was the protected and valued domain, and thus the place to be.

Living in the protected domain was equated with order – the order that overcomes the chaos that all societies must overcome. All societies create structures and arrangements. Relatively few societies, though, invest heavily in public structures and arrangements. Creating order through public forms, rather than private hierarchies, is the exception, not the rule in social-historical experience. Thus, despite the implantation of the church-and-plaza model in the Philippines, it is not so surprising that closed system order in the end largely displaced open system order. Variations on the intra muros model became widespread through the Philippine archipelago. This was based on a social-symbolic understanding that the world was divided into domains with strong boundaries and that careful gate keeping was needed so as to regulate the relation between domain and environment in favour of the protected domain rather than open environment. This contrasts with the church-and-plaza model where the apse and square – or the portico and square – function as inter-mediation between domains. In the latter case, persons are constantly crossing from one domain to another through the portal spaces of public spheres. In this model, gateways operate to facilitate orderly traffic between domain and environment. Portal or public space typically functions as a ‘third term’ between two or more private (e.g. household or institutional) spaces and their respective domains. In contrast, when ‘being inside the walls of the domain’ is the key social value, then ‘being outside in the public’ is aberrant behaviour. Under these conditions, the clear distinction between the ‘third realm’ of the public and the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ private domains evaporates. Simply put, everything becomes private because the public transit space between domains is eviscerated.

The very perception of order changes under these conditions. ‘Being inside’ is valued because the inside is a place or space that is not chaotic. It is the place of calm and order. The world outside of domain boundaries is chaotic. Crossing the road between domains is hazardous or unpleasant. Domains are not constantly translated into environments and back into domains through interstitial traffic. The overall effect of this is uncanny. Whether on the outside, ‘beyond the walls’, or on the inside, ‘between the walls’ of the domain, there is no clear distinction made between public and private. From the standpoint of church-and-plaza perceptions of space, expectations of what exactly is private and what exactly is public are continually confounded. This might not have been an issue in the Philippines had not the church-and-plaza model been implanted there and had it not raised social-symbolic expectations of traffic between domains. Spanish colonization was self-contradictory. It embedded a notion of publics, portals, and traffic, and then it systematically undermined this.

The chief culprit undoubtedly was the fact that Spanish colonization was originally organized around the encomienda. This was a patrimonial system. Large estates were given to private settlers on a temporary basis by the Spanish crown. Along with land the settlers received the right to collect taxes. Public and private roles were indistinguishable. The state devolved, in a feudal-like manner, into hierarchically nested ‘private public’ or ‘public private’ entities. What matters in this world is not that someone is performing a public or a private role, but rather that they are inside or outside the social-system ‘walls’. The encomienda system was dismantled at the end of the 17th century. The system of provincial rule (alcaldías mayores) that replaced it, though, blurred the distinction between public and private just as much. Public offices were for sale. They were regarded as a source of private income for the office-holder. Underscoring the uncanny relation of public and private, many public functions in the Spanish colonial era were carried out by priests. These included responsibilities for examination, certification, census taking, statistics collection, and censorship. The Pauline distinction between ‘what is God’s and what is Caesar’s’ – fundamental to the differentiation of public and private – was blithely ignored because the Spanish state couldn’t manage to fill its offices with persons with the required competencies. Giving permissions – required by the state’s bureaucratic law – in return for bribes was the omnivorous preoccupation of public officers.

One might have expected that the opponents of the Spanish might have overturned the intra muros social-symbolic system. But, if anything, they amplified it and reinforced it. Nationalist opposition to the Spanish Empire is a reminder that in politics enemies often have a great deal in common. Philippine nationalists simply turned the intra muros model against the colonial power. They portrayed Spain as the bad outside power and the antithesis of the good inside power of the Philippine nation. The nation, as the good inside, was defined both in cultural and economic terms. Political good was equated with authentic local culture and a closed commercial state. In so many ironic ways, this mimicked the language policies of the 16th-century Church orders and the old mercantilist trade policies of the Spanish Crown.

The American period: Success and failure

The attempt to create a nationalist state during the uprising against Spain in 1899 was stymied by the Americans. For close to 40 years, the United States administered the Philippines under various guises. The fact that the United States replaced Spain as an administering power was of considerable historical significance. This is almost the only time in history that America established a formal colonial territory on any sizeable scale. In conventional developmental terms, the Americans as the colonizing power did ‘all the right things’. ¹⁵ They built an extensive road, rail and harbour network – creating the basis for an infrastructural public. They put in place a good public education system. They made an international language (English) the medium of trade, government, and education. They carefully prepared the ground for democratic self-government. ¹⁶ They encouraged free speech. They opened up American markets to Philippine goods. They created a provincial government (Moro Province) for the Philippine Muslim minority. ¹⁷ In specific cases, they had spectacular successes. They drove up the literacy rate from 5 per cent in 1898 to 65 per cent in 1935. Yet, in the most global sense, American rule was a failure. It failed because it could not reverse the long-term decline of the Philippine economy relative to the wealthiest countries in the world economy.

Comparative world data for the early 19th century is sketchy, and to some extent informed guess work, but nonetheless revealing. In 1820, the Philippines ranked the 18th wealthiest nation in the world (measured in terms of gross domestic product per capita). ¹⁸ This is a position held today by the United Kingdom. ¹⁹ In 1820, on a per capita basis, the Philippines was wealthier than Russia or Eastern Europe. It exceeded the average wealth of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. As our statistical knowledge gets surer, the story gets worse. By 1870, the Philippines had fallen behind Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as behind Latin American success stories like Argentina and Uruguay. The Middle East had nearly caught up to it. ²⁰ By 1950, the Philippines was ranked 79th in the world. Some of this is accounted for by new states being added to the world’s roster. But, however we qualify it, the bottom line was that the Philippine state was now exceeded by the average wealth of Latin America, East Europe, and the Middle East. ²¹ By 1973, it had fallen to 100th in the world, and by 2003 it was 106th in the world. ²² It began the new millennium with a gross domestic product per capita that was 40 per cent of the world’s average, only in advance of averages for Asia and Africa.

However the figures are sliced and diced, and whatever we regard as the starting-point for reliable figures, the trajectory of Philippine wealth creation moved downwards without relief for over a century and a half. And whatever definition we might afford the polity and economy of the archipelago across the centuries, Manila is a prime player and mover in this story. In 1820, the wealth of the country was 105 per cent of the world’s average. By 1870, Philippine per capita wealth had fallen to 88 per cent of the world’s average. In 1913, it was 69 per cent. In 1950, it was 50 per cent. In 1973, it was 48 per cent; and in 1984, 46 per cent. ²³ As is apparent from the figures, the long-term decline began in the latter part of the Spanish era. Did free trade cause the decline? After all, Spanish mercantilism was abandoned in 1834 for free trade under pressure from Britain, the United States and other powers. From that time, the Philippines entered on a path of relative decline. In stark contrast, the new wealthy economies – Japan and the United States – that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries were protectionist. America was heavily protected till the 1950s, and contemporary Japan still is. Prima facie this suggests that the intra muros model should have been persisted with in preference to an open system of trade. But appearances can be deceiving.

Indeed, for the first half of the 20th century, ‘free trade’ meant preferential access to American markets for Philippine goods. This was a bilateral (in effect a mercantilist) arrangement that eliminated duties on American goods exported to the Philippines and reciprocally on most Philippine goods going to the United States. ²⁴ The Philippines was not an American state, but, as a quasi-colony, it angled to be treated as such in trade matters. As it was, neither liberal ‘free trade’ nor mercantilist ‘preferential trade’ made any noticeable difference to the long-term decline of the Philippine economy. The United States and Japan illustrate why this was so. Both were cases of successful modernity. Both were states of permanent innovation. Trade policy was not the key to this in either case. America till the 1950s limited access to its markets, then it liberalized its trade barriers. Yet, even when it was a protectionist state, it still had very porous borders, allowing the easy entry of people and ideas. The Japanese model is different again. Japan has always limited entry of both goods and people. Yet it has voraciously imported ideas. Indeed, the Japanese did so long before Commodore Perry’s arrival on their shores in the 1850s. ²⁵

In contrast, the Philippines in the 19th and 20th centuries lacked the key drivers of successful modernity. It did not aggressively import people (skills) or ideas (knowledge). Exclusion of aliens and distrust of foreign capital was a regular theme of Philippine nationalism. ²⁶ The historic Constitutional Convention of 1935 conceived a principle whereby the rights and privileges of ‘natural born’ citizens were superior to naturalized citizens. It also recommended, as a matter of principle, limiting the employment of alien labour. ²⁷ Education nationalism mirrored this in the realm of the arts and sciences. ²⁸ The 1935 Constitution actually provided additional hours in schools to teach nationalism. The ambition of education nationalism was to raise ethnological study above the ideas of foreign pedagogues. It promoted folklore, indigenous literature, and national historiography. While American pop culture circulated widely in the Philippines, informal barriers to the entry of other arts and sciences prevailed in condescension to nationalist agendas. This was very costly.

American rule had little long-term effect on this. Thus, while science, technology and the applied arts became the driving force of Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul’s spectacular modernity after the Second World War, Manila exported its qualified and skilled labour. Nor did it ‘compensate’ for this export by reciprocally importing skilled and qualified workers or harnessing the propulsive energies of settler cohorts. The one saving grace of the ‘brain drain’ of educated or skilled Filipinos abroad was that the monies repatriated by ‘overseas contract workers’ became one of the leading sectors of the local economy. ²⁹ This type of diaspora economy, though, was never replicated in Manila or in other Philippine cities. There is nothing in post-war Manila that equates with the mercurial wave of overseas Chinese settlers in Hong Kong or Taipei, or their conjugation with Indians and Malays in Singapore. The Philippines didn’t even have notorious stories like the forced settlement of millions of Koreans in Japan – mainly in Japan’s port cities – and their mass repatriation to South Korea after the Second World War. Settler cities and city-regions – even ones that are the product of vile state policies – have a remarkable record in creating successful economies and societies. They do this because they are effective at proliferating traffic between domains and creating the kinds of public space and infrastructure that sustains such traffic. The corollary of this is that they become highly proficient at importing and exporting people, ideas, and/or goods.

The Philippines as an archipelago is by definition a porous geography. Filipinos constitute the largest cohort of merchant mariners in the world. Manila is built around a bay. Yet 20th-century Manila did not become a magnet for overseas settlers. Instead it was subjected to an un-regulated flood of rural labouring poor from the countryside. The consequences of this internal migration from countryside to city were disastrous. It produced the opposite of what the settler society model produced. The cumulative result was the downward spiral of economic un-development. One of the conditions of successful modernity is the stranger city. ³⁰ One of the reasons why Manila, despite its propitious marine location on the edge of a major sea region, never developed in the 20th century as a stranger city is that the Americans came as administrators, not as settlers – and, unlike the British in Hong Kong and Singapore, they did not encourage an influx of foreigners. ³¹ Political prudence in part dictated that the Americans not encourage settler cities around the Philippine littoral. Large numbers of aliens would have offended deeply entrenched Filipino nationalist sentiment. Chinese and Japanese had a history of settlement in the Philippines, but also a history of being resented. Nationalist politics was a glass for magnifying such feelings. This was not the only consideration for the Americans, though. America was in many respects a paradigmatic ‘open society’. Yet it also had its own strain of the intra muros mind set. Settlement abroad was not the American style. The irony is that the United States, as the settler society par excellence, had little taste for the re-export of its own people. American popular culture stimulated a post-nationalist taste amongst Filipinos for migration abroad. The 20th-century Philippine diaspora became very large. But few Americans, the religious apart, came to live in the Philippines. ³² As in all of its short-lived occupations of foreign states, the United States moved quickly to hand over most administrative functions to locals as soon as possible. ³³

At stake here is not the nature of the Philippines but rather the nature of America. The borders of America are very porous. It imports people, ideas, and (since the mid-20th century) goods freely. But, unlike the British, it has shown little inclination to export people as settlers. This is unsurprising when upwards of 30 per cent of the American population has always been isolationist. Isolationists see American responsibilities as being properly confined to the North American continent. The manifest destiny of the United States thus has always been a rather lonely one. Correspondingly, the projection of American power abroad has always been heavily reliant on its military bases. America has rarely been a colonizing power in the traditional sense. It has typically avoided responsibility for administering large overseas territories. In the exceptional cases when it has, it has done so for time-limited periods. The Philippines was one of those exceptions, and even that exception proved in its own way typical.

The corollary of this was that the American presence in the Philippines was mediated through the more or less closed system of the American military bases and diplomatic compounds. This meant that, unlike the experiences of the settler societies and settler city-states, American rule triggered no autopoietic civic movement, and thus no self-generating urban development. Indeed, the point of intersection between the military domain and the broader Philippine society was invariably the sleazy public of bars and brothels – hardly the best experience of the stranger city and its publics. This is ironic several times over. Firstly, because what a visit to the former US naval base at Subic Bay (today a specially-administered free trade zone) reveals, inside its boundaries, is a model piece of mid-20th-century American urbanism transplanted to the tropics. The base possesses all of the conventional urban form so often lacking in Manila. This is doubly ironic because the bits of Manila that do have a strong ‘Cartesian’ urban morphology are more or less fortified cities. An unintended consequence of American occupation is the perpetuation of the stockade city rather than the creation of a public civitas. (As we demonstrate below, Fort Bonifacio is the latest example of this legacy.) This is triply ironic when we consider that American occupation of the Philippines coincided with the peak of a great spurt of American civics and the often very successful City Beautiful movement. ³⁴ The failure of the Americans in the Philippines was the failure to find a way to translate this bravura experience across the Pacific and into the mainstream of Philippine urbanism. The American civic explosion was propelled by waves of immigrants flooding into the United States in the latter-part of the 19th century. This was the era when New York, Chicago and San Francisco took on a mature form. Daniel Burnham’s 1905 Plan for Manila demonstrates that the Americans at least imagined Manila as city like Washington or Chicago. ³⁵ It could have been as great an urban creation as, say, Sydney or Melbourne in the 20th-century inter-war era. The Burnham Plan was still the focus for urban renewal in Manila in the early 1990s. This is evident in the ‘clean up’ of the Ermita and Malate areas, and the redevelopment of the Roxas Boulevard with a promenade. ³⁶ Burnham’s design of Luneta Park provided a major point for religious and political meetings. ³⁷ The Plan successfully integrated the Pasig River and Manila Bay waterfronts. It provided a unity between the important civic buildings of the era – the Post Office, City Hall, museum, and government buildings. Indeed, at the end of the 20th century, Burnham’s Manila was still the only part of the city that ‘breathed’, providing that crucial urban portal-public sense of ‘in and out’. ³⁸ It was the only part of the city friendly to walkers. ³⁹ For all of this, Burnham’s Plan suggested only what might be. It did not represent what was. Its rationality remained frozen in anticipation, until it became a memory without ever having been a reality. The real triumph of the Americans in the Philippines was not in urban morphology, but in public policy. In particular, the Americans radically transformed the field of public health. ⁴⁰ They aggressively promoted a culture of hygiene. This policy and practice was the product of the Progressive-era Protestant American ethos – a White Anglo Saxon Protestant ethos – of a ‘clean’ society, ‘clean’ city, and a ‘clean’ politics. It was inspired by turn-of-the-20th-century American Progressive urban reformism – a curious tradition created by an anti-big-city rural Protestant middle class intent on ‘cleaning up’ the new, spectacular, often corrupt, dense, impersonal, sky-scraping cities like New York that were utterly unlike anything previously seen in urban history. ⁴¹ This new urbanism attracted millions from Catholic and Orthodox Europe.

If you doubt that ‘clean’ is a civic ideal, take a look at the work of Lewis Mumford. Mumford was a literary child of the Progressive Age and America’s great historian of the city. In his many books, he returned time and again to the theme of public hygiene. ⁴² Just like the American colonial administrators in the Philippines, Mumford viewed hygenics as one of the chief criteria of a successful civics. In the case of the Philippines this model should not be sniffed at. Despite its low per capita income, the country has had tremendous success in preventive public health. It experienced very low rates of HIV/AIDS, SARS, bird flu, and other turn-of-the-21st-century pandemic agents. ⁴³ When African societies in contrast were devastated by HIV/AIDS, this was no mean achievement.

If the Philippines learnt from the Americans the ways of a ‘clean’ society, the efforts to implant a ‘clean’ city or a ‘clean’ politics were markedly less successful. The civic hygiene model emphasized the idea of the garden city. Gardens represented clean air and beneficent sunshine. This had little traction on an urban scale in booming Manila. The population-swell of Metro Manila in the second half of the 20th century left the city with few green spaces or parks. Notably also, professional middle-class efforts to stamp out the ‘dirt’ of corrupt politics, the legacy of centuries of patrimonial culture, had virtually no effect at all. Contrast this with the Sino-Fabianism of Singapore, where legally-enforced clean habits and a very efficient water-and-sewage socialism went hand-in-hand with carefully husbanded green areas and very strict regulation of corrupt behaviours. ⁴⁴ Most importantly of all, the Singaporeans also created a public sphere that they placed high store on. This is often misunderstood, because commentators habitually think of a public sphere as the place of peer-style coffeehouse debates and institutions of criticism. These have been late arriving in Singapore. But the city-state nonetheless was very successful at creating an infrastructural public.

In contrast the Americans acquiesced in traditional Iberian-Filipino patrimonial social structures. This killed the Burnham Plan. To be successful, a city plan has to be congruent with social behaviours. Burnham’s plan laid a civic model over a patrimonial society. In practical terms this left the real estate and the social economy of Manila in the hands of powerful landed families. The families simply ignored government planning laws, or became their own law. In the course of the 20th century, these families and their successors developed an urban system that was reminiscent of the encomienda system.

The ‘new encomienda’ system

In the 1920s and 1930s groups like the Legarda, Araneta, and Tuason families, who transformed their familial estates into rental and market properties, represented the ‘new encomienda’ system. The social weight of this new urban landlordism had a peculiar distorting effect. It allowed the proprietor kin to become de facto city planners as well as developers and landlords. As far as the families were concerned, there was no real distinction between these roles. Anyone familiar with late Roman history will appreciate that this is also the story of the origins of feudalism. The estate developers in Manila created what is in effect an urban feudalism. Because they controlled so much land, they could ignore or circumvent American-type civic planning regulations that required a proper, proportionate quantity of public space to be developed alongside residential and commercial space. They eventually built their own ‘manorial’ cities within Metro Manila.

What was at work here was not simply the effects of money and power. Just as crucial was the effect of the social imagination. To illustrate this, consider the case of Chicago in the 19th century. There, powerful plutocrats played an enormous role in turning Chicago into a world city. But the plutocrats did it by funding large civic projects and creating and landscaping large areas of attractive public space. The contrast is telling. Chicago’s plutocracy was civic-minded. ⁴⁵ It was civic-minded because the social imagination of Chicago was civic-minded. This civic-minded character prevailed because, from its start, Chicago was a stranger city. It was a settler city devoted to the constant traffic of goods and people, and later on cultures and ideas. Chicago’s plutocracy grasped that public space was simply a step-up from the wharves and docks and loading bays with which it had made its fortunes. In contrast, the 20th-century Manila model stressed estate-power – power over land – rather than circulatory power. And the estate-power was and is in the hands of particular families. Estate-power is patrimonial power. This is why our recovering of the term ‘encomienda’ is not merely theatrical or analogous.

The ‘new encomienda’ system took off in the 1950s with the decision of the Ayala Family Corporation to develop Makati – the best known and the wealthiest city in Metro Manila. ⁴⁶ It is where financial institutions and embassies are concentrated. Instructively, Makati drew its name from Don Jose de Roxa’s San Pedro de Makati hacienda. The Ayala family turned city building into a family enterprise. They built city infrastructure, high-rise office buildings, retail properties, and gated communities for upper-class residents. The Ortigas Company repeated this in the 1980s when it turned its estate, which ran alongside the EDSA Avenue, into a second Central Business District for Manila – the modestly named Ortigas. ⁴⁷ A consortium of overseas Chinese went to the next stage of ‘private public’ neo-feudal development in the 1990s when it acquired the lands of the former US military base at Fort Bonifacio, and began to turn it into a ‘global city’. ⁴⁸ The explicit aim was to fuse global high technology and infrastructure standards with an appropriately fortified city mentality.

In each of these cases, the distinction between state and estate is blurred. The estate takes on many of the functions of a state or at the very least of a municipality. It ‘privatizes’ state functions – though it is a moot point whether appellations like ‘private’ or ‘public’ have any real meaning in the Philippine context. Family companies carry out what in other circumstances would be state or municipal planning decisions. ⁴⁹ They defend this as being more rational than the alternative – often pictured in terms of the impossibly corrupt Caesar-ism of the Marcos dictatorship. These years (1965–1983) produced a type of crony capitalism and feudal privateering that resulted in a legion of unfinished developments that combined grandiloquently delusional aspirations to a showpiece public order with a shoddiness of execution that only the truly venal can manage. ⁵⁰ Imelda Marcos was the chief purveyor of this folly. Her ‘Palace in the Sky’ (at Tagatay) is a prime example of this Ozymandian architecture. ⁵¹ Even when projects were completed, as in the case of her Cultural Center of the Philippines, the combination of Peter-the-Great-like ruthlessness in its construction with a romantic ideology of national cultural originality produced a monument to the lonely hubris of the dictator-family. Built on reclaimed land on Manila Bay, and stuck out on the bay out of reach of the populace, the CCP presents an empty spectacle. The Leandro Locsin-designed building makes the obligatory nod to indigenous form, but its prime signification is that of a compound building. It is defensible stockade space – a cantilevered monolith. It is perfect for a showpiece public culture that in fact has no public.

Nation should not be confused with public. The typical patrimonial cultural strategy is to collect things. ⁵² The Marcos pair conceived an open-door national repository for the work of ‘national artists’ and the performances of ‘national companies’ – in tacit opposition to the private collections of well-to-do Manila families. This cultural one-upmanship, however, was not the triumph of the public over the private. Rather, national collecting was simply the more acceptable face of the legendary patrimonial-turned-kleptocratic acquisitiveness of the regime. The Marcos pair transformed the private not into the public but into piracy, and ordinary corruption into grand larceny. Measured against this, the patrimony of family capitalism – estate capitalism – is quite rational. It ‘simply’ internalizes public externalities.

Modern estate feudalism is one kind of counter to out-of-control kleptocracy. The developments that are typical of this new kind of urban feudalism are based on compound-type space. But the compound in this case includes the city rather than, as in the Ozymandian Marcos model, shying away from it. The new urban feudalism threads together the closed semantics of a military compound with the simulation of urban activities. The American fort-turned-base city is a model of this kind of space – though the original model for this in fact goes back to the Spanish fortified city and the urban semantics of the ‘intra muros’. The Fort Bonifacio development happened because the United States handed back one of a number of military bases to the Philippines. As a result, the first open space in Manila in the 20th century became available for public redevelopment. That this proceeded in the form of a joint ‘public-private’ venture indicates yet again the ambiguities of the notion of the public in Philippine life. It also underscores the reliance of the state on patrimonial families to drive high-technology urbanism.

The resulting city of Fort Bonifacio unconsciously mimics the semantics of the encampment space that it was named for. The estate-cum-stockade city model punctuates the larger metropolitan city with a series of quasi-private compounds with strongly policed boundaries – some visible and some invisible. Like all of these kinds of corporate cities within Metro Manila, the spaces of Fort Bonifacio are securely bounded – in the manner of a gated community – against the teeming city outside. Even when the ‘walls’ erected are invisible, they are walls nonetheless. They exist lest the carefully constructed order of private city is made chaotic. The paradox is that its planners know what is expected of a civic development. Fort Bonifacio proudly promotes public art, public events and public order, and builds a careful civic order out of efficient infrastructure (not least, the infrastructure of streetscapes). Yet it still can’t mesh these convincingly with each level of everyday life. Its public space is curiously empty. Elsewhere in unregulated Manila, streets teeming with life exclude lucent order; the order of the high-tech feudal-fort-gated city, however, excludes streets filled with life.

The ‘new encomienda’ system has some features that are analogous with a ‘company town’. It is a proprietary system, but not in the sense of a public corporation. Its capital is familial or patrician. Family-patrician capital instinctively creates service classes and private security forces. Combined with landlord domination of urban real estate and ‘manorial’ style planning power, this leads to a modern feudalism. It does not have serfs ‘tied to the soil’ – nonetheless, the poor clients of this system live and work in conditions where the procedural law of the state has little effect. The new feudalism mixes market rentals and market labour with patron-client service relationships and kin preference, ‘manorial’ separation from a weak and corrupt state, production and service based on labour rather than skills and knowledge, and private armed force.

A parallel can be drawn with the railway baron George Pullman and his creation of a model company town – the also modestly named Pullman – in South Chicago in the 19th century. An important difference, though, is that Pullman’s megalomaniac town was the exception, not the rule, in the Chicago city-region – and, in practice, it was atypical of American urbanism and indeed of American capitalism. Company towns typically appeared in America where the local economy still had a residual patrician character – from New England textile mill towns to Kentucky coal mining towns. ⁵³ One study of these towns in the 1920s reported that they suffered some of the things that contemporary Manila suffers from.

The company townscape exhibited a uniform appearance. The absence of visual interest was the rule, a result from repeated building designs. The lack of trees and other landscaping did not mitigate that sterile appearance of rows of identical houses. Much of the infrastructure available in contemporary urban settings was missing: paved roads, water mains, sewer systems, and lights were generally non-existent. ⁵⁴

In the family-corporate city, the public sphere is turned into a private domain. In Manila’s case, up-scale gated residences provide their own services, like rubbish collection, and of course the ubiquitous security guards-cum-gate keepers. Development companies maintain the gated commercial properties. The rest of the space, outside of the gated domains, languishes in a state of neglect. The urban poor colonize it. They impose on this space their own subaltern logic of turning public space into private residences and compounds. Their illegal erections are a kind of parody of the private family corporations. Government is a captive of both the private poor and private rich. The rich installed in their gated domains evade taxes, leaving government with no money for civic infrastructure. The poor in their ‘undocumented’ encampments give government a crucial resource – votes, many of them bought. Votes are the coin of official legitimacy. The price of that legitimacy is that the poor be allowed to continue to live in public space (near railway tracks, under bridges, on river embankments, and so on). The poor provide the cheap labour to build the next round of ‘manorial’ cities and enclaves. The poor then maintain, serve and secure these stockade cities, both their own DIY squatter cities and those of the rich. The paradox of insecurity for the rich is that they employ the very same minions who they most fear to protect them.

Urban morphology: Searching for the Platonic city

It might be argued that Manila’s problems stem from its domination by private interests. But this is a world in which ‘the private’ is a trump card. It is a trump card because of the high valuation of the ‘inside’. Between the private development of the rich and the private development of the poor, there is little or no public realm left over. Because Manila is not a city of strangers who imagine and construct the public as the commons, the public is what is left over after territory and space is appropriated and occupied. As the rapid population growth of the metropolis continues unrestrained, there is little left over.

It is interesting how the ‘outside’ constantly figures as the bête noire in interpretations of the fate of Manila. Nationalists blame the urban blight of Manila on American bombing at the end of the Second World War. Without question, American bombing of the Japanese caused a holocaust of the city. Yet, while wartime bombing may have levelled Manila, the real cause of its continuing lop-sided development was the failure to construct out of the ashes a city with a public sphere and public infrastructure and order. After all, many of the great city renaissances in history – London and Chicago are cases in point – occurred after holocausts had laid them to waste.

The Americans contributed $620 million in reconstruction aid after the war. But this triggered no concentrated mobilization of capital for civic renaissance. There was nothing like the drive of merchant capitalists who went to their New York and Boston bankers to finance the rebuilding of Chicago after the Great Fire in 1871. ⁵⁵ There was nothing like the concentrated effort of Parliament, Crown and merchant capital in Wren’s London to rebuild the city after the Great Fire in 1666. Manila’s holocaust meant simply that ‘the plan of the city’, the ‘model’ of the collective demiurge, fell into abeyance. Neo-patrimonial behaviours filled the vacuum thus created. There were traces left of Spanish ‘Baroque’ and American ‘City Beautiful’ urbanism beneath the clutter of Manila streets, but their form was constantly swamped by an overwhelming humanity that surged in from the countryside. And the public transport system was not reconstructed.

We clearly see the failures in nationalist projects like Quezon City, which was loosely modelled after the Baroque planning of the ‘City Beautiful’ urbanism together with elements of Modernism. ⁵⁶ Like a lot of misconceived Baroque or Modern urban plans, its monumentality is false, and its public space is unattractive. It is ‘big’ – it has big parks, a big roundabout, and a big national research university. To successfully do ‘big’ on an urban scale requires thick, dense public textures. Quezon City planners did ‘big’ as empty space, much of which the urban poor has inevitably colonized. Its failure was the lack of civic imagination – in particular, the lack of understanding that big civics requires the complement of medium-scale and small-scale civics. Such space needs to scale. Quezon City did not scale. Scalability is a Platonic value. ⁵⁷ It is a universal value. Nationalist urbanism instinctively rejected universalism. It treated the geometries of big, medium and small as a handmaiden to its romantic ideals. Such ideals, so often, turn into a wasteland. ⁵⁸

Much closer in spirit to the Platonic city, and yet curiously several steps removed from it, is Singapore. It has no romantic wastelands at all. It is prosperous, functional, decent, and efficient. Yet it suffers from an oddly un-Platonic condition: soul-less-ness. This can be over-stated, especially when many Western romantics prefer the pornography of the wasteland to decent living conditions. Yet, given the large Singaporean diaspora that quietly chooses to live abroad, it can hardly be said that the charge of soul-less-ness is completely off-target either. Even the energetic Singaporean guardian-officials admit that, after a half century of development in a utilitarian mode, Singapore found itself lacking a ‘creative dimension’. ⁵⁹ Its hygienic rationalism and its high-quality infrastructure provision on its own terms could not reverse this deficit. So the guardians of the city-state began to talk openly of their desire to turn Singapore into a ‘renaissance city’. ⁶⁰

Think of Singapore’s limits in these terms: there is no chaos on Singapore’s streets. Chaos is planned out of the Sino-Fabian city. But imagination is also cramped. The problem of Singapore is not the absence of chaos but the confusion of administration and order, and more particularly the confusion of rules and beauty. A society can do what Singapore has done – it can imitate a stock standard civic order by applying rules. Singapore’s planners very effectively deduced the rules of an International Style skyscraper city and applied them flawlessly in a tropical setting. The achievement was considerable. Yet rules do not make for beauty, but for clinical precision. Generating social prosperity through rules has a built-in ceiling.

Here, though, we need to be careful not to fall into the trap of postmodern stereotyping. The argument being advanced is not that rules create a disciplined order that is stifling, while ‘chaosmos’ is the condition of inventiveness. Chaos is certainly not inventive. The cost of chaos is evident when we look at the case of Manila contrasted with Singapore. Singapore has successfully created a public order. The order is stiff and contrived, not to say at times punitive. But this achievement should not be underestimated either. Genuine public culture of any kind is historically rare. Most human activity – from the household to the state – is private, even where it is official. The historical act of differentiating between public and private is very difficult, and most societies blur the distinction in practice.

Manila is a prime example of a city in which the meanings of public and private have been rendered systematically ambiguous. This systemic ambiguity lends public and private life an uncanny edge. It is impossible to escape the sense that ‘something is not quite right’ when all space becomes uncanny and has a pervading sense of being ‘close-to-chaos’. It is not literally chaotic. No society or city can endure actual chaos for very long and survive intact. Rather, this space is ‘close-to-chaos’ in the sense that its incipient public order always seems on the edge of dissolve. While this may sound attractive when described on paper, in everyday life it is most unattractive. There is no doubt a public domain that is ‘close-to-chaos’ can produce energy – as in the ‘teeming life’ tag that is invariably applied by visitors to old Asia-Pacific cities. But, because it has no container, this energy is also wearying for the denizens of ‘close-to-chaos’ cities. The uncanny condition turns life into a vain struggle to secure what good order produces: lucidity, clarity, and the satisfactions of pattern rationality. During the postmodern period, Western social science made a mistake in dismissing the virtue of lucidity as the work of an overzealous gardener who obsessively trims the social bush. But no inhabitant of Manila would ever tell you that the hours spent needlessly in traffic jams or searching for un-signposted streets is a good thing. The product of an ad hoc city topology, in turn the tainted fruit of an ad hoc new feudalism, these inconveniences are wasteful of the energy they create. Chaos is the privilege of the over-endowed. For everyone else, well-structured public space is essential.

This is especially so in low-income societies and developing economies. This is desperately so in the world’s most fragmented, privatized and un-public of cities – Manila.