reading response

Messy Urbanism

Understanding the "Other,, Cities of Asia

Edited by Manish Chalana and Jeffrey Hou

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong

Pokfulam Road

Hong Kong www.hkupress.org

© 2016 Hong Kong University Press

ISBN 978-988-8208-33-3 (Hardback)

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any infor-

mation storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments xi

Chapter 1 Untangling the "Messy" Asian City 1

Jeffrey Hou and Manish Chalana

Chapter 2 A History of Messiness: Order and Resilience on the Sidewalks of 22

Ho Chi Minh City

Annette M. Kim

Chapter 3 The Order of Messiness: Notes from an Indonesian City 40

Abidin Kusno

Chapter 4 Concrete Jungle or Geocultural Cipher? Reading Lineage into 60

the Perils and Prospects of Metro Manila

Jose Edgardo A. Gomez Jr.

Chapter 5 The Royal Field (Sanam Luang): Bangkok's Polysemic 81

Urban Palimpsest

Koompong Noobanjong

Chapter 6 Shinjuku ~JT:@ : Messy Urbanism at the Metabolic Crossroads 101

Ken Tadashi Oshima

Chapter 7 Little Manila: The Other Central of Hong Kong 119

Daisy Tam

Chapter 8 Neutral Equilibrium in Public Space: Mong Kok Flower Market 136

in Hong Kong

Kin Wai Michael Siu and Mingjie Zhu

Chapter 9 Making Sense of the Order in the Disorder in Delhi's Kathputti 154

Colony Manish Chalana and Susmita Rishi

Chapter 10 Messy Work: Transnational Collaboration in Chandigarh

Vikramaditya Prakash

175

VI

Chapter 11 Everyday Urban Flux: Temporary Urbanism in East Asia as Insurgent Planning

Jeffrey Hou

on tents

193

Chapter 12 Messy Urbanism and Space for Community Empowerment in 215 China

Daniel Benjamin Abramson

Epilogue: Sites of Questions, Contestations, and Resistance

Manish Chalana and Jeffrey Hou

Notes on Contributors

Index

238

244

246

Figures

Figure 0.0 Case study cities xiv

Figure 1.0 Case study sites xvi

Figure 1.1 A large electronic billboard welcoming visitors to Chungking 2

Mansions in Hong Kong

Figure 1.2 Street vendors and shoppers near the Siam Square in Bangkok 4

Figure 1.3 Hawker stands on Chun Yeung Street in Hong Kong 7

Figure 1.4 Street vendors in Mumbai 7

Figure 1.5 Large-scale urban redevelopments in Shanghai 11

Figure 1.6 The historic Qianmen district in Beijing 12

Figure 1.7 The seemingly amorphous urban fabric of Tokyo 14

Figure 2.0 Map of Ho Chi Minh City and map of twin cities, Saigon and 22

Cholon

Figure 2.1 Superimposed historic maps of present-day Ho Chi Minh City 26

from 1623 to 1950

Figure 2.2 Everyday scene of a Vietnamese street vendor selling soup, 31

ca. 1920

Figure 2.3 Public space in front of the market building in Cholon during 32

the French colonial era, 1920s

Figure 2.4 An elegant young woman enjoying a beverage while on the 33

sidewalk in Cholon, ca. 1955

Figure 2.5 A street scene of Saigon, ca. 1955 35

Figure 3.0 Map of Batavia (today's Jakarta) in 1904 40

Figure 3.1 Tillema's model of a new kampung 45

Figure 3.2 Comic depiction of a riverside urban kampung, with rural below 47

and urban above

Figure 3.3 Comic depiction of an irregular settlement showing street scene 49

Figure 3.4 An urban kampung in West Jakarta 50

Metropolitan Manila. Philippines 5km L...--J SOOm '----J

200m .__, 100m '----'

Figure 4.0

Map and aerial photographs of Metro Manila and an exemplary site. Tllustrations by Weijia Wang.

Chapter4 Concrete Jungle or Geocultural Cipher? Reading Lineage into the Perils and Prospects of Metro Manila

Jose Edgardo A. Gomez Jr.

With a daytime population breaching the 12 million mark and a density of 18,650

persons per square kilometer (NSCB 2008), Metropolitan Manila, capital region

of the Philippines, often presents itself as a sketch of urban anarchy to the casual

observer who wanders beyond the insulated neatness of tourist spots and business

districts toward the port and riverbank neighborhoods where old universities and

slums spill unruly masses. At its present stage of history, it is often portrayed as a

teeming stew of urbanity where migrants in search of greener pastures may be driven

to desperation, as poignantly illustrated by British director Sean Ellis's Metro Manila

(2013), the UK's official Best Foreign Language Film entry to the 2014 Oscars. In

the buildup of Eilis's film, the protagonist, newly arrived in the metropolis, is soon

swindled of his savings and compelled to live in a slum with his pregnant wife and

daughter, until he finds a job as a security guard for an armored van company that

services banks. His supervisor soon entangles him in a plot to steal a safety-box key

from their employer, which eventually leads to the hero's death. His demise, however,

results in a bittersweet emancipation for his wife and child, who return to their rural

province with enough loot to free them from the clutches of Metro Manila.

Another of this metropolis's latest claims to infamy was the unflattering and exag-

gerated-if fictional-city of Manila described by international best-selling author

Dan Brown as "the Gates of Hell" in the novel Inferno. This was done through the

narration of his character Siena Brooks, who endured "six-hour traffic jams, suffo-

cating pollution, and a horrifying sex trade" (Brown 2013, 459). Cut to the quick

Attorney Francis Tolentino, chairman of the metropolitan government, felt com-

pelled to defend the Filipino reading public and retorted in a letter dated May 23,

2013, through Doubleday Publishing:

Dear Mr. Brown:

We write to you with much concern regarding your recently published novel Inferno and its mention of Manila being defined by a number of terrible descrip- tions .... While we are aware that yours is a work of fiction, we are greatly disap- pointed by your inaccurate portrayal of our beloved metropolis .... More than your portrayal of it, Metro Manila is the center of Filipino spirit, faith, and hope.

62 lml' hlg.1rdo A. Gomez Jr.

Our faith in God binds us as a nation and we believe that Manila citizens are more

than capable of exemplifying good character and compassion towards each other,

something that your novel has failed to acknowledge. Truly our place is an entry

to heaven . ... We hope that this letter enlightens you and may it guide you the

next time you cite Manila in any of your works. (MMDA 2013; author's emphasis)

In fairness to Mr. Brown, even the local literati admitted in opinion columns and

blogs1 that the American writer's rendering may not have been entirely off the mark,

as the urban setting indeed needs much housekeeping. Simultaneously, the seeming

sprawl of Metro Manila's streetscapes bears an ironic familiarity to Westerners, inas-

much as the metropolis emplaces US iconography and suburban imitation in a region

that hints at a more profound Southeast Asian spatial vernacular. Different from the

deterministic delineation of sites in European medieval tradition or turnpike-and-

skyscraper urbanism in parts of the United States, the Southeast Asian patterning can

be historically traced to either trade-oriented settlements that sprouted along coast-

lines and estuaries or inland civilizations, many influenced by ancient Indian notions

of hierarchy, that commanded wet-rice cultivation and commodity exchange (Hall

2011). Such protocities were less enduring than their Western counterparts, and they

were eventually transformed by successive colonizations, built over, or pushed into

decline by newer, proximate cities of similar provenance that were-and continue to

be, dependent on the ebb and flow of sociocultural and commercial exchanges among

numerous peoples. While the resultant layering of multiethnic urbanity may appear

disorderly to outsiders, it nevertheless hints of an urban concordance that will be

explored in this paper.

Established on November 7, 1975, during a period of authoritarian rule (Republic

of the Philippines, Presidential Decree 824) that carved much of it out of adjacent

Rizal Province, Metro Manila sits on a flood-prone alluvial plain bisected by the Pasig

River and consists of a rough semicircle of seventeen local government units (LGUs)

of which the littoral core is Manila, a city enfolded within the westward-facing Manila

Bay on the main island of Luzon. Despite its 400-some years of existence as a planned

coastal settlement, at least since its designation as such by Spanish conquistadors in

1571, Manila, now grown into Metro Manila, remains largely a megalopolis of young

people. Energetic, if often impoverished, its youth follow demographics that are a

reflective microcosm of the conservative national total of at least 80 million Filipino

citizens, growing at a rapid 1.8 percent, with a high density of at least 269 persons

per square kilometer (Demeterio 2007), at least half of this population aged below 25

years-or more precisely, a national median age of23.4 years as of the 2010 census2-

I. Among numerous articles citing or reacting to the Dan Brown's novel and the chairman's letter, here are

examples from local journalists, used in the chapter: Melican, Gamil, and Felisse Mangunay 2014;Torrevillas

2013; Seares 2013.

2. Philippine Population Pyramids from the National Statistics Office, "The Age and Sex Structure of the

Philippine Population: (Facts from the 2010 Census);' accessed June 10, 2014, http://www.census.gov.ph/

Concrete ung l' rn 11·m 11 tu1 ,11 ,ipher? oJ

Figure 4.1 . . . This close-up of concrete flyovers and the pedestrian footbridges that literally dip and nse,

snake-like, beneath show how infrastructure has been built in increments, lending a seeming

"messiness" to the landscape of Metro Manila, at least for the untrained observer. Photograph

by Jose Edgardo A. Gomez Jr.

the youngest by proportion to the whole in Southeast Asia. Moreover, already identi-

fied by Douglass (2000) as one of the Mega-Urban Regions (also known as Extended

Metropolitan Regions following McGee and Robinson 1995) of Asia, Metro Manila

is swept along in varying degrees into the dynamics of consumerist concatenations

and megaprojects. Simultaneously, its feverish globalization is checked by local

civic resistance and administrative interventions by LGUs and the overarching

Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA), whose landscape projects

represent well-meaning, if sometimes indiscriminate, attempts to repair and beautify

whatever policy makers perceive to be unsightly or spontaneous construction. Urban

messiness is commonly framed by politicians as an eyesore that could repel visitors,

but it is ironically ignored every election season, when shanty demolition would be

unpopular. Moreover, government interventions are limited to main thoroughfares

and city centers. Thus, rather than overpowering the informal and permuting ele-

ments that enculturate the landscape with its own Filipino logic, metro governance is

digested and absorbed, along with accretions and economic rationality into the daily

content/age-and-sex-structure-philippine-population-facts-2010-census.

04 11\l' I·.< g<1rt o A. c;omez Jr.

city-in-the-making dynamic. All told, the combination of a vigorous population,

regulatory attempts, the prodding of worldly propaganda, and the region's trading

boom caused in no small degree by the nearby Chinese juggernaut economy, results

in the transformation of contested space that becomes a compelling subject for schol-

arly analysis.

This essay describes that contested space by making some sense of its superfi-

cial chaos and argues that even the jumble of transactional dynamics observed at

the roadside up to the skyline are mediated by historic and cultural forces that lend

Metro Manila its distinguishing "messiness:' By finely reading this complexity, the

researcher can elaborate on Metro Manila's profile in a region whose demand for

migrant workers, development potential, and environmental vulnerability imply any

number of growth trajectories. The research draws on archives as well as fieldwork

that describe the metropolis's defining nodes by employing a vertical hierarchy as

a framing device. Key interviews were conducted to validate findings and uncover

areas for insight. Interspersing the review of literature, the author's discussion seeks

to bridge the technical findings toward a sociocultural interpretation that su.ggests the

persistence of native symbolisms and preferences amid the glut of seemingly globaliz-

ing structures.

Urbanization in Asia, the (Dis)ordering of Space, and Urban Semiotics

Many cities in Asia remain at the forefront of socioeconomic growth and have become

loci of innovation. Such cities make the meeting of actors from different worlds pos-

sible, where there is enhanced inclusion of diverse groups and causes and where civic

capabilities are strengthened, but also where major conflicts may erupt (Sassen 2012).

But critics of such writers on world cities remind us that the spaces occupied are

not static platforms on a single scale but can be messy, juxtaposed, and consisting of

multiscalar flows, performances, and practices (Smith 2003). In the urban context,

the debate about globalization can thus be significant and reified, involving attempts

to comprehend the forces at work but neglecting smaller-scale impacts and meanings

that may affect the quality oflife of residents (Jenks 2003).

Despite different views on the matter, the growth of Asian megalopolises also

resonates with literature on the rise of metropolitan areas as governmental solutions

to spatially anchored problems. Whether de jure or de facto, the millions-strong

metropolis has become commonplace despite earlier attempts in the 1970s to control

migration and growth (Simmons 1979). As explained by Gaussier, Lacour, and

Puissant:

The concept of metropolitanization is more than a simple synonym of urban growth according to its accepted and statistical meaning: a whole package of trends, such as urban sprawl, or increasing urbanization rates in spaces already

Concrete Jungle or< ;t•ot ultur,il Cipher?

strongly urbanized. The phenomenon of metropolitanization exceeds all these tendencies. (2003, 253)

65

Simultaneously, alternative interpretations of the apparent spatial quilting are not

uncommon in the literature. For instance, geographer Lynn Staeheli (2010) explains

how the seeming disorder and regulatory attempts over city spaces can be both the

cause and effect of a vibrant democracy, insofar as civic exchange is encouraged, as

opposed to restrictive or undemocratic planned uses. In similar fashion, buildings in

the urban space are designed by architects as acts of cultural production that none-

theless bend to capitalist funding, so that the resulting edifices make up a landscape

that is as much the product of commercial impulse as it is of the design profession

(Jones 2009). Urban growth may be the result of investment in creative industries,

as a means to renew industrial areas and blighted districts by injecting innovation

(Evans 2009). These same culturally productive spaces not only are physical creations

but also must be recognized as sites of signification and communication prerequisite

to human society, as explained by Kim O'Connor (citing Umberto Eco 2003). That

is, they are a system of coding that must be agreed upon by interlocutors, which

precedes transmission of that code into the city's cultural space. Eco himself (1981)

writes about the evolution of semiotics from a preoccupation with symbols and

structures to text-grammars, and in more recent times to reading and interpretation,

which factor into the legibility of the city. Similarly, Pauwels (2009) describes the

city as a huge, out-of-control arrangement, a combination of paradigmatic choices

by actors with conflicting interests, where some signs persist after they have become

obsolete. The point that one may draw from these streams of commentary is that the

interpretation of the city's symbols, including its totality as a landscape or a melange

of signified edifices, demands a certain prior comprehension of semiotic elements-

which themselves may vary from one urbanized society to the next. Ergo, chaos or

order becomes a matter of translation by readers/beholders.

Findings: From Streetscape to Skyscraper

Bottom Story

In Metro Manila, the bottom is as good a place as any to start. The dregs of urban

society often literally cling to the nooks and crannies of the terrain, imposing habit-

ability on the remaining grassy hillsides, creeks, and murky foreshore areas that lie

beyond the pale of incessant urbanization. For informal settlers, the physical geog-

raphy of the delta and its climbing eastern hinterlands often determine whether a

ramshackle wooden hut can be cantilevered over a ravine or hung under a bridge, in

a remarkable colonization that resembles the nests of wasps or the fixtures of barna-

cles. This is readily observed in the many reeking esteros (natural canals, sometimes

ll m\• h g.1100 A. (,omcz Jr.

subsequently re-engineered) that wind through Metro Manila's cities. In other cases,

squatters occupy unguarded idle lands or government property like the edges of

railroad tracks. These colonies persist in cities like Taguig and Muntinlupa, where

shanties on stilts come right up to the shoreline of Laguna de Bai, the country's largest

lake forming the metropolis' southeast border. The rest of the environment, especially

in the rural fringe, continues to be regarded as land for tilling or to be left as wild

areas, where local beliefs hold that nature spirits (i.e., equivalent to dwarves, naiads

and dryads of European lore) hold abode. Such superstitions, common in Southeast

Asia, abound in the metropolis, as ancient trees, particularly of the strangler fig or bo

tree (Ficus religiosa) are not cut down or bypassed without uttering a supplication,

for fear of inciting the curse of some malevolent gnome. (The relevance of such a

phenomenon in the urban setting will be discussed later in the analysis.)

The persistence of such raw informality has been explained by Shatkin (2004),

who leans toward the view that development of an export-oriented economy origi-

nally meant to improve national income has instead led to downward pressure on

wages, environmental destruction, and the dislocation of poor communities, result-

ing in increased immiseration, skyrocketing land prices in city centers, and the con-

sequent occupation of peripheral spaces by dislocated clumps of informal settlers.

In such slums, strategies to eke out a living frpm the floor and underground of the

vaster cityscape are surprisingly diverse and continue to resemble the behaviors of

organisms that thrive on others' leavings: scavenging of plastics or bottles, disassem-

bly and bundling of metallic objects-including fences and lampposts, and peddling

of refried slops and double-dead meat-an unhygienic recycling of fast-food waste

called pagpag, that was featured on BBC in February 2011.3 Shading toward legiti-

macy are the various twenty-four-hour informal vendors who ply their wares on the

streets and hog the sidewalks, yelling to sell such proletarian delicacies as kwek-kwek

(battered quail eggs), adidas (boiled chicken feet), isaw (chicken intestines), and balut

(unhatched duckling), along with overripe fruit and greasy spiced peanuts. This has

been observed around train stations, validating the study of Recio and Gomez (2013),

which points out that there are subtle and organized rhythms and uses of space even

by the seemingly random scattering of hawkers. For instance, itinerant vendors rarely

persist all day on the same contested sidewalks. They arrive, in almost tidal fashion,

to set up just before the lunch hour and late afternoon surges of office workers and

students. Neither do informal vendors colonize space haphazardly but often obtain

prior permission from some neighborhood figure of authority; in some cases, formal

stallholders in adjacent markets may offload their perishable inventory at day's end

3. British Broadcasting Company, "PagPag: 'This food someone else has already eaten", accessed June 10, 2014,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/pOOfcxll. Pagpag is a verb that means to strike or slap down an object against a surface, often with the intention of superficially cleaning it by shaking off grit, as is done by impov-

erished scavengers who fish out this partially eaten food from rubbish bins, prizing and shaking off the bitten

or rotten parts and recooking the leftover, for resale to knowing customers.

Concrete Jungle rn C ;t·m ultural Cipher? 67

by passing these to the hawkers gratis (or for a nominal fee). Those who defend such

unorthodox and relentless pedestrian trade underscore the need for survival and

optimistically point to the resources that slums offer the chaotic city, as explained by

Bolay:

The slum is characterized by the precarious nature of its habitat. But it is much more than that: it can genuinely be seen as a "hothouse" of cultural creativity, economic invention and social innovation. Classic urban planning principles are based on comprehensive planning .... In the slums, however, this technocratic approach is undermined by the social practices of individuals, families and social groups, particularly the poorer ones. These actors resort to their own emergency solutions to urban integration problems, and they do so at the micro-level at which these problems are posed-generally the plot ofland, the house, then the district. (2006, 286)

Such a view is seconded by Pugh (2000) in his study of changing multilateral donor

and government policies toward informal settlement from an "eradication'' mentality

to an "assimilation" into the urban fabric, which he argues can be accomplished with a

great deal of self-help and employing the natural creativity of residents. Nonetheless,

some grounding in reality is needed here: TV news proves that many of the crowded

and older sections of Metro Manila remain havens of crime and banality-to draw

on our ecological analogy, these are the lairs of bottom-dwelling predators: hold-up

gangs, pickpockets, and drug cartels. In the littered and narrow alleys of Manila's

Tonda or Quiapo neighborhoods, for instance, abundant anecdotal evidence suggests

that one might get mugged, lured into a brothel, or simply be coaxed into buying

pirated DVDs or shamanistic potions of risky provenance.4 Similarly, the slums in

other parts, both inner city and at the perimeter, are typical of those described by

Davis (2006) in his book Planet of Slums, of which he estimates there are some quarter

of a million worldwide. This, then, is Metro Manila from the worm's eye: unkempt,

Figure 4.2 This area, developed in the last decade by conversion of an old army base shows an unusual split between a formal, ultramodern district separated only by a highway from a convoluted mass of older shantytowns. Figure by Jose Edgardo A. Gomez Jr.

4. While there are no statistics for these Manila City neighborhoods specifically, longtime residents of Metro

Manila will tell you that Tondo and Quiapo are not for unaccompanied tourists to visit. For written narratives,

try Silverio 2014; Zialcita 2006.

68 Jose Edg<1rdo A. Gomez Jr.

coarse, labyrinthine, and blighted but a place whose denizens possess an uncanny will

to self-organize and thrive.

Middle Story and Historic Overlay

But Metro Manila's artful pandemonium reaches its climax only when one steps into

broad daylight, main roads, and commercial complexes and observes its citizens: its

well-starched and pomaded yuppies running the rat race, uniformed students playing

noontime hooky, and its blue-collar workers enduring the workaday grind, so to

speak. This is the metropolis of rush-hour congestion, with vehicles creeping along

between twenty-nine and thirty-three kilometers per hour, where colorful jeepneys

weave maniacally from curbside to fast lane, picking up and depositing harried pas-

sengers in puffs of tailpipe smoke, while three rapid transit lines of varying heights,

the LRT Yellow Line (1984, 170.72 million passengers/year), LRT Purple Line (2004,

70.33 million passengers/year),5 and MRT Blue Line (1999, 180.00 million passen-

gers/year)6 ferry at least 1.1 million commuters overhead each day, and the revived

(2010) at-grade train carries some 25.2 million passengers each year. Crisscrossing

the metropolitan airspace are elevated roads, locally called flyovers, which prolif-

erated in the 1990s as an effective, if unsightly, engineering solution to worsening

traffic. Together with the ubiquitous ten- to fifteen-meter utility poles, between which

power and telephone cables dangle, the overall visual impression, especially at inter-

sections along the metropolitan main artery of Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, could

be that of a dense entanglement of black vines and cement trunks, rising between

three and seven stories above ground level, interspersed with medium-rise buildings

or the gentry's gated subdivisions. This midlevel geography is the result of a tension

between private and public sector investments that have been built with each socio-

political epoch, as each layer of growth and decay in structures or shift in land uses

can be read as a bullish gamble or a cautious response to the opportunities for profit

and the demands for public infrastructure investments.

Contrasting against other Southeast Asian agglomerations like Jakarta and

Singapore, Metro Manila's vertical profile is relatively lower. It grows out of an organic

sprawl of land parcels, with four sizable clusters of skyscrapers found only along the

historic Escolta Street near Chinatown (City of Manila), the Cubao Araneta Coliseum

complex (Quezon City), the Makati Central Business District (City of Makati), and

the newer Ortigas Business District (City of Pasig). The tallest buildings are no higher

than a modest 259 meters, the PBCom Tower-smaller than the 280-meter towers

5. Basic train performance data from Light Rail Transit Authority, accessed May I 0, 2013, http://www.lrta.gov.

ph/kp_line_l_system.php and http://www.lrta.gov.ph/kp_line_2v2_system.php.

6. Estimate, based on website figure ofS00,000 passengers a day x 360 days, from DepartmentofTransportation and

Communication, accessed May 10, 2013, http://dotcmrt3.gov.ph/about.php?route=3, and http://www.inter-

aksyon.com/business/38531/mrt-3-daily-ridership-hits-nearly-half-a-million-exceeds-capacity-for-6th-year.

Com:rele jungk rn < ;\'m ultural Cipher? 69

Figure 4.3 This panoramic shot depicts the full-blown layering of Metro Manila, particularly the middle

story. Note how the train tracks and the footbridges are elevated above the main intersec-

tion. People are busy crossing this midcanopy, while buses and jeepneys rumble below-where

street vendors and pickpockets also may be found. In the background, the relatively low but continuous skyline is dominated by the roofs of old houses, midrise (four- to five-story) build-

ings, and fewer skyscrapers. Photograph by Jose Edgardo A. Gomez Jr.

of Singapore and the 452-meter Petronas towers of Malaysia, not to mention the

508-meter Taipei 101 in Taiwan.7 Yet the field observer cannot absolutely conclude

that the surrounding urban mosaic is unambitious or awry; rather, the metropolis

appears to have evolved its own polycentric hierarchy through four decades of exist-

ence. Throughout this patchwork, urban space along major nodes is punctuated by

shopping malls, most notably the box-like emporia of the SM Group of Companies,

a homegrown Filipino-Chinese retail and real estate giant versus its close rivals the

Ayala Group and Robinsons Group, followed by a host of smaller conglomerates.

Just as important, the most accessible spaces also constitute a Metro Manila of

tourist routes, of picturesque views of Manila Bay's sunset, anchored onto the visible

and palpable remnants of historic city planning that governed the earlier incarna-

tions of the capital city. It is through the planned layouts of avenues and the coastal

boulevard that one connects at last to a rootedness of Metro Manila in a colonial

lineage absorbed largely from the rule of the United States (1898-1946) and Spain

7. Figures for building heights from the Skyscraper Center, accessed June 7, 2014, http://www.skyscrapercenter.

com/taipei/taipei-101/117/.

70 Jow J1dg.1rdo A. Gomez Jr.

(1565-1898), as well as local architectural and cultural icons- all of which have

become bastions of order that somehow dispel or oppose the wanton encroachment

that so afflicts the urban understories. To begin with, the original Manila grew out of

the urban seed oflntramuros, the squat walled city near the mouth of the Pasig River,

whose wartime rubble had been partially restored to its 1800s fin-de-siecle ambience

by the 1970s (Santiago 2003) and that remains the primary exemplar of Hispanic

plaza complex and gridiron layouts in the metropolis. Just beyond the walls and delib-

erately located as a contrast to the segregation of the port enclave that Intramuros

stood for, fan out the government edifices, grids interlaid with radials, and parks that

make up the legacy of American architect Daniel Burnham of City Beautiful fame.

All these made for a pleasant if small city at the dawn of the twentieth century, when

the burgeoning millions of today could not have been anticipated. And only some five

kilometers south stands the spacious Cultural Center of the Philippines, completed

in 1969 under the watchful eye of then-First Lady Imelda R. Marcos. These are the

areas to which tourists and vacationers flock. Together, this blend of public spaces

combining colonial heritage with the grandiose buildings of the authoritarian era

makes up the first of a dual massing of administrative structures that act as reference

points to counterbalance what would otherwise appear to be an incoherent sprawl of low-rise residences and slums.

The other end of Metro Manila's dual institutional core is found in the Elliptical

Road that forms Quezon City's hub, a city named in postmortem homage to an ener-

getic former president who in the 1940s initiated moves to transfer the capital to

what was then still a rural hinterland some fifteen kilometers away and less prone

to naval attack or annual inundation by the monsoon. Its centerpiece, designed by

architects Harry Frost and Juan Arellano, became the rotund park and mausoleum-

cum-museum of the late President Manuel Quezon, whose dream for a new capital

was fleetingly realized from 1948 to 1976, although a later law (Republic of the

Philippines, Presidential Decree 940 of 1976) reverted the title to historic Manila.

Lastly, a word must be mentioned about another ubiquitous structure that typifies the

metropolitan patchwork: the Roman Catholic churches, as well as houses of worship

of other denominations, including the unmistakable faux-neo-Gothic facades of a

wealthy local Christian sect, the Iglesia ni Kristo, all sprout amid the litter of low-

slung cement and rusty corrugated roofs. The former's spires, bell towers, and crosses

puncture the slew of girders, wires, and elevated pedestrian walkways, as if to compete

for the light of day through the midstory spaces of the metropolis.

Taken all together then, with the blocks of shopping malls, the snaking flyovers

and the elevated trains, the houses of the better classes, and the anchoring effect of

religious structures and government complexes, Metro Manila's loosely strung mid-

story embodies the city dynamic at its best. While feigned pandemonium prevails

to the untrained eye, one can already begin to make out horizontal and vertical

Concrete Jungk or ( ;1·m 1111111 al Cipher? 71

patterns of repetition, directed energies of citizens and the technologies that they

utilize. Simultaneously, Bessey (2002) reminds us that such temporal and spatial dis-

continuities are as fundamental to the system as other seemingly orderly parts of the

hierarchy, at any scale. This means that even the observed disjunctions contribute, in

certain situations, to overall coherence of the urban system.

Upper Story

Fieldwork to decipher the babel of Metro Manila ultimately leads the researcher to

gaze up and explore the upward limits of city growth. It is here, touching the met-

ropolitan horizon, that the summits of material aspiration of Filipinos are erected

and here as well that the minds of commuters and residents below are swayed-

or, as moralists argue, corrupted, by commercial signs and symbols that jostle to

overwhelm the urban panorama. Of late, the metropolis has been caught up in the

Southeast Asian economic boom that has resulted in a rise of real incomes by yuppies

and families sending children to urban universities, which in turn has fueled aggres-

sive construction of thirty- to fifty-story condominium buildings since the 2000s and

the consequent spiking of the urban skyline.

However, often more telling in their impact are the stacks of billboards or movie-

screen-like LED displays and other outdoor advertising that are literally hung or

pasted over the metropolis-on the walls of private property, atop roof decks, on bus

stops, and across other public surfaces. Here, messiness assumes new implications,

as the veneer of ads utilizes both local and global (or Western) symbols and jargon

of sex, prosperity, and popularity to scream or whisper "buy me:' "eat me;' "do me;'

"try me;' and so on. In an earlier study by the author (Gomez 2013), it is noted that

billboards are the result of complex, and thus difficult to regulate, chains of businesses

from producers through advertisers and lot owners. Their location is just as much a

function of the political geography of the metropolis, in which the moneyed elite hold

monopolies in partnership with transnational agencies that have taken root locally

in order to gain indigenous knowledge and promote face-to-face contact with target

consumers (Leslie 1995). When such billboards were still shoddily regulated in the

last decade, a few were recorded to have toppled during typhoons, damaging prop-

erty below or killing people. On the psychological level, they tend to become sources

of controversy when they exceed the bounds of decency in terms of slang usage or

skin exposure, not to mention the common complaint that they ruin once-pristine

vistas. Indeed, commentators will readily observe that much of the advertising that

adorns or destroys the fa<;:ades of Metro Manila caters to a relatively small segment of

society, the struggling middle classes and the upper crust, and only reinforces desires

for products that the majority of citizens cannot afford but are urged to consume.

This, then, is the contested upper story of the metropolitan landscape-a place where

72 Jose E<lgar<lo /\.Gomez Jr.

Figure 4.4

This section of Epifanio De Los Santos Avenue on a typically busy day shows a cross section of

the upper story urban skyline, from billboards and buildings rising up the hill to outreach one

another, while the traffic snarls below. Photograph by Jose Edgardo A. Gomez Jr.

economic wherewithal determines control of space in what seems to be a jungle-like

race to grow vertically and spread out one's canopy of glass, steel, concrete, and mate-

rialistic messages as far abroad as possible.

Analysis and Discussion

Just as nearly all cities in the developing world have informal settlements, so do they

possess in contrastive measure unique ordering patterns for space, which reflect their

inhabitants' usual diurnal and nocturnal activities. These autochthonic regularities

persist despite the chaos that accompanies droves of migrants vis-a-vis the coping

strategies of governments trying to bring public services and job creation up to speed.

This chapter gives but a brief affirmative treatment of ordering: hierarchy, sequence,

and coupling, which are more expertly treated in voluminous research elsewhere

on pattern languages (Salingaros 2000). Rather, what is emphasized here is how the

extant spaces are deeply sociocultural productions on an "as is, where is" basis and

should not be dismissed cursorily as some city-in-the-making whose final crystalliza-

tion will fit a familiar mold found in textbooks from the Global North.

Concrete jungle or ( ;l'm ullur al Cipher? 73

"Generic" Underlying Order

Under the first rubric of analysis, it is obvious from the findings that Metro Manila

is an amalgam of both the planned and the unplanned, beginning with the typical

Southeast Asian city described by McGee (1969), which grows out of a port location

that may or may not have been colonized, in Manila's case, Intramuros, although

the surrounding American-designed government complex appends a distinctive arc.

This is followed by planned suburbs and new industrial and commercial districts.

Eventually, the metropolis fans out desakota-style, into the periphery, where urban

and rural enmesh. Hierarchy infuses this metropolis-echelons of centrality, with

offices and residences clustering around the Central Business Districts and echelons

of growth, as corporate headquarters and hotels loom over gated subdivisions, which

in turn distance themselves from slums and weathered neighborhoods struggling to

keep up a respectable fac,:ade. Such settings are neither permanent nor universal, but

they reflect concentrations of wealth around areas with high access and a diversity of

amenities considered to be pre-eminent during the eras when they were built. There

are orderly sequences of activity as well-commuting rhythms and the surge of office

workers and students who mob shopping malls and entertainment complexes. And

there are couplings and multiple matching too: of one-stop shops and parking spaces,

of schools and sports areas. Thus, the only truly random elements here might be the

presence of litter dropped by pedestrians and the incidence of violent crime in par-

ticular areas.

Customized Order: The Filipino Street Space

Because of a degree of abiding untidiness in the paramount Philippine metropolis

despite government interventions, one might venture to ask whether this is not in fact

a tolerable phenomenon that its citizens might consider less objectionable as long as

it trades off certain perceived conveniences. This is neither to condone the impover-

ished state as acceptable nor to excuse the paucity of development interventions, but

it is rather to recognize that rich and poor alike have found remarkable ways of navi-

gating through the din and shambles. Until they get used to walking longer distances

despite tropical heat and poorly maintained sidewalks and until a more efficient and

predictable mass transit system is completed, locals have had to bear with the undis-

ciplined jeepney and pedicab8 drivers who ferry commuters from the safety of their

doorsteps and back every day. Within the limitations imposed by site geography and

torrid climate, the majority of Filipino public spaces bluntly speak of neighborhood-

specific conveniences for the blue-collar worker, housewife, and student, sometimes

8. Pedicab: a bicycle with a side-attached steel-frame cabin, covered with thin tarpaulin, and driven by the urban

poor as a means to earn a living. As a nonmotorized vehicle, it is used to drive one or two passengers to and

from alleys and culs-de-sac.

74 Jose Edgardo A. Comez Jr.

Figure 4.5

This neighborhood, which is part of a state university, shows how mature informal settle- ments in the interior of a housing allotment have changed from partly wooden makeshift dwellings to two- to three-story concrete structures over time, juxtaposed along th~ rows of bungalows for the university's rank- and-file employees. Figure by Jose Edgardo A. Gomez Jr.

at the cost of convenience to other transients, as informal service providers swarm the

stree.ts. Ho~ever, the properties for the well-to-do are often gated and served by auto- m~b1le, w_hile places f~r upscale entertainment have dress codes and high price tags. This p~ys~cal ~eg~egahon betrays social schisms that result from unequal wealth and land d1stnbut10n m and around Metro Manila (Ortega 2013; Shatkin 2000; Strassman

and Blun~ 1994) .. The result is a sort of customization of spaces for citizens of average '.11eans with particular predilections; in contrast to mainland Southeast Asians for

mstance, Filipinos do not heavily spice their food, favor saccharine drinks, call toilets

"comfort rooms;' and often ignore stoplights late at night when no cross-flow traffic

is visibly approaching. The landscape adjusts accordingly: outdoor advertisements tout simple, high-fat meals with rice and a soft drink "CR" · h b · , signs ang a ove rud1- m~ntary public toilets, and traffic lights recently equipped with countdown timers gmde motorists. This is, in the author's final analysis, no excuse for inefficiency or

dysfunctionality of the urban spaces that must be repaired or re-engineered, but it

does argue for some leeway against more strictly aseptic and rule-frozen cities that result from doctrinaire planning and management.

Deeper Connectivity-a Southeast Asian Pattern?

Whil~ Metro ~anila's origins as a formal entity are herein acknowledged in the colomal foundmg of Spanish Manila over the remains of the native palisaded port

,ll,pn n

settlement of Rajah Sulaiman (Corpuz 2007), the author would like to close here with

the suggestion that a recursive cultural hierarchy manifests itself in space that draws

on an even deeper precolonial cosmology. This is supported by the evidence of present

structures, where the powerful and wealthy occupy and command from the upper

stories or more centrally accessible areas, while those who are impoverished or just

getting by occupy the lower and middle levels, sometimes in border areas between

districts, so that a gradation of sorts is established. This cultural gradient shades down

to the imagined realm, still socially relevant, of creatures that inhabit the desakota

edge, from animals to nature spirits respected by those migrants who have retained

their folk beliefs and who may shun hoary groves and swampy creeks at the urban

edge because they believe these places to be dwellings of earth spirits. This resonates

strongly with what anthropological studies describe as a layering of the universe of

indigenous peoples in the Philippines, different from Christian notions of heaven,

purgatory, and hell into which access depends on earthly actions. For instance, hin-

terland tribes like the Manobo in Mindanao speak of a fourteen-layered universe

(seven above and seven below the human plane), while many Visayan ethnic groups

reduce this to seven layers in total, and as one goes farther north, tribes like the lfugao

and Bontoc limit their skyworlds and underworlds to four layers (Demetrio et al.

1991).

While there is no cosmological numerology involved in contemporary construc-

tion techniques, the hierarchical notion seems also tacitly reinforced by the siting of

places of worship in elevated or central areas, often manifested as churches of differ-

ent Christian denominations but also occasionally a Buddhist temple or an Islamic

mosque built in a grand manner. And yet persistent at the level of the personal prop-

erty owner, the author has heard of the engraving or embedding of coins, talismans,

and other charms beneath doorsteps or into lintels to attract prosperity and fend

off intrusive beings. In relation to urban surroundings, however, the most plausible

relationship that can be mirrored seems to be the whole syncretic approach: the layers

of pan-Southeast Asian animism have been subsumed into the monotheistic cos-

mologies of colonizers, even as Filipinos still retain a propensity to dig deep into their

cultural consciousness to employ whatever notions can be hybridized-that is, the

concept of an Almighty does not dispel or erase the utility oflesser sources of spiritual

or material succor. Taking the above patterns all together, it cannot be dismissed as

too remote that some of this hints at a subtle influence of Hinduism, a belief system

that touched the archipelago before fourteenth-century Islam and sixteenth-century

Christianity swept over it (Osborne 2013). Borrowed from Hinduism are those exis-

tential schemes where gods lurk and where humans and the elementals travel freely

between levels to interact beneficently or mischievously. This layering or permeable

zoning of the universe and its relatively loose borders reflects in the Philippine urban

experience, especially in its culminating manifestation as a metropolis.

/ 0 os~ l .dgardo A. 10111ez r.1,...-·. --- ---

figure 4.6 Whal resembles chaos may actually reflect a deeper affinity for a multitiered coexistence with other forces of nature, as Philippine mythology and religious iconography recognize a many-layered universe, inhabited by a supreme being, higher deities, and humans or elementals who freely travel between levels. Lower planes contain earth spirits, as well as malevolent beings. Given this cultural lore as background, does it seem strange that many Philippine cities reflect a lay- ering as well? Figure by Jose Edgardo A. Gomez Jr.

As a deep-seated cultural notion, it is also radically different from the Chinese

feng ~hui, a framework that prescribes positioning of houses and towns in auspicious locations and juxtapositions. East Asian cities are laid out more according to what is

conducive to the flow of good chi (vital energy) and reserve spaces for society's upper

classes, as opposed to the looser blending found in what anthropologists collectively

call the Austronesian races of Southeast Asia. And, because a significant portion of this

latter region did have Indic ties in antiquity, rather than the Sinic predominance over

N~rth Vietn_am and Taiwan (Reid 1993; Diamond 1999), it is not far fetched to proffer this alternative reading as an explanation of the spatial dynamics and social structure

~fMetro M~nila as a kin to other regional ports whose lineage and Austronesian poli- ties shared ties oflanguage, material culture, and superstition, centuries antecedent to

the waves of European stock The insistence of layered cityscapes that are permeable

to mobile citizens may indeed seem discomfiting at first glance, but this is a porous-

ness that fits right into the societal context: there are no rigid socioeconomic enclaves

here,.neither are there sharp gender inequalities nor barriers to interclass dialogue in

a nat10n-state that has never had an indigenous monarchical tradition.

Ultimately, the layered but intermingled landscape serves as a comfort zone and

mirror to both the present fecundity and historical accretion that has defined-and

will define-Metropolitan Manila as it completes its first half millennium. While the

author does not assert this as a definitive explanation for the studied messiness of

Metro Manila and many other highly urbanized areas in the Philippines, one can rea-

~onably suppose that embedded cultural patterns do tend to resurface, as proven, for mstance, by the ubiquity and appeal of neo-/faux- Hispanic sites throughout a country

that has long since evolved beyond Latin urbanism and even later Americanization

to emerge as an independent republic that is continually redefining, and physically

expressing, a contemporary Filipino identity. This repurposing of colonial style is

another creative means of taking ownership of a formative heritage that, unlike other

Asian countries, has been undeniably Western in provenance. It nevertheless must

be rooted in the same original geography, temperament, and material bases that have

durably shaped the Filipinos as a race before and after colonial experiences. In this

sense, the veneer of colonial art, architecture, and semiotics become subsequently

parts of the midstory as well as the fabric for recreation of another layer of the urban

landscape. This new layer may draw nostalgically from the design of the old but will

always be different, as its structures will have been erected for other purposes, follow-

ing changes in governance, environment, and the performance of real estate markets.

Conclusion

This chapter has woven a narrative of the physical environment and activities of

Metropolitan Manila, a seemingly tumultuous metropolis representative of develop-

ing Southeast Asia. It demystifies the superficial disarray by describing in vertical

fashion structures and circumstances that impart uniqueness. Beginning with the

unplanned underground, slums, and street-level rhythms of commuters, this work

moves up to the designed residences, gathering places, traffic intersections, and malls

that anchor urban sprawl. The importance of enduring historic icons and places of

worship is recognized. Finally, the physical aspirations of Metro Manila's economic

elite find spirited expression in abundant office construction and the recent rash of

condominiums that protrude above flyovers and tenements.

Taken together, all these physical and operational elements tell the story of a recur-

rent, if inelegant, logic in the metropolis- one that tolerates degrees of friction or

loose fit that local citizens may not fret over too much but that may seem unfin-

ished or undesirable by Occidental standards. Ultimately, the author suggests that

such architecture and syncopations are perhaps rooted in an Austronesian cultural

pattern found in Southeast Asian nations, one that differs from Chinese, Indian, and

colonial Western notions of how the universe is, or should be, ordered. The messi-

ness thus becomes a sort of layered and pervious scheme of things, through which

citizens can navigate and negotiate their lives, depending on their circumstances and

endowments.

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Chapter 5 The Royal Field ( Sanam Luang): Bangkok's Polysemic Urban Palimpsest

Koompong Noobanjong

The concept of urban palimpsest proposes that contemporary cities can be seen as

a layered construction exhibiting physical diversity in their historical development

(Azimzadeh and Bjur 2007, 2). In this regard, Bangkok (the capital of Siam which

later became Thailand) possesses rich-if not polysemic-layers of morphologies,

memories, and meanings, as vividly shown by the Royal Field (known in Thai as

Sanam Luang). Created in 1782 at the same time Bangkok was founded, the Royal

Field is a large open space located at the heart of the city in front of the Grand Palace.

Since the eighteenth century, it has progressed from being (1) a ground for regal

cremation and a regal paddy field to being (2) a public open space for social gather-

ings and a setting for state ceremonies, military exercises, cultural and recreational

events in the nineteenth century and (3) a scene for street fighting and killing, as

well as various kinds of civic activities during the twentieth century and beyond, for

example, an open market, parking lot, sleeping place for the homeless, or even a loca-

tion to solicit prostitutes.

To a large extent, the above developments illustrate the multifaceted and multi-

layered significations of Sanam Luang. By operating as a representation of power,

the Royal Field has occupied a prominent position both in the urban fabric and in

the collective psyche of Thai people. Aside from serving the monarchy and existing

power holders, it has been a site where major contests to power and authority in

modern Thailand have collided in making their marks, claims, demands, actions, and

representations.

Owing to such historical importance, this study first examines Sanam Luang as a

symbolic device for the state and ruling authority to manifest, legitimize, and main-

tain their hegemonic power. The scholarly focus subsequently shifts to the theme of

contested space, where different groups of contestants, including ordinary citizens,

have reappropriated the Royal Field to perform their social and political acts as well

as to create their modern identities.

In contrast to the accepted convention that portrays Sanam Luang exclusively

as a ground for performing regal rites, rituals, and ceremonies (Committee for the

Rattanakosin Bicentennial Celebration 1982, 321), the following analytical and