Chapter 5

Managing the Post-Colonial City Crisis & the Crisis of Management

Interventions From Above: State & the World Bank, 1946-1986
State versus Squatters: Shelter Symbolism and Tactical Redeployment, 1946-1972
Juvenile state shelter and service delivery and realty development in the metropolis at the outset of Independence, emerged in the context of both ascending social and market demand for urban housing following in the wake of rapid postwar urbanisation. While the dramatic proliferation of slum and squatter colonies and the economic embolisms associated with them drew urban management into modicum efforts at socialised housing, the crucial impetus to early shelter delivery programs was provided by an increasingly profitable market for housing demanded by bourgeoning bureaucratic middle class. In general, while the bulk of shelter stock generated by the early programs tilted to towards the latter, urban managers marshalled the problems of squatting and urban conurbation through arbitrary and coercive redeployment campaigns involving the summary eviction-

relocation and resettlement of whole squatter communities to far and often undeveloped suburban sites. At the threshold of Independence, thousands of displaced families from war-ravaged areas migrated to the metropolis in 1945, settling on vacant and idle public and private lands with little or no regard to land ownership. With an estimated population of over 20,000 in 1946, mainly confined to the old colonial Intramuros and Tondo districts, squatter and slum settlements soon parachuted all over the city - along railroad tracks, estuaries and swamplands. In the wake of the postwar industrial boom, a steady stream of rural migrants propped up the squatter population from 96,000 in the mid-50s to an alarming 283,000 by the early 60s.i In the face of such an explosive trend, the need for socialised planning became compelling indeed. In its earliest version, official postwar shelter policies

resurrected the three-pronged thrust of previous colonial programs on slum clearance, relocation and housing and subdivision development. Urban public land and housing programs navigated mainly along lines charted by the reactivated prewar Peoples Homesite Corporation (PHC) and the National Housing Commission (NHC), which provided neither direct state shelter investments nor low income housing.ii Rectification of the latter and the rationalisation of inter-agency coordination led to the fusion of these two agencies in 1947 into the Philippine Homesite and Housing Corporation (PHHC). PHHC departed from its predecessors by rhetorically incorporating socialised housing and direct investments in its agenda of priorities while sharing slum clearance

and relocation functions with other agencies involved in social welfare and service delivery. It also signalled and stimulated the emergence of an inchoate web of public and private credit facilities to prime up the market for low cost housing in the 50s. Thus, six years after its creation in 1950 by virtue of Republic Act 580, the Home Financing Commission (HFC), patterned after the US Federal Housing Administration, instituted a mortgage insurance program to induce banks and financial institutions to grant housing loans on liberal credit terms and mobilised investments in housing by reducing risks on loans with longer periods of maturity. Following suit, the Government Service and Insurance System (GSIS) and the Social Security System (SSS), respective insurance programs for state and private employees, started to extend inter-agency loans to bankroll PHHC housing projects in the mid and latter 50s. Similarly, the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) unveiled a small loans program for low income borrowers in 1960.iii Following congressional ratification of the Tenement Law (Republic Act 3469), low income high rise tenement construction was revitalised in the 60s. The NHC was created to supervise production of prefabricated dwelling units for low and middle income groups and to help coordinate expanding state housing commitments.iv Screened by the Ministry of Social Welfare and Development, eligible clients were allocated dwelling units via lottery overseen by the PHHC. In quantitative terms, however, public shelter provision hardly made a dent in plugging the widening gap between supply and demand for urban housing.

Hence,

while the combined achievement of conventional

housing programs (PHHC, GSIS, SSS and DBP) stood at a mediocre 135,114 units nationwide between 1948 to 1975,v in Metro-Manila alone the squatter population jumped by 56 times to 1.3 million during that interval. Qualitatively, in-built biasses in the allocation of low cost housing and credit tended to operate against low income clients and eventually transformed PHHC sponsored housing projects into middle-class havens.vi Although loan terms were extremely attractive (6% interest, 25 years to pay and up to 90% financing), self-imposed constraints resulted in their typical product reaching only the top 12% of subscribing membership (e.g. in the case of GSIS and SSS).vii While rentals and amortisation rates were considerably lower than in the open market, they were beyond the means of the poor because they were based on cost rather than family income, leading gradually to their expulsion from state housing projects in favour of the more solvent middle-class clientele (clerks, civil servants, professionals, military and police personnel).viii In the USAID-funded Project 5 in Metro-Manila, for instance, one of the nine low income housing projects under PHHC auspices - apart from huge turnover rates due to tenants defaulting on payments - many of the original apartments had gone at the outset to government employees by order of the mayor of Manila. Public housing in the Philippines had been treated and financed like private housing and operated as such. Token state subsidisation of public housing had been endorsed by the fact that no additional congressional funds over and above its original capital were granted to

the central housing agency, PHHC. High building standards and the capital-intensive nature of tenement housing invariably translated into relatively high production costs per unit; thus exerting affordability constraints on poor households.ix Practical biasses inherent in the type of shelter delivery adrift in the Philippines seem to stem from the then prevailing modernisation ideology informing urban management:x ... which sought to make the urban poor adapt to modern urban lifestyles, and fostered Western oriented aesthetic norms through tenement living. The net effect was that social housing programs failed to reflect the preferences, needs and paying capacities of the poor. In the face of unabated squatting and the impotence of symbolic state shelter delivery in the 50s and 60s, massive tactical decongesting campaigns via slum clearance, relocation and resettlement form the actual hard core of urban crisis management. This administrative praxis began to take shape during noted period, when city authorities relocated some 7,000 squatter families to various sites in the metropolitan periphery.xi Legally, squatter evictions were facilitated by court injunctions arising from either suits filed by private landowners or the prerogative vested upon the mayor by the city charter for purposes abating public nuisances. The early squatter redeployment drives were marked by the red thread of inadequate site provisions and employment opportunities coupled with scarce and inaccessible community facilities forcing many relocatees to migrate back to the city. Moreover, while some resettled

tenants were even barred from the right to purchase the lots they occupied, majority of them (75% of the squatters surveyed in the 50s) were found financially ineligible or unable to keep up with payments when they had the right to buy. Inevitably, payment delinquencies led to the foreclosure of hundreds of sales contracts.xii Whereas previous evictions took place on a piecemeal basis, affecting a relatively small number of people, the city government began large scale evictions in 1963. This was a precipitate action which inadvertently botched preliminary state plans to correct early mistakes through integrated services and industrial development in Sapang Palay, a pilot relocation area 40 kilometres north of Manila. Between December 1963 and March 1964, almost 15,000 squatter families in the capital lost their homes as a result of massive demolition operations within the walls of Intramuros, Tondo and the North Harbor areas. Squatter shanties were summarily burned down, allegedly to give way for the restoration of the ancient Spanish walls and the transformation of Intramuros into a cultural centre. Consequently, 4,500 of them were relocated to Sapang Palay before the proposed state development plan could take off the ground. Unfortunately, virtually no preparations had been made to absorb the sudden influx of such a vast number of people who found themselves literally being dumped at a 754 hectare hilly, infertile government estate without the benefit of shelter, public services and employment. Additional resettlement sites were opened in San Pedro (1963), in Carmona (1968) and Dasmarinas, Cavite (1974, 28 km southwest of

Manila) in a way that recapitulated the nostalgic maladies in Sapang Palay and other earlier sites (with the exception of Dasmarinas in subsequent phases of relocation).xiii Indicting the viability of eviction, relocation and resettlement as a corrective strategy to urban congestion and conurbation, an

authoritative study on the subject listed a host of counterproductive effects. It argued that while demolitions did not spare the complex informal sector economy that has emerged in those low income residential quarters (existing employment opportunities within the cleared areas were destroyed as well), out-city resettlement engenders the multiplication of costs in all sectors of life (e.g. the absence of alternative employment, concentration of job opportunities in the capital implying high transport costs, the longer chain of middlemen and additional transportation costs inflate household expenses for food and other commodities, etc.). As such, the process of de-resettlement is

particularly intensive in the initial stages of relocation. In Sapang Palay, 60% of relocatees left between 1960-1969, while 45% between 1968-1972 abandoned the Carmona resettlement site. Those who left sold their claims on lots to speculators or lower middle class outsiders. Essentially, relocation did not significantly contribute in the dispersal of urban growth. On the contrary, (given the high remigration rate) through backfilling, these standard urban satellites tended to further reinforce the trend towards conurbation and

metropolitanisation.xiv

Polity, Culture, Ideology, Power and Community

Urban management and managers certainly do no operate in a political vacuum, and therefore cant be meaningfully understood in isolation from polity and political culture and their general and specific complexion. In this context, the flux and tone of urban policies and management strategies and technologies are inextricably tied to the conjunctural shifts in mainstream polities and states of Third World societies. In the Philippines, this relation is graphically illustrated by the strategic reupholstering of city management following in train with the institution in 1972 of autocratic rule by Ferdinand Marcos, and later with the reinstitution of the liberal democratic yet elite-dominated democratic state power under Corazon Aquino in 1986. Within the framework of constitutional democracy patterned after the US model, the political system from 1946-1972 operated in a relatively decentralised climate. Factions of the landed oligarchy

alternated in power through electoral contests, where citizens were mobilised through traditional patron-client relationships, and political organisations along horizontal or class lines were still embryonic. The

unwritten rule of elite constitutionalism dictated that each elite faction would get its chance to control the government machinery and dole out the spoils of victory to its followers.xv Urban and rural delivery systems of collective goods and services had often served as traditional conduits for patronage politics, as one author, studying metropolitan politics, observed:xvi

Jurisdictional conflicts over the responsibility for the delivery of services among local units and between the municipalities and the provincial governments, as well as the national government, often immobilised local bureaucracies. The preoccupation of MMA (Metropolitan Manila Area) local officials with electoral contests influenced decisions on priority programs and services which local government should undertake. In general, local government tended to undertake services with potentially greater political impact, which would promote good public relations and result in more voted at election time. A study, for example, of Manila city ordinances involving public works projects in 1963 (an election year) revealed the partisan nature of these policies. Of some 44 ordinances enacted from January to November 1963 authorising the construction, repair of roads and bridges and acquisition of private lands for right of way and private buildings, more than half (24) were confined to the first district, the incumbent mayors bailiwick.xvii The clientist character of urban politics may also account for the ambiguity of city policies towards squatters and slum dwellers who form a large potential market for political support. It also explains why despite occasional spates of evictions and relocations, squatting as a growing phenomenon was relatively tolerated in the pre-autocratic era, i.e. before martial law disbanded traditional structures of electoral competition. In fact, in the course of power base building, the practice of literally herding squatters into selected areas to guarantee bloc voting by petty politicians and caciques, virtually created new slum and squatter

colonies in the city!xviii On the other hand, squatters and slum dwellers as well as community organisations who had banded themselves into unified voting blocs tended to maximise manoeuverability afforded by the electoral process by waging their bets on candidates best equipped to deliver an array of otherwise scarce social dividends to their localities (security of land tenure, services, etc.).xix Linkages between traditional elite political machineries and local organisations to and constituencies city, vertically and integrated national the

communities

mainstream

provincial

polities.

Pragmatic advantages conjured by patronage politics in the form of symbolic resource allocation in exchange for political allegiance tended to deflect popular resentment away from more strategic, albeit more risky, class-based forms of political mobilisation, thereby by and large

reinforcing the status quo. However, by the end of the 60s elite democracy began to burst at the seams as a result of two parallel developments. The rapid degeneration of elite competition into violent vendettas between huge private armies of the oligarchical warlords was triggered off by Marcos reelection to the presidency in 1969, one of the most corrupt and violent elections in Philippine postwar history. And more importantly, the growing success of the Filipino middle and lower classes in utilising constitutionally guaranteed freedoms to articulate popular demands.

As the upper classes were tied down in internecine strife over political office and over the response to US economic domination (see Chapter One, p 19?), thousands of youths, workers and peasants burst out from the straightjacket of patronage politics to rock the country with antielite and anti-US demonstrations, strikes and marches. With class and nationalist consciousness taking hold, the capacity of the elite-dominated democratic system to co-opt, fragment and defuse mass demands through patronage began to break down.xx Following the usurpation of state power by Marcos in 1972, a military-technocratic government was installed, traditional institutions of elite democracy dismantled, dissident segments of the ruling and popular classes ruthlessly suppressed, and the economy harmonised with the requirements of transnational capital and WB-IMF sanctioned reforms. The political arrangement signified by the authoritarian state was a

schizophrenic mix between, on the one hand, a modernising westernised technocracy and the elevation caciquismo and patronage to its highest conceivable form.xxi Strategic changes in metropolitan management and city politics dovetailed ideological caciquismo well with this dramatic shift in political power and following 1975 the twin logic in of the modernisationpolitical and

orientation which in

would

culminate

administrative centralisation of the National Capital Regions 17 separate cities and municipalities when a presidential decree (PD 824) ordered the integration of 17 local governments under the Metropolitan Manila Commission (MMC).xxii

Administrative rationalisation and infrastructural modernisation were part and parcel of the Marcos regimes grand ambitions to convert the city into the Mecca of transnational corporate investments and tourism. On another level, it was a logical step in the process of regional power centralisation. World Bank technocrats were among the most energetic and very actively lobbied for the drive towards state orchestrated strategic reorganisation of city management. Ecstatic over the final creation of the MMC, the World Bank quickly committed itself to assist the metropolitan government with technical assistance and financing to tackle questions of organisation and management, fiscal policy, programming and

budgeting. The MMC was a super-body envisioned by the Bank to establish strategic policy and coordinate infrastructure planning for the area and supervise the administration of local services. xxiii At the same time, consolidation of cacique power synonymous to this process corresponded with the centralisation and institutionalisation of the formal and quasi-formal instruments of coercive power:xxiv Moves to centralise metropolitan police services were started in the late 60s with the assistance of the USAID Public Safety program ... Local mayors were instrumental in forging the network of baranggay, ward leaders who acted as the grassroots eyes and ears of the regime. Police services were formally integrated in March 1974, under the control and supervision of the Philippine Constabulary ... While its objective was

technocratic centralisation, in actuality, the Bank promoted

greater personal concentration of power in Marcos hands ... Marcos appointed his wife Imelda as governor of the area ... all local officials in the area were to be appointed by Marcos, and the power to levy and collect revenues were transferred from local governments to the Commission. As we shall see later in the succeeding section, the duality of urban management strategies appears to have been inspired by the constraints imposed by the unholy wedding between cacique and technocratic ideologies plus the ambivalent programs executed to address the squatter problem. By the time the liberal democratic Corazon Aquino assumed political power in 1986, Marcos institutional brainchildren were already so solidly in place after nearly two decades of dictatorship that to have dismembered them would have destabilised the new, still fragile dispensation. Aquinos position towards the city poor and squatters was infected by a similar ambivalence: retention of the most repressive features of urban management alongside democratisation and the controlled institutionalisation of peoples power, the latter

demonstrating the growing sophistication and strength of urban collective movements. The ramifications of this ambivalence will be the subject of elaboration further on.

State and World Bank versus Squatters: Strategic Dualities, Slum Upgrading & Bulldozer-and Uproot Politics, 1976-1986

Reaching breaking point proportions by the early 70s, unmitigated squatting, then estimated at 1/3 of total metropolitan population, invited serious attention from official quarters and strategic remedial inputs generally forking out in two analogous directions. The cutting edge of initial state squatter policy was an enlarged looking glass of the previous thrust provided by controversial growth centre strategies: Relocation and resettlement coated with a semblance of socialised but de facto middle class oriented shelter delivery. Viewed through the cognitive lense of the authoritarian state, squatters were simply technical obstacles standing in the way of ostentatious official plans to beautify and modernise metropolitan topography. Symbolising this vulgar view was city governess, Imelda Marcos grand vision of turning Manila into the City of Man, a modern city complete with financial centre, an area for hotels and restaurants, an embassy enclave, high class restaurant areas and other appurtenances of luxury living, Florida style.xxv The zeal with which the Marcoses mobilised the coercive powers of the autocratic state in the strategic attempt to physically obliterate the squatting problem was legendary. Adding teeth to the eviction-relocation protocol, Marcos issued a score of edicts and

memoranda facilitating and legitimising eviction and relocation campaigns to an extent never before possible. Delivering the opening salvo in 1972, the president directed (Letter of Instruction, LOI 19) the secretaries of National Defence, Public Works and Highways, Social Welfare and other

heads of government agencies to remove all illegal construction along estuaries, river banks, railroad tracks, buildings erected without permit and to allocate or assist in the relocation of squatters and other displaced or evicted families. This was followed by a series of procedural instructions and decrees (LOI 19A in 1972 & PD 296 in 1973, see Table on Laws and Decrees), and decisively climaxed in 1975 when Marcos introduced the notorious Anti-Squatting Law (PD 772) criminalizing squatting and penalising offenders with imprisonment ranging from 6 months to one year or a fine of no less than 1,000 pesos or no more than 5,000 pesos with subsidiary imprisonment in case of insolvency.xxvi These ferocious laws caused public uproar since it practically gave private owners and city authorities in blanco power to carry out arbitrary evictions and forced relocations. Indeed, statistics lend credence to these fears. Of the 46,186 relocated families between 1963-1980 from the metropolis to government resettlement sites, at least 27,486 or almost 60% had been resettled after the imposition of Martial Law in 1972. For the whole country, the now defunct Presidential Assistant on Housing and Squatter Relocation Agency (PAHRA) disclosed that some 400,000 urban families had been evicted or resettled between 1973-1980, i.e.

approximately 18% of the total urban population.xxvii In the name of beautification, coercive anti-squatting

legislation sanctioned Imelda Marcos frantic and massive efforts to fumigate if you like city landscape from squatters or what she pejoratively referred to as blistering eye sores, employing the more preferred

bulldozer-uproot strategy. Notable cases occurred, for example, during the hosting of the Miss Universe pageant in 1974 when squatter shanties, housing an estimated 100,000 people along the parade route, were demolished on a wholesale basis. In much the same way, 10,000 were ejected and relocated before the visit of US president Gerald Ford in 1975. A year after, 65,000 squatters were shuttled away as a result of a citywide beautification campaign on behalf of the delegates to the 1976 IMFWB conference in Manila.xxviii Tragically, the elan of these huge eviction campaigns rhymed ill with the capacity of extant relocation areas to accommodate the sheer number of relocatees involved. And since tantamount upgrading of resettlement sites was forgone, this strategy repeatedly ended in fiasco and at best regenerated the vicious cycle of de-settlement alluded earlier on. Failure of the relocation strategy provoked the periodic official threat of the Return to the Province Program, designed to prevent rural families from migrating to Manila by providing current city residents with identity cards to distinguish them from those officially regarded as intruders. An attempt vehemently challenged and foiled by budding squatter belligerence triggered off by the unpopular relocation

programs.xxix Elsewhere, state and World Bank technocrats were transmitting new impulses in the form of alternative strategies in Third World shelter and urban development. Alarmed by exponential urban growth, poverty and the blunders of erstwhile growth development strategies, international organisations like the World Bank and the United Nations joined the reform

debate on slum improvement and urban development. As a facet of a new basic needs development strategy, the World Bank and other international development institutions propagated low cost housing projects designed to rely on the self-help inputs of target beneficiaries, thereby adopting, if only rhetorically, Turners concept of housing as a process.xxx Known in official parlance as sites and services and slum upgrading, this new brand of low-cost housing programs was soon adopted by many governments in the Third World. Indonesia and the Philippines were among the first countries in Southeast Asia to experiment along these coordinates. Slum upgrading in situ and sites and services formed the avantgarde of technocratic management technologies counterposed by the World Bank to the more mundane palliatives of slum relocation and expensive shelter delivery still regnant in the Philippines. Slum upgrading as a novel approach to mass housing consisted of re-blocking, or the rearrangement of the typically irregular blueprint of slum settlements by moving the dwellings along a rectangular layout, hand in glove with the provision of basic infrastructure, access to water and electricity, then renting or selling the sites at affordable costs to beneficiaries. Re-blocking, however, often entails the relocation of an overspill affected by the decongesting measures. Sites and services projects usually serve a two-fold function viz., to accommodate the overspill population of upgrading programs and to increase the housing stock at low costs.xxxi This virgin strategy - at the forefront of the Manila Urban Development Program, MUDP I - was to be

tested by the World Bank at the proverbial Tondo Foreshoreland Area (TFA), the single largest agglomeration of slum and squatter dwellers in the Philippines.

Testing Technocratic Technology in Tondo (MUDP)

Being the freak case of city congestion and conurbation, TFA logically qualified as central testing ground for trend-setting in situ upgrading-cumsites and services programs introduced by the World Bank in the early 70s. The TFA test-case heralded the elevation of this strategy to national and city-wide shelter policy with the launching of the Slum Improvement and Resettlement (SIR) program and the Zonal Improvement Program (ZIP) during the latter half of that decade. More significantly, the TFA example, being the traditional epicentre of squatter dissidence and enjoying a long and complicated history of community organisations, eloquently portrays the thug of war dialectics between management and grassroots counter-management that dynamized the evolution of urban policies. The TFA is a 180 hectare land strip reclaimed from the Manila Bay in the early 1940s and was intended for industrial development and a port complex for inter-island shipping. After World War II, the land lying in fallow and largely undeveloped was quickly settled by squatters. Between 1968-1973, the squatter population dramatically leaped from 44,000180,000 (or 27,500 families).xxxii In step with the modernisation thrust in the early 70s, a giant urban renewal and development plan along the TFA was announced by the

government, entailing the expansion of the old Fisheries Port and the construction of an international port with a network of circumferential roads embracing the whole Metro-Manila and ten radial superhighways terminating in export processing zones all over Northern Luzon to the Southern Tagalog region.xxxiii With the spectre of relocation - then the lodestar of official urban policy - looming, brewing squatter resistance in the early 70s, denounced the plans and official indifference to long-standing claims for land tenure rights. At the vanguard of the urban poor movement stood ZOTO, a federation of 113 local organisations from 8 adjacent shantytown areas in Southern TFA. By mid-decade, the prairie fire of squatter opposition -a response to the common threat posed by arbitrary government actions - spread to other squatter areas in the city, coalescing later into the ZOTO-Ugnayan, a city-wide confederacy of militant community organisations. Meanwhile, negotiations around urban development projects for Bank financing were afoot in 1973-76 between the government and select teams of World Bank technocrats. Bilateral deliberations were marked by discrepant views on strategy. Against the traditional official predisposition to hitherto unsuccessful out-city relocation, resettlement and expensive showcase housing alternatives, Bank officials strongly endorsed slum upgrading in situ and sites and services as vanguard approach in the

rehabilitation of Tondo. The Tondo-project was a substantial component of the city-wide $65.7 million MUDP, half of which was to be funded by the Bank.xxxiv

On the surface everything about the new development recipe appeared to be innovative enough. After all, slum upgrading meant to integrate for the very first time upgrading of substandard shelter, basic services delivery with income generating programs. It promoted sound principles like those of maximum retention of structures, minimum displacement of families, maximum community participation in planning and implementation, and integrated of physical target and socio-economic Beyond

development,

affordability

beneficiaries.xxxv

appearances though, the programs purportedly innovative features were by no means all that original. Bank propaganda skirted the fact it had:xxxvi ... pirated the approach from ZOTO-Ugnayan, which had drawn up a similar alternative to the government relocation plans in the early 70s. As formulated by the people of Tondo, slum upgrading was a more humanitarian approach than relocation. As

reformulated by the World Bank, however, humanitarian rhetoric coexisted with hard capitalist economics ... On the one hand, the Bank claimed that slum upgrading projects were directed at very poor people, on the other hand, they were economically predicated on recovery of full costs from their beneficiaries. .. This was a major contradiction but it was something that the Bank confidently ignored in the mid-70s as it sought to persuade the Marcos regime to adopt slum upgrading as its general approach to mass housing. Although the Banks prescription finally prevailed, schisms between proponents of the technocratic and traditional approaches lingered

nevertheless and precipitated a division in the governments housing programs. While the Bank virtually fathered the National Housing Authority (NHA), created by Marcos under considerable Bank pressure in 1975 to absorb the functions of the PHHC, merge pre-existing government hosing agencies and supervise slum upgrading efforts, city governess and First Lady Imelda Marcos eventually erected her own fiefdom, the Ministry of Human Settlements (MHS) three years later to carry out showcase middle class biassed housing projects. Obviously, this division added fodder to administrative confusion in the housing sector.xxxvii To a certain extent, the conflict played into the hands of the Tondo squatters and gave them greater manoeuverability in bargaining and lobbying attempts with Bank and state officials aimed at harmonising the slum upgrading program more closely with grassroots demands and community interests. However, when the Tondo project was ultimately operationalised, the difference between sophisticated technocratic

strategies and traditional norms proved to be deceptive, a petty deviation in from but not in substance as far as the squatters were concerned. Managers and counter-management grassroots organisations were particularly at loggerheads over three key issues - relocation, affodability and security of land tenure, and grassroots participation which were in fact among the presumed pillars of slum upgrading.

Relocation Reblocking of the TF to give room for the planned expansion of the international and fisheries port complex required the relocation of 4,500

squatter families, half or 2,000 of which were to be accommodated in the adjoining 40 hectare land-fill of Dagat-Dagatan (DD), to be developed by the NHA as the countrys very first sites and services area programmed for infrastructure development. The remaining 2,500 (1980) estimates, or those who settled in the TF after the project began in 1976 were destined for out-city relocation to the distant Dasmarinas resettlement site. Despite the fact that more than 27,000 families were to be spared from relocation and were to supposedly benefit from upgrading and access to newly installed basic services and amenities, the decongesting component jibed ill with the absolute minimum relocation principle proudly peddled at the outset by Bank technocrats.xxxviii

Affordability and the Land Tenure Issue The issue of de jure landownership has been a source of festering frustration among Tondo residents since the 50s. Pre-martial law governments had in fact already legally acknowledged their claims on landownership through the passage of Republic Act 1579 in 1956. The Act provided for the sale and subdivision of a part of TF land to lessees at a price not exceeding 5 pesos per sq m without down payment for a 15 year period. Subsequently, the scope of this law was to be either enlarged or reduced by a labyrinth of controversial amendments, ending in protracted deadlock that left the TF land issue basically unresolved.xxxix Upon the behest of a World Bank mission to rectify past conflicting legislation and regularise tenure in order to iron out project

implementation, Marcos issued a decree in 1975 (PD 814) defining the

land tenure arrangement in the TF and DD project areas. In contrast to the grassroots demand for immediate freehold rights, the decree prescribed leasehold with or without option to purchase, igniting once again popular resentment among TF occupants. Consequently, Marcos revoked the latter and all previous legislation through Presidential Decree (PD) 1314 in 1978. Again reneging on popular demand, this decree required the residents to lease their sites from the NHA at 5 pesos per sq m with additional cost of services or development costs at =.95 pesos per sq m to be amortised within 25 years at 12% yearly interest. Those who wished to buy their lots could do so only after 5 years of leasehold, when the sites would be sold at their market value at the time of purchase.xl In effect, the decree served as incontrovertible legitimation of Bank and technocratic emphasis on the left-hand side of the cost-benefit scale, i.e. self-liquidating and free market dynamized rather than subsidised slum upgrading programs. ZOTO categorically disavowed the arbitrary repeal of previous laws and contended that the proposed rental rates were way beyond the affordability of the poor. The West German government mission exploring the possibility of bilateral aid to the project in 1979 arrived at similar critical conclusions, sinking Bank and state claims that rental rates were affordable to 3/4 of TF households:xli Looking at the data available on income distribution (in Tondo) ... only 30-40% of the squatter households can afford to pay regularly the rents foreseen under PD 1314; this means that 60-70% cannot pay the rentals.

Moreover, PD 1314 condemned any delinquent tenant in arrears of three months rent to outright eviction, an onerous imposition given, according to the West German report, that 2/3s of the Tondo residents have highly irregular employment and will as such formidably be constrained in

regularly paying required monthly rents.xlii This early disclaimer would later be verified when Marcos, in an apparent act of self-admission, passed PD 1923 in 1984 declaring pardon on the surcharge imposed on overdue accounts of beneficiaries in NHA project areas as a result of insolvency.xliii Equally repudiated by ZOTO was the Kapitbahayan (Neighbourhood) - a multi-family model housing pet project of Imelda Marcos in the adjoining DD area inaugurated in 1976 - the rental rates of which were beyond the league of low income residents. Whereas squatters could afford about 35 pesos, average monthly rental figures ranged between 70-100 pesos. Visiting Australian architects critically argued that the squatters were only asking for sites and services, not programmed houses. They also pointed out that there had been no input into the house selection by any recognised community organisation such as ZOTO.xliv

Grassroots Participation Official reliance on baranggay or ward leaders as principal protagonists behind community mobilisation and project watchdogs has also earned the ire of squatter organisations like ZOTO and popularly recognised community leaders, who were in effect formally shut out from the mainstream of the decision making process and implementation of the Tondo project.

Deliberate exclusion of outspoken organisations and authoritarian control were indirectly spelled out in one official project report outlining the rationale of community relations as: to actively involve the residents in the propagation of values and attitudes desirable for a new community and to neutralise and displace (authors emphasis) any information which tends to undermine the success of the project.xlv Official hostility towards militant ZOTO demands for wider

participation translated into regular outbursts of repression. ZOTO leaders like Trinidad Herera and others were periodically arrested and detained or driven underground. Military raids of community organisations

headquarters and offices were conducted. Astutely shifting to more pragmatic lobbying tactics vis-a-vis Bank technocrats as repression mounted in the latter 70s, ZOTO-Ugnayan was to a certain extent able to forestall the project. Hence, four years after its launching in late 1979, only 25% of reblocking plans was complete.xlvi In the final analysis, technocratic strategy in Tondo inevitably and radically departed from its avowed objective of delivering affordable, decent shelter and services to the urban poor and of harnessing and enhancing their self-help potential and popular participation. While Bank rhetoric claimed that the projects were directed at the very poor, the full cost recovery premise of these programs effectively priced out their target beneficiaries in favour of the upper and middle classes. As one author elegantly put it:xlvii The final outcome of the World Banks urban strategy in the Philippines is thus undistinguishable from the results of Imelda

Marcos beautification projects: Removal of the poor from the choice parts of the city. The difference lies only in the means of reaching this end: In place of the First Ladys method of coerced and immediate relocation, the Bank offers indirect and gradual uprooting, accomplished with the indispensable assistance of the real estate market.

Reform and Resistance from Landlords and Land Reform

Above:

Urban

Barely a year after the Tondo prototype lift-off, slum upgrading and sites and services strategy was brought to higher altitude in mid-1977 when Marcos issued two landmark Letters of Instruction (LOI 555 & 557) instituting a nationwide Slum Improvement Program (SIR) and elevating slum improvement to the status of national housing policy. More significantly, these instructions signalled the formal relegation of slum clearance and relocation to the backseat, only to serve as complementary measure to slum improvement programs and following certain stringent norms.xlviii Basically replicating the cost recovery mechanics of the trail blazing Tondo experiment, SIR was designed to deliver land and use of improvements in target areas to bonafide residents under long-term leases for 25 years, with option to purchase after 10 years of continued and uninterrupted occupancy provided all subsidies and grants shall be recovered in full from the buyer at 12% yearly interest from the time of project construction.xlix

In the same vein, the Zonal Improvement Program (ZIP) was designated as SIRs Metro-Manila component under the aegis of Imelda Marcos MMC. ZIP was a gigantic venture indeed. It committed to upgrade in successive stages no less than 236 slum communities with a total population of 172,572 families occupying public and private lands (636 hectares) scattered across the whole metropolis. Bankrolled with a $104 million loan from the World Bank, the program was to be operationalised through inter-agency coordination and tripartite agreements between the MMC, NHA and concerned local governments, and aimed at increasing the role of the latter in planning, execution and cost recovery. Similar Bankfunded upgrading projects were launched in other major cities (Cebu, Davao and Cagayan de Oro).l Given the amplitude of these nation and metro-wide upgrading programs they would have been toothless without the institutionalisation of a comprehensive expropriation strategy, since more than half of the targeted slum and squatter areas were on private real estate. To crutch the upgrading thrust, Marcos proclaimed a nationwide Urban Land Reform (ULR) by virtue of PD 1578 in 1978, placing the program under the direct supervision of his wifes Ministry of Human Settlements (MHS). In spirit it was a pioneering reform, linking exacerbating urban problems (i.e. squatting) to the traditional concept of landownership and declaring as state policy the liberation of communities from blight, the optimum use of land, equitable access and opportunity to use land, and the alienation of lands to check land speculation. To profit from the reform were legitimate tenants defined as those who have resided on the land at least 10 years

and were to be granted the right of first refusal to purchase land for a reasonable price.li Pursuant to the ULR law, the entire metropolis was declared as Urban Land reform Zone (ULRZ). This proclamation (Proc. 1893) reiterated ULR sections that required all landowners concerned to register existing rights and development proposals with the Human Settlements Regulatory Commission (HSRC), the implementing machinery. But while ULR may have been radical in spirit it was certainly weak in flesh. Soon before the ink had dried on the paper on which reform was written, an agitated phalanx of urban landlords, real estate dealers and subdivision owners was up in arms. The landlord-led rebellion succeeded to deflate the ULRs scope to a mere 10% of Metro-Manila, confining it only to river banks, land along railroad tracks and 415 blighted areas identified by the NHA. This powerful bloc argued that the original scope would engender land depreciation, and since most of these lands had been mortgaged to banks, even the entire banking system would be in jeopardy.lii Not only did the geographical scope of the reform dramatically depreciate in the end, it had in fact limited demographic coverage from the very start. While it defined tenants and beneficiaries as rightful occupant of land and its structures, it excluded those whose presence is merely tolerated and without benefit of a contract, those who enter the land by force or deceit, or those whose possession is under litigation. In other words, squatters per definition were legally disqualified. Together with the 10-year continuous residency rule, coverage of the program was

effectively narrowed down to the bane of the squatter and slum dwelling majority. Further, ULR did not categorically provide that landowners must limit their land holdings nor were they required to sell, thus, effectively subjecting tenant rights to first refusal to the mercy of landowners caprice.liii As far as the upgrading programs were concerned, a broad segment of squatters was similarly discriminated by provisions on accreditation of bonafide residents, invoking the 1975 Anti-Squatting Law which considered squatters as criminal offenders and persona non grata. Those who were credited faced imposing cost of development and affordability constraints and the nagging threat of contract foreclosure. Moreover, the expanded role of local governments in planning and implementation had been both boon and bane: the temptation for local mayors to seek political mileage out of ZIP is great since they make use of patron-client links with local baranggay ward leaders. The local upgrading projects could be exploited to prop up the mayors political mass base.liv

Back to the Basics: Bulldozers and Bogus Housing

By nationalising the slum upgrading strategy and its complementary components through the SIR and ULR programs, fledgling contradictions and conflict in the Tondo precedent case of the mid and late 70s were inadvertently exported to other cities in the country. Popular

disenchantment over these perceived bogus reforms gradually intensified and was no longer only confined to the capital city, the traditional stronghold of squatter militance.

In Cagayan de Oro, for instance, one of the regional cities targeted for slum upgrading under the World Bank sponsored Urban II in the distant southern island of Mindanao, the city mayor requested to withdraw from the project in 1980, asserting that it was imposing a tremendous fiscal responsibility on the city and that most of the beneficiaries wouldnt be able to afford rentals on their upgraded sites, thereby ultimately saddling them with the threat of eviction.lv In the face of mounting resistance, the debacle of urban development programs and unmitigated growth of urban poverty and squatting, urban management did eventually revert to the more time-honoured tactic of eviction and relocation. On an inspection tour of the city drainage and water systems in June 1982, Manila governess Imelda Marcos, offended by the unpleasant sight of squatter shanties along the estuaries and canals, ordered the creation of a metro-wide anti-squatting task force. Declaring an all-out offensive against alleged professional squatters and plain land grabbers taking advantage of the compassionate society, she unleashed a massive eviction drive in 162 blighted areas, better known as The Last Campaign. Drawn into the crusade were baranggay officials and police instructed to monitor and arrest all people squatting in public and private lands in the city. By 1984, 24,000 families had been whisked away to old and new yet inadequately served relocation sites in direct violation of current official norms on resettlement. On top of 76,0000 were earmarked for future displacement.lvi Apparently, while the stick was being wielded by one hand, the other was busy dangling the carrot of modicum social shelter delivery. The that, an additional

latter, epitomised by the official launching of a National Shelter Program (NSP) in 1978, was spearheaded by none other than Imelda Marcos Ministry of Human Settlements (MHS). Integrating regulation, production, finance and marketing components of state house delivery programs, and knitting together seven agencies (NHA, NHC, HSDC, HSRC, HFC, NHFMC, HDMF), NSP envisaged to churn out 100,000 new units annually over a ten-year period. In Metro-Manila, 200,000 were expected to be constructed between 1983-1987. While these dazzling figures may generally hike availability, how much do they actually tally with actual accessibility and low income demand for housing, or metaphorically, how much of the shelter delivery carrot is really dangled to the poor? To begin with, according to one study, of the total projected construction, a large part of which was to be delivered by private developers, only 1/6 of the units was devoted to social housing. A composite profile illustrating the relation between program beneficiaries and their income levels show that the tilt of the program was distinctly towards middle income families (62%), while only 27% went to the lower half of the income table.lvii Another study evaluating NSPs shelter financing program noted:lviii What it has failed to achieve so far is the fulfilment of its promise to the bulk of the people who contribute a portion of their monthly salary to the fund (i.e. the Home Development Mutual Fund or Pag-ibig Fund, the government agency charged with the development of saving schemes for home acquisition by private and public employee affiliates) which helps finance

housing activities ... poor families are still deprived of hosuing loans not because there are explicit rules against their borrowing but because of their low incomes, high housing prices and some explicit barriers in the lending process itself ... What is more disheartening: some high income borrowers avail of the loans to finance the acquisition of more housing units for purposes other than living in them. (Suggesting inter alia the emergence of petty landlords)

Notes

AMAWIM IV, 1990: 4; Meijer, op cit. PHC was mandated by the Homesite Act of 1936 to develop expropriated urban lands into subdivisions for low wage earners in the late 30s. Before the outbreak of World War II, NHC was created to undertake urban housing, subdivision and slum clearance programs. Operating under the predominant view which equated the slum and squatter phenomenon with public health and safety hazards, these incipient programs and agencies tended to focus more on slum clearance and limited relocation, and generally paid lip service to low cost housing need. Angeles, 1988: 47-48. iii GSIS initiated individual loan grants for housing to its affiliates in 1955, while a similar program was launched by the SSS two years later. Ibid: 50-51. iv Ibid v Keyes, 1980: 5. vi Keyes, 1975, 1980; Ruland, 1980, 1985; Angeles, 1985; UNICEF, 1986. vii For example, as Keyes noted, 88% of SSS members earn less than 500 pesos monthly. Yet 500 pesos is the benchmark used by SSSs real estate department evaluators as a minimum wage below which applicants are usually not considered. If the ordinary wage earners house cannot cost more than 10,000 pesos (2.5 years salary) and SSS only helps to finance homes that cost an average of 30,000 pesos, it is obvious that the systems custodial role over members funds, in practice, results in using the funds of the poor to finance the homes of higher income groups. Keyes, 1975: 412. viii Ruland, 1985: 21-23. ix Meijer, 1986: 40. x UNICEF, 1986: 57. xi Makil, 1983: 4-5 xii Meijer, op cit: 41. xiii Ibid: 42-43; Makil, op cit: 4-5; Ruland, 1985: 9-10. xiv Ruland, 1985: 10-13; Ruland, 1980: 64-65. xv Bello, op cit: 19-20; Rojas, 1987: 6-7. xvi Caoili, op cit: 128. xvii Ibid: 128-29. xviii Stone & Marsella, 1976: 89-90. xix Laquian in UNICEF, 1986: 29-30. xx Bello, op cit: 20; Rojas, 1987. xxi As Benedict Anderson noted: Marcos bent (the oligarchy) to his will by punishing financially particular oligarches he disliked or feared, and by abolishing the political and legal structures by which the oligarchys economic power was independently safeguarded. But he was one of them in every way - though with the good fortune to have the state military and the police as his private arm. Quoted in Rojas, 1987: 6. xxii Caoili, op cit: 156-58. xxiii Bello, op cit: 105. xxiv Ibid; Particularly, the baranggay system was an innovative institution of grassroots control. While traditional clientist venues and forms of popular mobilisation and community control were extinguished by Martial rule, they were replaced by the legitimising role of the baranggays in stituted in 1972. They acted as intermediaries between government authorities and community residents. The baranggays were allegedly formed to serve as the base of citizens participation and to execute government legislations and programs. However, baranggay officials were not elected, but appointed by local mayors. Popular participation was carried out merely in the form of petition. Officials of the baranggay assembly (whose function was basically recommendatory) were accountable only to higher government authorities. In this context, the baranggays principal participatory function was reduced to vulgar legitimation. Auxillary components to it, like the tanods or civilian custodians of peace and order in the neighbourhoods, were enjoined to cooperate with military authorities in surveillance and intelligence work, denunciating alleged subversive activities in the communities. See Renne, 1988: 49-51; Ruland, 1980: 69-70.
ii

xxv

As Bello noted, only the middle and upper classes and tourists really figured in Imelda Marcos vision and showed in her construction priorities: $300 million were sunk into a score of luxury hotels, several million went to building the monumental Conventional Centre designed to host international conferences and the Cultural Centre catering to the decadence of the Westernised elite. Bello, op cit: 106. xxvi During previous periods, as weve noted elsewhere, squatting was considered as public nuisance under the Civil Code (CC Art 695). Power to abate nuisances was granted by the city charter to the mayor of Manila, reinforced further by a 1967 Supreme Court decision affirming the right of city authorities to abate squatting and skirt legal proceedings. AMAWIM, July-Sept 1987: 9-10. xxvii Ruland, 1980: 16. xxviii van Naersen, 1987: 7; Ruland, 1985: 14. xxix Bello, op cit: 107. xxx By the end of the 60s, the stereotypes which until then had beset the image of slum dwellers and squatters were successfully refuted in pioneering works on Third World urbanisation by those like Abrams (1966), Turner (1972) and others. A short menu of their salient conclusions include: that slums and squatter settlements were a rational and functionally adequate response to socioeconomic deprivation and the shortage in cheap and centrally located housing; without security of tenure, some infrastructure development and the provision of basic public services, there is no prospect of improvement for the living conditions of the urban poor; slum and squatter settlements offer housing through self-building or application of simple building techniques satisfying basic needs. Thus, viable strategies should be premised on the affordability reach of the poor; housing services should be user oriented provided with participation of target groups and self-help potential of the poor must be mobilised. Ruland, 1985: 24-30. xxxi Ibid. xxxii Keyes, 1980: 11; Encarnacion et al in Jose, 1982: 175-76. xxxiii AMAWIM, Oct-Dec 1987: 8. xxxiv Encarnacion, op cit: 171-201. xxxv UNICEF, 1986: 53. xxxvi Bello, op cit: 109-10. xxxvii Ibid: 110-11. xxxviii Ibid; Encarnacion, op cit: 182-83; UNICEF, op cit: 54. xxxix For instance, RA 2439 amending the 1956 law enlarged the alienable portion of the TF area. Succeeding proclamation (Proclamation 788 in 1961 and 378 in 1968) deflated the scope of preceding acts while Executive Order 297 in 1971 declared a large part of the TF as customs zone, implying the effective dissolution of at least 5 squatter communities in TFs Zone One District. No less than 28 laws were passed before 1972 to address the TF land conflict. Elegant reviews on the subject have been provided by Sembrano, op cit: 31-34; ZOTO, 1973: 3-4, 7-9; SCAPS, 1983: 2022, 40-41. xl SCAPS, 1983: 22-24; Urban Land Reform and Housing ...1988; Tri-Sectoral Workshop on NHA Policies. 1989; Keyes, op cit: 12-13; Bello, op cit: 112. xli Bello, ibid: 112-13. xlii Ibid. xliii AMAWIM, July-Spet 1987: 20. xliv ZOTO, 1976. xlv Ibid. xlvi Bello, op cit: 116. xlvii Ibid: 118. xlviii Apart from its complementary role, slum clearance and relocation shall be applied only in cases where squatter families are staying in areas dangerous to public safety or are needed for official infrastructure programs. Stringent norms for relocation were defined: Proximity to work places; out-city relocation must provide for economic opportunities and must be premised on the

availability of pre-developed sites complete with basic infrastructure and services.UNICEF, op cit: 53. xlix AMAWIM, July-Spet, 1987: 12. l Skinner et al, 1987: 26-27; Meijer, op cit: 51-53. li Jimenez et al, 1986: 55; CCUP, 1982; Urban Land Reform & Housing ... 1988. lii Program scopoe shifted from full coverage of the entire Metro-Manila in 1970 to lands within s-c Areas of Priority Development (APD) in general by virtue of LOI 935 the same year and finally only applicable to 245 selected APD after the passage of Proclamation No. 2234 in 1983. Soontorn, 1986: 14; Urban Land Reform and Housing ...ibid; AMAWIM, July-Sept 1987. liii AMAWIM, ibid: 14. liv Meijer, op cit: 52; Jimenez, op cit: 54. lv Bello, op cit: 122-23. lvi Makil, 1982: 12-13; Meijer, op cit: 53; van Naersen, 1987: 13. lvii Angeles, 1985: 59-60; Meijer, 1986: 61-62. lviii Angeles, ibid: 76.