Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession by Arnisson Andre Ortega

Abstract

Reviewed by: Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession by Arnisson Andre Ortega Chester Antonino C. Arcilla ARNISSON ANDRE ORTEGA Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018. 361 pages. The Philippines is in a neoliberal urban upheaval, Arnisson Andre Ortega declares in this groundbreaking book, Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession. He compellingly shows the spatial contradictions in the country's national capital region, Metro Manila, which is increasingly being neoliberalized, i.e., designed and developed for elite accumulation whereby land and housing are commodified to provide real estate profits while marginalized populations are displaced. Ortega accomplishes the difficult task of linking contemporary economic and land-use developments with the country's postcolonial history. Since the late 1980s, the real estate industry has been the Philippine economy's backbone, driven by overseas-based Filipinos' (OFs) desire for safe, exclusive suburban spaces and their transnational remittances. Surrounding Metro Manila are massive constructions of gated subdivisions that are often sold to "productive and successful" OFs. Within the metropolis, high-end condominiums, malls, and services in central business districts drive development to attract foreign investments and remittances. These processes of gentrification and socialized housing projects are mired in violence and dispossessions. The state drives out "unproductive [End Page 145] and unsuccessful" Filipinos—peasants, informal settler families (ISF), and indigenous peoples (IP)—from their homes and livelihoods, often violently, to make way for such projects. Because the law requires the relocation of ISFs before demolition, the socialized housing market in low-value peri-urban areas that sell homes to the evicted provides an additional opportunity for real estate accumulation. The relocatees fend for themselves as they struggle to meet amortization payments in resettlement sites, where livelihood and social services are difficult to access. Due to the general failure of the land reform program and the dominance of elite-influenced urban planning, large landholdings—often formerly export-oriented, colonial-era haciendas—are usually the ones converted for gentrification and socialized housing. The author is a geographer teaching at Syracuse University in New York and a former faculty member of the University of the Philippines Population Institute. In the book's introduction, Ortega shares his personal history as a son of peasant migrants to the city and among the first in his family to obtain a university education. As an engaged scholar committed to social justice, he admits his work is necessarily incomplete and explicitly political. His earlier researches on critical geography, migration, and spatial dispossessions have appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Urban Geography, Cities, and Geoforum, among others. In chapter 1 Ortega draws from a comprehensive review of Marxist, postcolonial, and critical urbanism scholarship to analyze urban space in the Global South as containers where global economic, political, and ideological flows are territorially embedded within the postcolonial state. These spatial configurations in turn reconstitute local social relations. Focusing on the period after the 1986 EDSA People Power, which restored liberal democracy and deregulated markets in the Philippines, chapter 2 tackles neoliberal restructuring, land commodification, and the reframing of the Filipino values of sipag (industry) at tiyaga (persistence) toward the ideal of the entrepreneurial, productive Filipino typified by successful OFs. Chapter 3 documents the rise of the real estate industry, identifies the major players, and discusses industry practices that supply OFs their suburban dream homes. In chapter 4 Ortega maps out the neoliberal spatialization in Metro Manila's peri-urban fringe, focusing on the transformation of the Canlubang Sugar Estates in Laguna. He notes how places of consumption have replaced the colonial población (town center) as a critical urban space, reflecting the [End Page 146] shift from agriculture and manufacturing to the service economy. As typified by the case of Canlubang, exclusive subdivisions would cluster around the mall, the archetypal site of consumption in Philippine cities. Chapter 5 studies the idealized "global" and "suburban" (168) lifestyles of returning OFs and traces the expansion of master-planned exclusive communities in the south of Metro Manila. The subsequent chapter descends to the everyday life inside these gated neighborhoods and finds economic anxieties and loneliness...