Working with the Community: Dilemmas in Radical Planning in Metro Manila, The Philippines

Abstract

The concepts of radical and insurgent planning have recently emerged in the planning literature as frameworks for describing movements against the totalizing discourses of modernist planning. This article critically examines these concepts with reference to movements for housing rights in informal settlements in developing countries. It argues that these frameworks fail to explain the decline of housing movements in many parts of the world. It further argues that this decline is caused by the decline of the modernist planning paradigm itself, and the emergence of new models of state legitimization. It then illustrates this argument with a case study of community mobilization in Metro Manila, The Philippines.