By Nancy Kwak

Tokyo, London, New York, Paris, Manila. Few would think of Manila atop a list of the 21st century’s premiere cities. Nor would most think of the Philippine capital as a critical node in the global economy. Yet Manila is indisputably at the centre of some of the most important urban trends of the past half-century: it is the world’s most densely populated city, and continues to grow at an exponential pace. It serves as the headquarters to one of the fastest growing economies in the world (10th in 2017, according to the World Bank). Filipinos, especially residents of Manila, travel all over the world as nurses, nannies, construction workers and sailors. They provide the mass labour fueling the global service economy.

In our urbanizing world, Manila, and a few other rapidly growing world cities, are not only just helpful in understanding how global cities work; they are indispensable.

Manila has long served as a hub connecting regional, colonial and global economies. The city sits on the coast of Manila Bay at the mouth of the Pasig River; it is low-lying, fairly flat in topography, and woven through with estuaries. Not surprising given seasonal monsoons and tropical cyclones, Manilans often have to cope with devastating floods. The most striking aspect of life in Manila, however, lies not in physical attributes but rather in the legal status of the communities living above and around these waterways. For the residents of this city of nearly two million, ‘informality’ is an all-encompassing, defining feature of everyday life in the capital.

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The term ‘informality’ is sometimes conceptualized as a periphery or a place of exclusion, but it is more accurate to define it simply as an absence of government control, management, or knowledge over an area.
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The term ‘informality’ is sometimes conceptualized as a periphery or a place of exclusion, but it is more accurate to define it simply as an absence of government control, management, or knowledge over an area. A city can be predominantly informal with lively black markets and mostly unregulated labour and housing. Informality does not have to occur on the margins of everyday life. In Manila, informality is both ubiquitous and poorly understood; statistics are widely varying and erratically collected. The government estimated in 2010 that roughly one in five residents of Metro Manila lived in housing about which the government kept few records and over which it had little authority. The number has most likely grown.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s current Informal City project offers some estimates. According to a recent report, 40 to 80% of Filipino residents work in the informal economy. Meanwhile, informal settlements are everywhere apparent, with self-built structures lining the waterways and filling nearly every available space in the city, and with informal settlers working in seemingly every aspect of the urban economy.

Even a casual look at Manila, and other bourgeoning global cities, shows that the functioning of the urban economy depends on informality. Informality allows workers to subsist on marginal incomes. Informality provides homes where the formal market does not. Despite or perhaps because of their meagre pay, these workers’ role in the global service economy is anything but marginal. A shoe repairman sets up a roadside station where he fixes the shoes of the restaurant worker who in turn serves food to visiting investors and local businesspeople. Workers rest in informal settlements before getting up to drive the jeepneys that transport young men and women inexpensively to Makati’s call centers. There, they will answer questions and complaints from customers of global firms headquartered in New York, London, and more. All for a low wage. Informality provides the foundation for local and global profits.

Manila helps us to understand how informality grew into a prevalent way of life in some cities, and an integral component of the global economy. In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, poor rural migrants flooded into Manila, in search of work and food. For these desperate newcomers, land-use rights mattered much more than land titles. Rural migrants built their own shelter on unoccupied land in the city, whether along railroad tracks, extending on stilts over waterways, or under bridges, and they constructed a sense of ownership that included the right to lease and sublease their units.

Many ultimately set up their homes near or on Manila Bay in the northern district of Tondo — a community of some 180,000 residents by the early 1970s. Residents did not deny the lack of government recognition for their land rights. Nonetheless, they still felt a sense of ownership, as evidenced in Zone One Tondo Organization’s explanation for resident motives when staying in unserviced homes in 1973: ‘the people prefer to live in a very small barung-barong [shanty] that is their own rather than rent a place’.

Those In Poverty: You Aren’t Responsible For Making Your Family Comfortable

The former president Ferdinand Marcos understood informality. He understood migrants’ claims to property rights; in fact, he tried to neutralize the political power of Tondo residents by defining informality in opposition to formal, state-regulated spaces. In 1975, Marcos issued a presidential decree criminalizing ‘squatters’ and ‘squatting’ as a ‘nefarious’ action punishable by incarceration and/or fines. In this way, the Philippine government implemented a clear legal dichotomy — formal versus informal, legitimate versus squatting. It did so in an attempt to strengthen the power of the state while undermining the political power of poor people who might oppose the ruling class. Put simply, the state created informality.

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Governments around the world build a divide between formal and informal residents, for historical and political reasons.
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The Philippine government is not unique in building a divide between formal and informal. Governments around the world do likewise, and for reasons historical and political. International advisors in United Nations technical assistance missions and U.S. foreign-aid programs advise Kenya, South Africa, Thailand, Peru, the Philippines and other so-called ‘developing’ countries to do so. These well-meaning technocrats, planners, housing experts and international development experts often find the manner and pace of urbanization in these cities unruly and confusing. So they urge national governments to foster order by adopting or reinstituting vigorous land surveying and titling programs. If individuals owned land, that land would become property — a site of investment and a potential source of profit. Regularized records would facilitate global investment. To Western development specialists, this is order, progress, modernity.

Development technocrats assure governments that fostering a class of property owners also means a class of citizens invested in political stability. Their message of stability appeals to governments concerned about their own security. Manila City Council members, for example, repeatedly requested advice from William Levitt, a U.S. property developer who quipped in 1948: ‘No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.’

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People living and working in these spaces have for decades contended with efforts to, essentially, delegitimize their economic activity and weaken them politically.
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People living and working in these spaces have for decades contended with efforts to, essentially, delegitimize their economic activity and weaken them politically. Informal dwellers have no illusions about their marginalization in the global city. ‘They think we are garbage people,’ one taxi driver and Tondo resident observed bitterly. And then, with a bark of laughter, he added: ‘Unless it is time for an election!’

This originally appeared on Aeon. Republished here with permission under Creative Commons.

By Michal “MJ” Jones

When she returned one evening from what I thought was a routine dog walk around the neighborhood, my partner was nearly in tears. Perplexed and concerned, I probed for an answer.

She explained the sinking feeling of watching her hometown of Oakland, California, become unrecognizable: The urban farm and playground that recently popped up on Peralta Street had not a person of color in sight. Tent encampments with dozens of newly shelterless black people sprawled out beneath freeway overpasses. White neighbors shot quizzical or fearful looks as she passed. Walking the dog — a practice that once brought her joy and rejuvenation — now left her feeling deflated, angry, and seemingly powerless. Her home, her community, had vanished. It had all been building up over the past few years, and in those moments as she walked, it became too much to take.

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Walking the dog — a practice that once brought her joy and rejuvenation — now left her feeling deflated, angry, and seemingly powerless.
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A news search of “gentrification” will land you with thousands of perspectives both for and against. Though the debate has emerged most vocally in the past several years, for residents born and raised in major cities, the ongoing loss of home is felt deeply.

“It is a feeling of powerlessness,” says Bie Aweh, who was raised in the Roxbury and Brighton neighborhoods of Boston. “You’re already vulnerable because of poverty, and it makes you feel like you have no power because capitalism talks the loudest.”

While many in support of urban renewal and development cite decreased crime rates and increased revenue as benefits, long-term residents from coast to coast echo concerns about the impact of gentrification on historically poor, predominantly of color neighborhoods.

Each of the people I spoke to were raised in historically black, poor communities now experiencing continued or more recent waves of gentrification. Noni Galloway, of Oakland, defines gentrification as, “when an environment or culture is taken over or redefined by another culture.”

On a surface level, the changes that come with gentrification are physical — new beer gardens, condominiums and bike lanes — and happen seemingly overnight. Many residents are left to grapple with what, where and whom to call “home.”

1. Shifts in demographics: ‘White people jogging was the first sign.’

When I first moved to Berkeley as a teenager in the early oughts, my peers had endless warnings for me about the neighboring city of Oakland. People living outside of Oakland, many of them white and/or middle to upper class, generalized it as “sketch,” “dangerous,” and “crime-infested.”

The neighborhoods they cautioned me against visiting are now, over 10 years later, spaces where young professionals are flocking to, often describing them as “up-and-coming.”

When asked to reflect on the first signs of gentrification they saw in their cities, three of four interviewees specifically mentioned “white people jogging,” especially in areas they previously would not have set foot in. The influx of white and middle-class newcomers on its own is not the issue; rather the loss of culture and diversity that comes when a city’s long-term inhabitants can no longer afford to stay.

“We used to be a Mecca for black home ownership. Now illegalforeclosures.org reports that thousands of illegal foreclosures take place in Wayne County,” said Will, an activist from Detroit. “The discussion of so-called ‘improvement’ should not be separated from the misery being created for tens of thousands of Detroiters.”

Much of the conversation in support of gentrification is coded in a racist and classist belief system that blames the residents themselves for crime rates, rather than lawmakers, local politicians, and complicit newcomers who are disinvested from solving the causes of poverty.

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Much of the conversation in support of gentrification is coded in a racist and classist belief system.
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The increase of white and/or middle-class new residents to traditionally poor neighborhoods tends to follow or reflect changes in infrastructure, another highly discussed symptom of gentrification.

2. Shifts in infrastructure: ‘Government housing began to disappear.’

“Government housing began to disappear and the projects were being torn down,” said Crystal Lay, of Chicago. “People were being displaced to other areas and put in these quickly built homes.”

The shifts that happen to city landscapes undergoing gentrification are more than physical, they are symbolic of efforts to “improve” an area for incoming residents.

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The shifts that happen to city landscapes undergoing gentrification are more than physical, they are symbolic of efforts to ‘improve’ an area for incoming residents.
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For those who have called these cities home since childhood, there are some strange contradictions: new bike lanes and rent-a-bike programs on streets riddled with potholes; sleek, market-rate apartments popping up beside historic Victorians; urban gardens and beautification in prior dumping grounds.

Oakland’s Noni Galloway summarizes the complex feelings that arise from witnessing these shifts overtime: “I have mixed emotions because… there were much-needed upgrades to the area that I feel didn’t happen until the gentrification started,” she said. “But it hurts to see my old neighborhood turn into the hot spot for someone else to enjoy.”

Another undeniable impact of the skyrocketing housing market is the increase in individuals without shelter, some of them former residents who have been recently evicted. In Oakland, homelessness increased by over 25%, and complaints went up by 600% between 2011 and 2016.

When developers are allowed to build housing starting at $3,000 a month in a neighborhood with a median family income of $35,000, what is being improved? Where can a family call home after their house becomes unrecognizable and unaffordable? What is the cost of gentrification? And who pays?

“Whites and the rich benefit the most,” said Crystal Lay. “I believe poor people and people of color lose. I think any mom-and-pop businesses also lose their customer base and those familiar faces.”

3. Shifts in safety measures: ‘Police make areas safer for suburbanites.’

“We saw blue lights go up in high-crime areas; it was like a sign for people to stay out of those areas. I feel like it was the early 2000s when they began,” said Lay.

Creating the perceived sense of safety associated with suburban areas, including policing, is part of what facilitates the process of demographic changes in major cities.

Sites such as Nextdoor and SeeClickFix encourage residents to report various issues, from car break-ins to graffiti, for resolution. These methods rely heavily on collaboration with law enforcement and public works officials, but also limit community members’ ability to resolve and express concerns together.

The desire to live in an environment that is free of violence, building decay and trash is obviously not unreasonable. I am certain that many long-term residents in urban areas have long wanted to see these changes. The issue is that local governments only invest in these changes when the demographics shift, and that the strategies of “safety” fit the new demographic as well.

The presence of law enforcement does not equal safety in many inner cities, but in urban environments undergoing gentrification, it is common to witness increased policing.

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The presence of law enforcement does not equal safety in many inner cities, but in urban environments undergoing gentrification, it is common to witness increased policing.
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Not only does gentrification push residents out of their homes, it can make them feel unwelcome, or even feared, on their own streets. “

I’m going to have a shirt made,” my partner said, once again returning from walking the dogs, “that says, ‘I’m not a criminal, I’m just from here.’”

Although interview participants overall were not optimistic about the possibility of stopping gentrification, they did have words, advice and requests for new residents.

“Are you moving into the community with the intentions of contributing to the existing culture, by supporting our businesses, or are you coming to disrupt it?” asked Bie Aweh of Boston. “If the answer is disrupt, then please don’t move here.”

“Consider the history of the neighborhood; understand the relationships that are among the neighbors,” Oakland’s Galloway concluded.

This story originally appeared on AlterNet. Republished here with permission.

A robust concept of social citizenship will provide a necessary framework for understanding contemporary urban life in destination cities.

Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York, c1900. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

By Nancy Berlinger

I n 1975, the English author John Berger wrote about the political implications of immigration, at a time when one in seven workers in the factories of Germany and Britain was a male migrant — what Berger called the ‘seventh man’. Today, every seventh person in the world is a migrant.

Migrants are likely to settle in cities. In the United States, 20 cities (accounting for 36% of the total U.S. population in 2014) were home to 65% of the nation’s authorized immigrants and 61% of unauthorized immigrants. In Singapore, migrant workers account for 20% of the city-state’s population. (Migrants continue to be a significant rural population. In the U.S., three-quarters of farm workers are foreign-born.)

Today, every seventh person in the world is a migrant.

Scholarship on migration tends to focus normative arguments on the national level, where policy concerning borders and immigration is made. Some prominent political philosophers — including David Miller at Nuffield College, Oxford, and Joseph Carens at the University of Toronto — also outline an account of ‘social membership’ in receiving societies. This process unfolds over five to 10 years of work, everyday life and the development of attachments. As Carens writes in ‘Who Should Get In?’ (2003), after a period of years, any migrant crosses a ‘threshold’ and is no longer a stranger. This human experience of socialization holds true for low-wage and unauthorized migrants, so a receiving society should acknowledge that migrants themselves, not only their economic contributions, are part of that society.

Carens and Miller apply this argument to the moral claims of settled migrants at risk of deportation because they are unauthorized or because the terms of their presence are tightly limited by work contracts. In the US, for example, most of the estimated 11.3 million people who crossed a border without authorization or are living outside the terms of their original visas have constituted a settled population for the past decade, with families that include an estimated 4 million children who are U.S. citizens by birthright. In The Ethics of Immigration (2013), Carens writes that the prospect of deporting young immigrants from the place where they had lived most of their lives was especially troubling: it is ‘morally wrong to force someone to leave the place where she was raised, where she received her social formation, and where she has her most important human connections’. Miller and Carens concur with the Princeton political theorist Michael Walzer’s view of open-ended guest-worker programs as ethically problematic. The fiction that such work is temporary and such workers remain foreign obscures the reality that these migrants are also part of the societies in which they live and work, often for many years, and where they deserve protection and opportunities for advancement.

Not all migrants will have access to a process leading to national citizenship or permanent legal residence status, whether this is because they are unauthorized, or their immigration status is unclear, or they are living in a nation that limits or discourages immigration while allowing foreign workers on renewable work permits. If we agree that migration is part of the identity of a society in which low-wage migrants live and work, whether or not this is acknowledged by non-migrants or by higher-status migrants, what would it mean to build on the idea of social membership and consider migrants as social citizens of the place in which they have settled? And what realistic work can the idea of social citizenship do in terms of improving conditions for migrants and supporting policy development?

Social citizenship is both a feeling of belonging and a definable set of commitments and obligations associated with living in a place; it is not second-class national citizenship. The place where one’s life is lived might have been chosen in a way that the nation of one’s birth was not; for a Londoner or a New Yorker, local citizenship can be a stronger identity than national citizenship. Migrants live in cities with a history of welcoming immigrants, in cities that lack this history, and also in cities where national policy discourages immigration. Considering how to ensure that social citizenship extends to migrants so that they get to belong, to contribute, and to be protected is a way to frame ethical and practical questions facing urban policymakers.

What’s The Difference Between ‘Migrants’ And ‘Refugees’?

Considering migrants as social citizens of the cities in which they settle is related to but not the same as the idea of the city as a ‘sanctuary’ for migrants. Throughout the U.S., local officials have designated ‘sanctuary cities’ for undocumented immigrants subject to deportation under policies announced by the federal government in February 2017. This contemporary interpretation of an ancient concept refers to a policy of limited local cooperation with federal immigration officials, often associated with other policies supporting a city’s migrant population. Canadian officials use the term ‘sanctuary city’ similarly, to refer to local protections and potentially also to limited cooperation with border-control authorities. In Europe, the term ‘city of sanctuary’ tends to refer to efforts supporting local refugees and coordinated advocacy for refugee admission and rights. These local actions protecting migrants are consistent with a practical concept of social citizenship in which civic history and values, and interests such as being a welcoming, diverse or growing city, correspond to the interests of migrants. However, the idea of ‘sanctuary’ suggests crisis: an urgent need for a safe place to hide. To become social citizens, migrants need more from cities than sanctuary.

Local policies that frame social citizenship in terms that apply to settled migrants should go beyond affirming migrants’ legal rights and helping them to use these rights, although this is certainly part of a practical framework. Social citizenship, as a concept that should apply to migrants and non-migrants alike, on the basis of being settled into a society, can build on international human rights law, but can be useful in jurisdictions where human rights is not the usual reference point for considering how migrants belong to, contribute to, and are protected by a society.

Social citizenship, as a concept that should apply to migrants and non-migrants alike, on the basis of being settled into a society, can build on international human rights law.

What can a city expect or demand of migrants as social citizens? Mindful that the process of social integration usually takes more than one generation, it would not be fair to expect or demand that migrants integrate into a new society on an unrealistic timetable. Most migrants are adults, and opportunities to belong, to contribute, and to be protected should be available to them, as well as to the next generation. Migrants cannot be expected to take actions that could imperil them or their families. For example, while constitutionally protected civil rights in the U.S. extend to undocumented immigrants, using these rights (by identifying themselves publicly, for example) can bring immigrants to the attention of federal authorities, a reality or fear that might constrain their ability to participate in civic life.

In his novel Exit West (2017), Mohsin Hamid offers a near-future fictional version of a political philosopher’s ‘earned amnesty’ proposal. Under the ‘time tax’, newer migrants to London pay a decreasing ‘portion of income and toil’ toward social welfare programs for longstanding residents, and have sweat-equity opportunities to achieve home ownership by working on infrastructure construction projects (the ‘London Halo’). Today, the nonfictional citizens of Berlin are debating how to curb escalating rents so that the city remains open to lower-wage residents, including internal and transnational migrants. A robust concept of social citizenship that includes migrants who have begun the process of belonging to a city, and those who should be acknowledged as already belonging, will provide a necessary framework for understanding contemporary urban life in destination cities.

This article originally appeared on Aeon. Republished here with permission under Creative Commons.

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Women do anywhere between 10 to 20 more hours of housework per week than their husbands do, according to a study released this week. Some women were surprised by the results.

“I’m floored,” said Julie Marcus, a financial analyst. “On the other hand, this explains so much. Last night after dinner, my husband said, ‘Thanks for that snack, honey,’ and I threw a sack of navel oranges at him. I was like, ‘My goodness! Where is all this resentment coming from?’ Now I understand!”

“I admit to being somewhat taken aback,” a lab technician named Naomi Hyde said after reading an article about the findings. “I had no idea that laundry and cooking and grocery shopping and cleaning amounts to so many hours a week. But that definitely sheds light on my chronic fatigue, and also the fact that I hurled a cantaloupe at my husband while he was napping on the couch yesterday.”

Some women acknowledged that they did more housework than their husbands, but said the disparity had not always been that way.

“When we first got married, we agreed to divide all the chores equally,” Etta Glover, a human resources manager, explained. “And it worked! For about five minutes. Then we had a baby. Now I can’t remember the last time a pomegranate made it through the day without being aimed at my husband’s head.”

Even though the study resonated with most women, a few defended the institution of marriage as totally worth it anyway.

“It’s a trade off,” said Glover. “On the one hand, I do more housework. But on the other hand I get to exhaustively research and plan our family vacation every year. So that’s one whole week a year that I get to kick back and drink mojitos while my husband plays in the swimming pool with the kids. Besides, what else would we do with the persimmons?”

“What’s the alternative?” said Hyde. “If I were unmarried, I might have much less housework to do, but I’d still get stuck changing the lightbulbs. And eating more bananas.”

One woman pointed out that though the study was enlightening, it gave a false impression.

“It may be that I do most of the housework,” said attorney Greta Miller. “But that doesn’t tell the whole story. I’m also the primary caregiver for our toddler, and responsible for everything that goes along with childcare for the older ones. I do the homework with the kids, for example. And the baths. Packing their lunches and schoolbags. Birthday party planning. School plays. Teacher meetings. Staying home on their sick days. Medical stuff. Driving them absolutely everywhere. What was my point again? Oh yeah. That my husband reads them a story each and every night just after I slingshot a Bosc pear his way. It’s the absolute sweetest!”

When asked if they would like the balance in their homes to change, the women gave varied answers.

“It depends what you mean by that question,” said Glover. “If the question is, ‘Do you wish that your husband would share the work more equally?’ then the answer is, ‘Sure. Why Not?’ But if the question is, ‘Do you wish that your husband would somehow magically transform himself into a berry-eating Centaur?’ then my answer would be exactly the same.”

“Frankly, I can’t imagine it any other way,” Marcus said. “I mean I’m thinking about what it would be like if my husband was the one doing the extra housework. And it would be, like, you know. It would be . . . Actually sorry, I can’t imagine it. Does anyone have a stalk of rhubarb handy?”

Some women expressed the hope that younger millennial women would share the housework more equally with their partners.

“That’s exactly what our mothers thought it would be like for us — more equality between us and our husbands,” Miller said. “So yeah. Maybe their hope skipped our generation and will go to the next one? Only time will tell. But there’s a watermelon sale over at the Stop & Shop, so I gotta run.”

“I’m not really bothered about the findings,” said Hyde. “I mean, look at Hillary Clinton. She probably did those extra hours of housework every week for years. And even though some believe she had the more promising career when they graduated Yale Law School, her husband got to be president first. But now she’ll finally have her turn! Or not. Whatever.”

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Lead image: Pixabay