managing post-colonial city crisis & the crisis of management, interventions from above: state...
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Chapter 5
Managing the Post-Colonial CityCrisis & 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-
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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 People’s 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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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 re-
migration rate) through backfilling, these standard urban satellites tended
to further reinforce the trend towards conurbation and
metropolitanisation.xiv
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Polity, Culture, Ideology, Power and Community
Urban management and managers certainly do no operate in a political
vacuum, and therefore can’t 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 re-
upholstering of city management following in train with the institution in
1972 of autocratic rule by Ferdinand Marcos, and later with the re-
institution 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
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“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 mayor’s 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
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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 and constituencies vertically integrated the
communities to mainstream city, provincial and national 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.
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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 anti-
elite 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 well with this dramatic shift in political power and
ideological orientation following the twin logic of modernisation-
caciquismo which in 1975 would culminate in the political and
administrative centralisation of the National Capital Region’s 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
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Administrative rationalisation and infrastructural modernisation
were part and parcel of the Marcos regime’s 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
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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.
Aquino’s 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 “people’s 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: StrategicDualities, Slum Upgrading & Bulldozer-andUproot Politics,1976-1986
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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
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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
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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 city-
wide beautification campaign on behalf of the delegates to the 1976 IMF-
WB 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
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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, Turner’s 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 avant-
garde 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 de-
congesting 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
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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-cum-
sites 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 44,000-
180,000 (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
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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
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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, integrated physical and socio-economic
development, and affordability of target beneficiaries.”xxxv Beyond
appearances though, the program’s 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 Bank’s prescription finally prevailed, schisms between
proponents of the technocratic and traditional approaches lingered
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nevertheless and precipitated a division in the government’s 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
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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 country’s 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
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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.”
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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.
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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 (author’s 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 Bank’s urban strategy in the
Philippines is thus undistinguishable from the results of Imelda
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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 Lady’s 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 Above: Urban
Landlords and Land Reform
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
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In the same vein, the Zonal Improvement Program (ZIP) was
designated as SIR’s 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 Bank-
funded 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 wife’s 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
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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 ULR’s 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
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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 mayor’s 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.
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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” wouldn’t 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 that, an additional
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
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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 NSP’s
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
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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
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iAMAWIM IV, 1990: 4; Meijer, op cit.iiPHC was mandated by the Homesite Act of 1936 to develop expropriated urban lands intosubdivisions for low wage earners in the late 30s. Before the outbreak of World War II, NHC wascreated 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 safetyhazards, 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.iiiGSIS initiated individual loan grants for housing to its affiliates in 1955, while a similar programwas launched by the SSS two years later. Ibid: 50-51.ivIbidvKeyes, 1980: 5.viKeyes, 1975, 1980; Ruland, 1980, 1985; Angeles, 1985; UNICEF, 1986.viiFor example, as Keyes noted, “88% of SSS members earn less than 500 pesos monthly. Yet 500
pesos is the benchmark used by SSS’s real estate department evaluators as a minimum wage belowwhich applicants are usually not considered. If the ordinary wage earners house cannot cost morethan 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 system’s 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.viiiRuland, 1985: 21-23.ixMeijer, 1986: 40.xUNICEF, 1986: 57.xiMakil, 1983: 4-5xiiMeijer, op cit: 41.xiiiIbid: 42-43; Makil, op cit: 4-5; Ruland, 1985: 9-10.xivRuland, 1985: 10-13; Ruland, 1980: 64-65.xvBello, op cit: 19-20; Rojas, 1987: 6-7.xviCaoili, op cit: 128.xviiIbid: 128-29.xviiiStone & Marsella, 1976: 89-90.xixLaquian in UNICEF, 1986: 29-30.xxBello, op cit: 20; Rojas, 1987.xxiAs 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 bywhich the oligarchy’s economic power was independently safeguarded. But he was one of them inevery way - though with the good fortune to have the state military and the police as his privatearm.” Quoted in Rojas, 1987: 6.xxiiCaoili, op cit: 156-58.xxiiiBello, 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 wereextinguished by Martial rule, they were replaced by the legitimising role of the baranggays instituted in 1972. They acted as intermediaries between government authorities and communityresidents. The baranggays were allegedly formed to serve as the base of citizens participation and toexecute government legislations and programs. However, baranggay officials were not elected, butappointed by local mayors. Popular participation was carried out merely in the form of petition.Officials of the baranggay assembly (whose function was basically recommendatory) wereaccountable only to higher government authorities. In this context, the baranggay’s principal
participatory function was reduced to vulgar legitimation. Auxillary components to it, like thetanods or civilian custodians of peace and order in the neighbourhoods, were enjoined to cooperate
with military authorities in surveillance and intelligence work, denunciating alleged subversiveactivities in the communities. See Renne, 1988: 49-51; Ruland, 1980: 69-70.
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xxvAs 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 luxuryhotels, several million went to building the monumental Conventional Centre designed to hostinternational conferences and the Cultural Centre catering to the decadence of the Westernised elite.Bello, op cit: 106.xxviDuring previous periods, as we’ve noted elsewhere, squatting was considered as “public
nuisance” under the Civil Code (CC Art 695). Power to abate nuisances was granted by the citycharter to the mayor of Manila, reinforced further by a 1967 Supreme Court decision affirming theright of city authorities to abate squatting and skirt legal proceedings. AMAWIM, July-Sept 1987:9-10.xxviiRuland, 1980: 16.xxviiivan Naersen, 1987: 7; Ruland, 1985: 14.xxixBello, op cit: 107.xxxBy the end of the 60s, the stereotypes which until then had beset the image of slum dwellers andsquatters were successfully refuted in pioneering works on Third World urbanisation by those likeAbrams (1966), Turner (1972) and others. A short menu of their salient conclusions include: thatslums and squatter settlements were a rational and functionally adequate response to socio-
economic 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 settlementsoffer housing through self-building or application of simple building techniques satisfying basicneeds. Thus, viable strategies should be premised on the affordability reach of the poor; housingservices should be “user oriented” provided with participation of target groups and self-help
potential of the poor must be mobilised. Ruland, 1985: 24-30.xxxiIbid.xxxiiKeyes, 1980: 11; Encarnacion et al in Jose, 1982: 175-76.xxxiiiAMAWIM, Oct-Dec 1987: 8.xxxivEncarnacion, op cit: 171-201.xxxvUNICEF, 1986: 53.xxxviBello, op cit: 109-10.xxxviiIbid: 110-11.xxxviiiIbid; Encarnacion, op cit: 182-83; UNICEF, op cit: 54.xxxixFor 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 TF’s Zone One District. Noless than 28 laws were passed before 1972 to address the TF land conflict. Elegant reviews on thesubject have been provided by Sembrano, op cit: 31-34; ZOTO, 1973: 3-4, 7-9; SCAPS, 1983: 20-
22, 40-41.xlSCAPS, 1983: 22-24; Urban Land Reform and Housing ...1988; Tri-Sectoral Workshop on NHAPolicies. 1989; Keyes, op cit: 12-13; Bello, op cit: 112.xliBello, ibid: 112-13.xliiIbid.xliiiAMAWIM, July-Spet 1987: 20.xlivZOTO, 1976.xlvIbid.xlviBello, op cit: 116.xlviiIbid: 118.xlviiiApart 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 officialinfrastructure 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
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availability of pre-developed sites complete with basic infrastructure and services.UNICEF, op cit:53.xlixAMAWIM, July-Spet, 1987: 12.lSkinner et al, 1987: 26-27; Meijer, op cit: 51-53.liJimenez et al, 1986: 55; CCUP, 1982; Urban Land Reform & Housing ... 1988.liiProgram 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 finallyonly 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.liiiAMAWIM, ibid: 14.livMeijer, op cit: 52; Jimenez, op cit: 54.lvBello, op cit: 122-23.lviMakil, 1982: 12-13; Meijer, op cit: 53; van Naersen, 1987: 13.lviiAngeles, 1985: 59-60; Meijer, 1986: 61-62.lviiiAngeles, ibid: 76.