Development as Dispossession in a Metro Manila Urban Poor Community

• In Event: Surviving the Global City: Dispossession and Urban Resistance in the Philippines

Abstract

Upon taking office in 2010, President Aquino implemented his Philippine Development Plan (PDP), which vowed to eradicate poverty through foreign investment and rapid industrialization. Many urban poor residents, however, argued that these very anti-poverty programs caused much greater displacement and immiseration in their communities. How then do we account for anti-poverty programs that are so far removed from the lives of the very people they are supposed to help?

This paper builds on interviews with women residents of Sitio Mapalad, an urban poor community in Metro Manila. Their analyses show that government narratives of abject living conditions and lack of trabaho (joblessness) render invisible what women call kabuhayan—the myriad of gendered ways of lifemaking that are vital to the well-being of the community’s 7,000 families. The women are then forced to find jobs as domestic workers overseas or to work under onerous conditions in the country's special economic zones. By centering the critiques of low-income women, I examine how state-sanctioned, corporatized “poverty alleviation programs” not only exclude urban poor residents from the benefits of neoliberal development. Rather, by foreclosing their access to kabuhayan, I argue that neoliberal development discourse creates a disposable population to be violently coopted into the flows of global capital

Author

• Stephanie Dimatulac Santos, University of California, Los Angeles