Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (27 page)

This is the classic twenty-first-century slum. Across the globe, one billion people live in slums: that is, one in seven human beings. By the year 2050, for all the same reasons that are pushing people like Len-len off the land, that number is set to double. The slum is the filthy secret of the modern mega-city, the hidden consequence of twenty years of untrammelled market forces, greed, neglect and graft.

Yet Mena, at my elbow, is feeding me this constant stream of verbal PR-copy: ‘We are happy; there is social cohesion here; only we can organize it like this.'

She's all too conscious that the Estero de San Miguel has been condemned. The left-liberal government of Benigno ‘NoyNoy' Aquino has decided to forcibly relocate half a million slum dwellers back to the countryside, and the Estero is at the top of the list.

‘Many of our people are no longer interested in agriculture, so we need to give them the incentives to go back to the land,' says Celia Alba, who heads the Philippines Housing Development Corporation. ‘If we had to rehouse the slum dwellers inside Manila, in medium-rise housing, it would cost one third of the national budget.'

But the San Miguel will not go without a fight, says Mena: ‘We will barricade and we will revolt if we have to. We will resist slum clearance and we will fight to defend our community. We are happy here.'

It's not an idle threat. On 28 April 2011, residents of the Laperal slum, a few miles away across Manila, engaged demolition teams with Molotov cocktails and bricks in a riot that injured six policemen and numerous slum dwellers. An arson attack had wiped out most of their homes ten days before.

Technically, global policy is on the side of the rioters. In 2003 an influential UN report,
The Challenge of Slums
, signalled a shift away from the old slum-clearance policies and recognized that slums make a positive contribution to economic development: they house new migrants; being dense, they use land efficiently; they're culturally diverse and harbour numerous opportunities for ragged-trousered entrepreneurs.
²

‘Even ten years ago we used to dream that cities would become slum-free,' Mohammed Khadim of UN-Habitat had told me at the organization's Cairo office. ‘Now the approach has changed; people see the positives. The approach now is not to clear them but improve them gradually; regularize land tenure.'

Cameron Sinclair, who runs the non-profit design firm Architecture For Humanity, goes further:

A slum is a resilient urban animal, you cannot pry it away. It's like a good parasite—there are some parasites that attack the body and you have to get rid of them. But within the city, the informal settlement is a parasite that acts in harmony with the city; keeps it in check.

Sinclair, whose organization has upgraded slums in Brazil, Kenya and South Africa, believes modern city design should not only tolerate slums but learn from them—and even emulate them. He's building instant shanty towns in disaster zones from Sri Lanka to Japan. ‘To be honest,' he says, ‘what we lack in a place like London is that the lower classes can't live in central London and have to commute for two and a half hours to do the jobs that keep people going.'

But what's driven this new thinking is not so much vision as a set of ugly economic facts. After the 1970s there was a sharp slowdown in the provision of social housing across the globe. In cities, the move away from state provision of services fuelled the rise of the informal economy and a growing inequality between rich and poor. As a result, we're having to ask ourselves a question that would have made the nineteenth-century fathers of city planning shudder: do we have to learn to live with slums forever?

It's a question to which the Filipino political elite has defiantly answered ‘No.'

A vision in vanilla

Estero de Paco,
Manila.
‘Should I buy them ice cream?' Gina Lopez asks me, tilting back her white Stetson and peering over her sunglasses. We're in a slum called Estero de Paco, or what's left of it. The teenage boys are crowding shirtless around Gina, and it's one of their birthdays, so should she buy them ice cream? After all, she is Gina Lopez.

Gina herself is wearing a cool vanilla sleeveless number that reveals her to be lithe and youthful for her sixty-one years. She enters the slum accompanied by about thirty people, including two police officers, a media team of six, some local community guys, her bodyguards, several factotums and a man in dark glasses who is carrying her handbag.

Gina is a TV star, a philanthropist, the boss of Manila's River Renovation Authority and, most importantly, a member of the Lopez family. Lopez Inc. owns half of downtown Manila, an energy company, an entire TV network, a phone company, and has interests in many other kinds of infrastructure, including water. So who better than Gina—in a country apparently untroubled by issues of conflict of interest—to run a charity dedicated to the forcible removal of slum dwellers from Manila's waterways?

The word ‘estero' means tributary, but it's also morphed into the word for a riverine slum. The Estero de Paco used to have slums right down to the water's edge, just like San Miguel. One hundred and fifty families lived in the five-foot-high space between the water and a concrete bridge, and several hundred more lived, strung out as in San Miguel, along the banks of the canal. But Gina has sorted this out.

Now, instead of shacks, a neat border of agapanthus and rubber plants fringes the water's edge. State-of-the art oxidation units are trying to turn the brown sludge into something chemically close to H2O. Into the cleared space, work gangs are laying a wide-bore sewage pipe.

As Gina approaches, a group of middle-aged local women forms up into a line. They stand to attention in their shabby garb while Gina goes into a Prada-clad drill routine: ‘River Warriors, atten … shun!' We are treated to some Filipino slogans about honour and playing for the team. Then comes some more drill, before they all fall about laughing: ‘I ordered them to dive into the water,' Gina giggles.

But the idea behind the River Warriors is deadly serious. The Estero de Paco clearance was, says Gina, ‘non-negotiable'. She set up the charity to train selected slum dwellers to form unofficial security groups, both of men and women. The River Warriors' job is to make sure those who've been cleared don't come back. Gina says: ‘They will poo here! They will throw garbage. They would come back if we didn't guard the place. So we work with the ones who are compliant. To make a change like this you have to work with a chosen few, with vanguards.'

The clearance programme works like a giant scalpel. All the engineers need is four metres' width of riverbank to create the easement for the waste pipe, so a second, deeper layer of slums remains: you can see where the demolition crews have sheared through walls, windows, dirt, alleyways. This is social engineering on a vast scale—but it's what the government has decided must happen to half a million people in Manila.

Gina says that she had the idea for the River Warriors

while I was at a meditation retreat in California. You know how things come to you? You will love this! I thought: I will create something like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. They can kneel down and I will knight them, but with an
arnis,
which is a Filipino weapon.

She is telling me all this without a trace of embarrassment or irony.

The Lopez family is one often mega-powerful business families that run the country. If your vision of capitalism is one in which a genetically predestined elite runs everything, where democracy is a vibrant sham, where the minds of the poor are controlled by religion, TV and lotteries, and where patronage and graft is rife, then the Philippines is the ideal embodiment of it.

But the longer I spend with Gina, the more I realize she does have a point. Manila can't be a modern city if its waterways are clogged with excrement. Like the slum-clearers of nineteenth-century London and New York, she has a missionary zeal:

You can't live well if you are faced with the constant smell of faeces, right? You can't live a decent life on top of a sewer. And even if those people want to stay there, it has a wider impact on the city, the environment: we can't clean the water and bring the river back to life if they are there; and the crime and sickness has a big impact on the overall environment.

But twenty-first-century capitalism has made the ideals of the nineteenth century almost impossible to deliver on. With Gina out of earshot, two River Warrior women tell me that they themselves are returnees from a place called Calauan, where they were moved to when Estero de Paco was cleared. I want to see Calauan, but it's too far to get there and back by road in a single day.

‘Oh, but you have to see Calauan,' Gina says. And she flips open her BlackBerry: ‘Get me aviation.'

At the treeline

Calauan,
Laguna
Province.
The chopper skims low across Manila Bay; it's fringed with slums and out in the bay itself there are homes on stilts. ‘Even the sea is squatted,' Monchet Olives, Gina's chief of staff, tells me.

Soon the skyscrapers of downtown Manila disappear completely and the slums give way to rice paddies; in the distance are mountains. Now Calauan comes into view: neat rows of single-storey housing, the tin roofs glinting. The whole complex houses maybe 6,000 families, and there is room for many more. On the streets of Calauan, density is not a problem. The public space is deserted. There's a playground and a school with the name Oscar Lopez painted on the roof. The problem is—as Monchet admits—there is no electricity or running water, and no prospect of ever getting any:

When it comes to electricity we're between a rock and a hard place. Many of the new residents have never been used to paying bills—and the electricity company, to make the investment, needs an income stream they just can't provide.

And there are no jobs.

As we walk we're being shadowed by two soldiers in full camouflage and with assault rifles, on a motorbike. Monchet explains that the soldiers' presence is due to the New People's Army, a Maoist guerrilla group going back to the 1950s with currently about 6,000 members nationwide: ‘Guerrilla activity is what made the authorities abandon this place for ten years.'

Deep in the jungle? ‘No, just up there on the hill.' Monchet waves his finger in the general direction of the landscape, which suddenly looks a lot like that treeline in the opening credits of ‘Apocalypse Now'.

Ruben Petrache was one of those relocated to Calauan from the Estero de Paco. He's in his fifties and has been seriously ill. His home now is a spacious terraced hut. It has a tin roof, with tinfoil insulation to keep the heat down, a pretty garden, and a ‘mezzanine' arrangement to create two bedrooms, such as you would see in a loft. Ruben's English is not so good, so Monchet translates:

What he's saying is that although the community [in Estero de Paco] is disrupted, he thinks it's better here. At least for him. Once you get here, after a while, you realize you've become accustomed to conditions that are insanitary; you learn to move on, live in a new way.

Ruben points to the solar panel that provides his electricity; to the barrel for collecting rainwater by the porch that supplements the water they pump from wells. Are there any downsides?

‘It would be better if there was a factory here, because we need more jobs,' Monchet summarizes. Later, with a professional translator, I replay the tape and work out what Ruben—handpicked by the camp's authorities—actually said:

What the people need here is a job. We need a company nearby so that we don't have to go to Manila. Also we need electricity. Many residents here know how to fix electric fans, radios. But the problem is that even if they have the skills, they can't do it because there is no electricity here, so they are forced to go to Manila to find work and earn money to buy food. We are hard workers: and if we don't do anything, we might die of hunger here. That's why many go back to Manila: to look for work and earn money.

In Calauan's covered market the stalls are plentifully stocked with meat, rice and vegetables, but there are more stallholders than shoppers. Gloria Cruz, thirty-eight years old, is performing on the karaoke machine to three toddlers, two other mums, the Armalite-toting soldiers and me. After a couple of verses she hits the pause button and says:

‘My husband commutes to Manila to work. He comes back at weekends. It's the same for everybody. There's nothing here.'

The tolerated slum

Makati, Manila.
I have an appointment to interview Jejomar Binay, the country's vice president, who is responsible for slum clearance. But when I arrive in the vestibule of his office, he turns out to have a throat infection, which prevents his attendance.

Felino Palafox is more accessible. Palafox is an architect who specializes in vast, space-age projects in the Middle East and Asia: mosques, Buddhist temples, futuristic towers on the Persian Gulf, always for people with money to burn. But now he's come up with a private scheme to save the Estero de San Miguel: to rebuild it,
in situ,
with new materials.

The plan is to clear it bit by bit and put in modular housing. Each plot will measure 10 m
²
, the ground floor reserved for retail, the floors above extending out over the walkway, just as slum dwellers build their homes—‘stealing the air from the planning authorities,' Palafox calls it. ‘The slum-dwellers are experts at live-work space design, they spontaneously do mixed use. We just have to learn from them.'

From the roof of the office block in Makati, Manila's central business district, where his practice is headquartered, Palafox gives me a primer in what's gone wrong. He indicates the nearby skyscrapers: ‘monuments to graft'. He points out the gated compounds where the rich live, downtown. To the government, which complains that his design is too expensive, he says: