The Matriyoshka Settlement: A Historical Geography of the Evolving Definitions of Metropolitan during the Marcos Era

Marco Stefan B. Lagman Department of Geography University of the Philippines-Diliman

Abstract

For the past four decades, it has become natural for Filipinos to perceive Metropolitan Manila as an agglomeration of 17 settlements all of which, save for one, has attained the status of highly urbanized city. While this particular geographic definition of Metro Manila has become normalized into popular consciousness, many have a very faint idea of its history as a planning and administrative creation. Using studies from the education, marketing and economics disciplines, urban and transport planning documents, journal articles, and studies during the 1960s to the early part of the 1980s, and geographic information systems knowledge, this paper seeks to provide a history of how Manila and its surrounding towns eventually came to be perceived as a metropolitan region that became the object of research, policy-making, planning, and administration by the state and other institutions. This study also aims to emphasize that the Metro Manila that we know today underwent several iterations as planners and policymakers seemingly employed several criteria such as urbanization, land use, population, and even car registration and traffic congestion as the bases for which to include in the metropolitan region. By rendering these into Geographic Information Systems-based maps, the multiple versions of the Metropolitan Manila Area over the years could be best understood, appreciated, and imagined in visual format. Moreover, as Metro Manila was being defined, an even larger area called the Manila Bay Metropolitan Region that included the former was being proposed by the authorities as a means for further directing growth and development of the largest cluster of rapidly urbanizing settlements in the country during the 1970s. It is hoped that this historico-geographical study will add to the literature in the areas of Philippine history, urban planning, and geography.

Introduction

For the past four decades since its formal inception in 1975, Metropolitan Manila has become normalized into the public consciousness. Also known as the National Capital Region (NCR) and one of the increasing numbers of administrative regions in the Philippines, Filipinos over the years have been conditioned, deliberately or otherwise, by educational, state, and media institutions to imagine and recognize Metro Manila as an agglomeration of seventeen local government units that radiates from the city of Manila. Taken as a given, many Filipinos may not realize that this notion of a Manila Metropolitan Area (MMA) has a long and interesting history as a ‘construction’ of both state and its institutions, the academe, and even the business sector.

This was especially the case during the roughly twenty-year administration of the late President Ferdinand Marcos in whose tenure there were three official versions of Metropolitan Manila that emanated from the different geographic versions conjured and imagined by academics and planners in the 1960s and 1970s. If put together and compared with each other, these different versions provide an image of Metro Manila that could be likened to a matriyoshka or Russian doll that can contain smaller renderings of its own self. As such, this paper discusses this evolution by examining the different versions of the Manila metropolis as well as the bases for their designation as metropolitan areas.

Metropolitan Areas as Regions

Loosely defined, regions are large contiguous land areas that are viewed holistically for having certain common characteristics, functions, or concerns (Wheeler, 2006). Mainly a function of state planning and management, examples of such regions in the Philippines include the country’s 18 administrative regions, the Pasig River Rehabilitation Authority, whose scope of planning and operations span several local government units that are traversed by the said water body, as well as the regional economic centers that are commonly mentioned in political addresses made by Philippines presidents.

The ideas of designating and constructing regions over landscapes are simply the product of the reality that many development concerns and issues, particularly in a rapidly urbanizing environment, are best dealt with on a regional scale. These include issues such as air and water quality, transportation planning, urban sprawl (Wheeler 2006), sewerage, and the management of criminal activities (Caoili 1999). In a sense,

contiguous areas that are experiencing urbanization [i.e., high levels of in-migration, the dominance of non-agricultural economic activities, intense land uses] (Serote 2008; Brunn et. al. 2008) at a hurried pace are usually viewed, accepted, and designated by institutions as metropolitan areas. Such is the case for regions in the country such as Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, and Metro Davao. At present, members of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry have already designated areas just outside of Metro Manila that have high concentration of call center establishments as metropolitan regions. These include Metro Bulacan, Metro Antipolo, Metro Cavite, and Metro Laguna, all of which are composed of towns and cities that are along the edges and/or share territorial boundaries with Metropolitan Manila (Torres 2015). Unfortunately, since everyday life occurs at a more local scale, regions, such as metropolitan areas, are the least understood by both the general public and as they are, at best, peripheral to their daily lives.

Despite the tendency of various groups in coming up with their own designations of regions to suit their own objectives, this has not stopped the state and its institutions (Ogborn 2003) in the Philippines from defining and designating regions in the country. Most prominent among these is Metropolitan Manila, composed of 17 contiguous local government units that officially came into being in 1975 via Presidential Proclamation 824 under the management of the Metropolitan Manila Commission (Presidential 824 1975). In reality, the current geographic dimension of Metro Manila (MM) is actually more of the culmination of several imagined versions of the said region. Manila, in fact, has a long history of ‘metropolitan’ abstractions and imaginations that began in the Spanish era and which gathered much momentum during the 1960s and 1970s. It could even be argued that the manner in which Manila has defined as a region has been quite fluid until its current dimensions was enacted into law and became slowly popularized and ingrained into the consciousness of Filipinos.

The Forerunners of Metropolitan Manila The term “metropolitan” is a relatively new term. A google N-gram analysis of the word in books reveals that the word started to be used in English texts beginning in early 1800s, began to be increasingly mentioned in books by the 1920s, and peaking in terms of citations in the early 1970s (Google Books N-Gram Viewer n.d.). In the case of the United States, it was only during the decades immediately after World War II that state institutions such as the federal government began designating metropolitan regions in their censuses (Brunn et. al. 2008) and have required the

setting up of metropolitan planning organizations to coordinate activities pertaining to housing and transportation (Wheeler 2006).

During the Spanish period, Metropolitan Manila had two precursors, the Manila y sus Arrabales and the Provincia de Manila. The latter became an official administrative area in the 1850s/60s (Huetz de Lemps 2000) that was comprised of practically the same number of localities of present-day Metropolitan Manila, except for Valenzuela City (Polo), and with the addition of the towns of Montalban (Rodriguez) and San Mateo (U.S. Military Notes, 1899). By the late 1800s, Manila Province already had a population of roughly 300,000 inhabitants (Huetz de Lemps 1998). Manila y sus arrables, on the other hand, was comprised of , the capital and synonymously called “Manila”, and around 11 suburbs that surrounded the capital (Doeppers 1998). This region was, in fact, likely to be the Manila and the surrounding environs that are commonly described by foreigners who travelled and stayed in the Philippines in their nineteenth century accounts (See Bowring 1963, MacMicking 1967, de Lurcy et. al. 1974, Foreman 1980, Mallat 1983).

Metropolitan regions, in a sense, can be reflective of core-periphery relations, wherein a human settlement or area within the center of that region has a dominant political, economic, and cultural relationship with its peripheral or hinterland settlements (Johnston, Gregory, and Smith 1998). Relations between the core and its periphery become more intense with once these areas are more connected to each other via transportation networks or when the natural environment of the hinterlands serve as a vital resource for the region’s core (Doxiadis 1968).

Such was the case for the colonial transport and waterworks services from the waning years of Spanish colonial rule until the time of American colonialism in the 1930s. By the 1880s, Manila was already being connected to its adjoining districts and communities via the five lines of the Compaña de Tranvia de Filipinas. One of these lines operated a steam-driven that extended from Binondo all the way to , which at that time served as Manila’s major source of raw and processed agricultural goods that were sourced from the provinces of Bulacan, Pampanga, and Nueva Ecija (National Archives of the Philippines, Tranvia de Manila). Another reflection of an emerging metropolitanization was the reality that Manila and its nearby communities no longer had the capacity to source potable water from their localities by the latter part of Spanish rule. This led to the sourcing of water from was then far-away Marikina River and which was processed in what is now San Juan City by the Carriedo Waterworks (Lico 2008).

By the arrival of the Americans, Manila and the areas surrounding it began to have a more distinct metropolitan character as it became more of the core that required the resources of its hinterland. By the second decade of American rule, Manila, the center, was already connected to several towns and localities in Cavite to its south as well as the towns of Montalban, Marikina, Taytay, Cainta, and Antipolo to its east via branch lines of the Manila Railroad Company (McIntyre 1907; United States Office of the Secretary 1908). In the case of the Manila-Antipolo Line, it was argued by proponents that the town of Antipolo, a known tourist haven, also provided Manila with much resources and, as such, it was reasonable to establish a line to the said area. In addition, the suburbs of Manila likewise expanded further with the increased geographic reach of the electric street cars that were managed by the Manila Electric Light and Rail Company () beginning in the early decades of American rule (United States Philippine Commission 1905; Dauncey 1906)

The imperatives of promoting better utilities services and sanitation to ensure the health of Americans who resided in the Manila area (Lico 2008) and the increasing number of inhabitants who needed potable water may have encouraged the expansion of both the water source as well as the geographic areas that were serviced by the first government or commercial entity that had the word “metropolitan” attached to its name – the Metropolitan Water District (MWD). The MWD served a wider geographic area, had a far larger water capacity, and sourced water from areas farther than that of the Carriedo Waterworks. Created through Act No. 2832 in 1919, the MWD was mandated to serve not only the city of Manila but also “14 other municipalities in Rizal Province” (Souvenir Bulletin 1940, p. 21). It eventually served 15 other settlements which included the towns of Cainta, Caloocan, Las Pinas, Malabon, Mandaluyong, Marikina, Montalban, , Paranaque, , Pasig, San Juan del Monte, San Mateo, San Pedro Makati and Taytay (Manila’s Water Supply 1935), a geographic area which included most of the localities of present-day Metro Manila with the exception of Pateros and the cities of Taguig, Muntinlupa, and Valenzuela. Water for these areas during the American period was sourced beyond the Marikina River, reaching as far as Montalban, Rizal and Angat in Bulacan (Philippine Commission of Independence 1923; United States Army Service Forces 1944).

The idea that Manila belonged to or was connected to a wider geographic area due to needs or concerns that transcended the borders of localities was furthered when the Philippines was finally involved in the Second World War. In the hope of preventing and mitigating the abuse that the inhabitants of the city of Manila and its

neighboring towns could experience in the hands of the invading Japanese forces, Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon enacted an executive order designating the city of Manila, Quezon City, and the 6 towns of Pasay, Caloocan, Makati, San Juan, Mandaluyong, and Parañaque as the Greater Manila Area (GMA) (See Figure 1). Jose Vargas was designated by Quezon to be the mayor of the GMA with all current mayors of the localities within it serving as GMA vice mayors (Caruncho, 2014). In effect, the concern that a common threat that could inflict much damage to a group of highly populated contiguous settlements was the main reason that prompted the leadership of the Philippine Commonwealth to establish the country’s first metropolitan-level administrative institution.

Figure 1. Cities and towns that was declared by then Commonwealth President Manuel L. Quezon as being part of the Greater Manila Area in 1942.

From GMA to MMA: Fluid notions of Metropolitan Manila, Post War to 1975

Variations of the Greater Manila Area by academics and graduate students

During the years after the Second World War, the Greater Manila Area became an accepted designation which, in the beginning, had a relatively fixed configuration of

settlements. The country’s Bureau of Census’s (BCS) geographic composition of Metropolitan Manila mirrored that of Quezon’s GMA, except that the census version of Metro Manila was made up of 4 cities and 4 municipalities. In a sense, it was region that was a collage of settlements that became a geographic agglomeration without any clear purpose (Roxas, 1970).

Yet from the 1960s until the middle 1970s, academics, researchers, and urban planners, depending on their own interests, seemed to have employed and invented different and fluid ideas of what should be both the GMA and MMA. These flexible conceptions of the Greater Manila Area were particularly evident in the studies of researchers in the fields of education, marketing, and economics. A marketing group called INDEX published a document entitled The Appliance Market in the Greater Manila Area (1964) that adhered to the 4 cities, 4 municipalities definition of the BCS. But other academics and researchers, while recognizing that there is a “Greater Manila Area” or an agglomeration of settlements that are connected to a center (Manila), their interpretations of what comprises the GMA were quite diverse and liberal.

Wanda Barber (1967), a then graduate student of the University of the Philippines College of Education (UP-COE) employed what she cited as a 1958 definition of the GMA in her thesis on child-rearing practices of Fukienese families in Greater Manila wherein the region was comprised of not 8 but 10 localities: Manila Proper, Pasay City, Quezon City, Caloocan City, Makati, Mandaluyong, Parañaque, and San Juan, as well as the towns of Las Piñas and Malabon. Another UP-COE graduate student, Wamalyao Silachan (1974), on the other hand, described GMA as being made up of 11 settlements, which different from Barber’s definition as former added the towns of Pasig, Navotas, and Valenzuela but she did not include Las Piñas and Parañaque. Morceover, another masteral thesis of another UP-COE graduate student defined the Greater Manila Area as being made up of two urban areas, Manila and Quezon City (Yenuthog, 1968). All of these studies indicate that while GMA was an accepted idea and one that has been officially designated and in a way standardized by the state, what comprises the area remained very arbitrary and was a matter of personal preference and interest.

The same can be said about the 1975 geographic definition of Metro Manila that was officially designated and assigned by a presidential of then President Ferdinand Marcos. Despite being explicitly stated in PD 824 that Metropolitan Manila is comprised of 17 localities, academics from the UP School of Economics still adhered

closely to the old BCS definition of Greater Manila in their studies, albeit after only three years after PD 824. While he did not explicitly enumerate GMA’s spatial composition, Armas, Jr. (1978), in his study of the construction sector of the Greater Manila Area defined his version of GMA as encompassing 6 settlements, Manila, Quezon City, Pasay City, Caloocan City, Makati, and Mandaluyong, while assigning the Escolta District of Manila as a distinct geographical category. Jurado and Castro (1978), in their discussion paper of GMA’s informal sector, on the other hand, had a GMA study area made up of the 4 cities of the BCS definition of GMA, the towns of Makati, Navotas, Mandaluyong, and San Juan, while again assigning a district of Manila, Tondo, as an entity separate from Manila Proper (See Figure 2).

Figure 2. Version of the Greater Manila Area utilized by Gonzalo Jurado and other academics of the University of the Philippines School of Economics.

Yet one researcher who seemed to distinctly define GMA as a metropolitan entity with a clearly expanding geographic scope was Richard Stone (1973). In his special report, The Politics of Private Property in Greater Manila, that saw print two years before the official designation of Metropolitan Manila, Stone explained that the Greater Manila

Area was actually synonymous to a metropolitan region. His Metropolitan Manila consisted of the “cities of Manila, Quezon, Caloocan, Pasay; the larger municipalities of Makati, Mandaluyong, San Juan del Monte, and Paranaque; the small municipalities of Malabon and Navotas to the north of Caloocan and the highway municipalities that run continuously to Malolos in the Province of Bulacan.” Stone’s definition of Metro Manila is important since he is the first non-planner to see the said metropolitan region as an agglomeration of settlements that expanded along major thoroughfares and which was much larger geographically than the Greater Manila Area of the Bureau of the Census and Statistics.

Settlement convergence, population density, extent of service areas, vehicle volume, and area of planning intervention: More nuanced bases for determining the Manila’s Metropolitan Region by policy-makers, businesses, and academics

By the late 1960s to early 1970s, there seemed to have been a consensus in the public administration and the emerging academic urban planning community that the true dimensions and extent of the metropolitan area that centered on Manila had gone beyond the prescribed 4 cities and 4 municipalities of the GMA. Individuals and groups associated with both fields became a rich source of material with respect to suggestions on what the true and real extent of the Metro Manila Area both as a geographical entity and as a unit of analysis. It should be noted that such geographic imaginings of what Metro Manila should be can be better appreciated using the expressed in visual or map format.

In 1966, public administration academic Aprodicio Laquian proposed that from the 8 localities that comprise the standard definition of GMA, Metropolitan Manila should be increased to 14 by adding the towns of Malabon, Navotas, Pasig, Pateros, Marikina, San Mateo, and Las Piñas (note: cited differently by Roxas, 1970 and Mendiola, 1970). He reasoned that since 1877, Manila’s population and urban development had already expanded outwards along major highways and rivers and have already converged with older settlements near Manila. Including the aforementioned towns as part of Manila’s metropolitan region would enable state institutions to better plan and integrate the physical services needed by these communities (Laquian 1966). On the other hand, urban planner Geronimo Manahan generally concurs with Laquian’s inclusion of the 6 additional towns but that the Bulacan municipalities of Valenzuela, Obando, and Meycauayan, as well as the localities of Cainta, Taytay, and Taguig, all of which were then part of Rizal Province

should also be part of the Manila Metropolitan Area (Mendiola 1970) (See Figures 3 and 4.).

Figures 3 and 4. GMA versions of Aprodicio Laquian and Geronimo Manahan.

Even earlier, in 1959, the group International Urban Research (IUR) already used as bases available data from the 1948 Philippine Census and population density to suggest that the MMA was composed of 23 localities (Paderon, 1970; Mendiola, 1970) (See Figure 5.). The proposed metropolitan area of IUR was in, fact, similar to that of Manahan’s except that the former included the Cavite settlements of Bacoor and Cavite City as well as the Rizal towns of Angono and Teresa, while excluding San Mateo and Las Piñas (Mendiola, 1970).

Figure 5. GMA Version of the IUR.

Laquian (1966) noted that while the government was slow in formally recognizing the urbanization and economic development had already moved beyond the BCS- defined GMA, business firms, particularly those involved in the provision of services have already recognized the expansion of Metro Manila’s borders. He cites the case of the Manila Electric Company (MERALCO) which at that time already served 38 contiguous municipalities and cities.

The recognition of the interrelated problems of water and sewerage that affected Manila and its adjacent areas may have been integral to the completion of an interim report of a master plan for a sewerage system that would serve the MMA. The 20 settlements that were included in the proposed service area were the 4 cities of GMA as well as the 16 municipalities adjacent to these. All in all, the area to be served would involve 49,000 hectares or 490 square kilometers (National Waterworks and Sewerage Authority 1970), about four-fifths of the land area of current day Metro Manila (See Figure 6).

Figure 6. The Metropolitan Manila Area as defined by the consultancy group Black and Veatch in the 1969 National Sewerage Plan.

The largest versions of the Manila metropolis were proposed by a team of professors and students from the then University of the Philippines-Institute of Planning (UPIP) and UPIP Professor Teodoro Encarnacion. The UPIP team that produced the landmark planning document Planning Strategy for Metropolitan Manila A.D. 2000 (UPIP, 1968) proposed an MMA encompassing the territories of 29 local government units which included Laquian’s 15 settlements with an additional 14 other municipalities. The boundary localities of the said spatial agglomeration would be Malolos and Angat in Bulacan, Biñan in Laguna, as well as Rosario, Cavite City, and 4 other towns in Cavite Province (See Figure 7.). Unfortunately, it could not be determined which localities in Rizal Province would serve as this aforementioned MMA’s border towns, although it seems that car-to-population ratios and the average growth rates of private vehicles may have been used as bases for determining the extent of Metropolitan Manila (UPIP, 1968).

Figure 7. Proposed Greater Manila Area of the University of the Philippines Institute of Planning Report “Manila A.D. 2000.”

Finally, Encarnacion (1969) noted that the rather spontaneous and organic nature of urban development in Manila and its environs, if it would continue unabated, would result in a “heterogeneous mass” with a maximum radius of 16 kilometers (See Figure 8.). While there was no enumeration of the settlements that this region would consist of, Paderon (1970) noted that the roughly 1,090 square kilometer land area, around 1.71 times the size of what is now Metro Manila, would extend up to the Antipolo foothills, Rosario and Cavite City, and Bocaue, Bulacan. Such attempts to redefine Metropolitan Manila, in fact, was more of an ancillary outcome of the consensus that the GMA and its periphery was developing in a very unplanned manner (Encarnacion, 1969; Roxas, 1970) and that many adjacent localities were already experiencing common problems in connection to peace and order, extreme natural events (i.e., flooding), settlement services provision (i.e., sewerage, water, waste disposal), the proliferation of slums (Mendiola, 1970), and traffic congestion (Paderon, 1970; Grava, 1972) that were best managed and addressed at a level that went beyond the territorial jurisdictions of localities.

Figure 8. Greater Manila Area version of Teodoro Encarnacion.

Yet unknown to many, as early as 1971, planners from the UPIP already produced a position paper called the Manila Bay Metropolitan Framework Plan (MBMFP). The 44- page document mentions two regions – 1) a Metropolitan Manila Area whose area of coverage include settlements in Bulacan, Cavite, Rizal, and Laguna, and 2) a massive Manila Bay Region made up of eight provinces, including the MMA, that would extend from Batangas to Zambales. This massive cluster of 188 municipalities and cities would have a land area of 18,000 square kilometers (DPWTC, 1973) (See Figure 9.).

The man objective of the MBMFP was to decongest the MMA by diverting development and migration towards 5 growth centers, namely: Batangas City, San Pablo City in Laguna, Angeles City in Pampanga, Olongapo City in Zamabales, and Balanga, Bataan. These aforementioned development poles ashare similar characteristics such as being 50-75 kilometers away from the MMA, are located along identified migration and development corridors, and have access to readily available natural and physical resources. In an ideal scenario, the five poles would function as political, social, and economic hubs for its surrounding settlements and will have administrative facilities and services similar to the ones offered in the MMA (Jucaban, 1976).

Figure 9. The Manila Bay Metropolitan Region. Source: Metro Manila Transport, Land Use, and Development Planning Project, 1977.

Population growth, economic concentration, and intense and haphazard land use development: Factors that determined the need to re-define the Manila Metropolitan Area

Clearly, all of these aforementioned definitions of metropolitan regions were not arbitrarily decided upon nor were they without any clear bases. In fact, all of these notions of the Metropolitan Manila Area and even the Manila Bay Metropolitan Region were simply reactions to a massive and unplanned urbanization of contiguous settlements whose common problems were already at a scale that required coordinated planning and management.

In urban studies and planning terms, urbanized areas are those settlements that experience an increase in population brought about mainly by in-migration and an economy that is predominantly no longer dependent on agriculture and fisheries (Brunn et. al, 2008). As a rule of thumb, populations of urban settlements are concentrated in smaller land areas. Land resources in urban places become more valued for its capacity to support buildings and structures than for its fertility.

This, in turn, leads to the conversion of land for higher intensity non-agricultural land uses (Serote, 2008). It should be noted that urbanization per se is not an inherently undesirable process, but when it happens in a rapid and haphazard manner, like what happened to Metropolitan Manila, such a process could lead to serious urban management problems.

It is often ignored that one of the legacies of colonization in the Philippines has been the overconcentration of people and activities in Manila and its surrounding settlements. Since the Spanish colonial period, the area that we call modern day Manila had been a preferred destination of migrants. Huetz de Lemps (1996) noted that the Province of Manila had a population that nearly tripled from the 1830s to the late 1870s; a rate of growth that clearly could not be attributed to natural increase alone. The attraction of Manila to both foreign and local migrants alike is connected to the fact that it had traditionally been the political, economic, and cultural center of the country dating back to the time of the Spaniards (Dery, 1991). This concentration of both people and activities in such a small part of the Philippines led to observations that Manila was the only settlement in the country that had a market to support local industries and commerce existed (March, 1899; Corpuz, 1997), and where its residents could be described to living in an urban environment (Le Roy, 1905).

This pattern of human settlement and economic development that centered around Manila and its ever-expanding periphery continued at an accelerated pace during the decades after the Second World War (Jurado and Castro, 1976). In the case of population growth, its concentration and direction in the Metro Manila Area is clearly demonstrated by the population growth maps of Metro Manila from 1903 to 1975 (See Figures 10-14).

Figures 10 to 14. Maps indicating the extent and concentration of population increases in settlements that are part of present-day Metro Manila during the census periods of 1903-1918, 1918-1939, 1948-1960, 1960-1970, and 1970-1975 (Left to right.). Maps by Johnson C. Damian.

These two related processes of population expansion and economic concentration, unfortunately, were aided by the Philippine government’s import substitution policy that encouraged the concentration of both people and industries within what became Metro Manila (Jones, 1988). By 1960, roughly 40% of Manila City’s residents were migrants, while 1 out of every 2 individuals in the Province of Rizal, which had towns that eventually became part of present-day Metro Manila, were classified as non- locals (Abad, 1971). The increase of populations in the GMA and neighboring provinces even led Walter Faithfull, an Australian urban planner renowned for helping develop the University of the Philippines, Institute of Planning, to suggest that it may again be feasible to operate the American period Cavite-Manila and Manila-Marikina- Montalban branch lines to the great increase in the population found in these settlements (Faithfull, 1970).

It is highly likely that people flocked to areas in what then were the Greater Manila Area and its peripheries as practically half of the country’s industries concentrated mainly in 6 localities of the GMA – Manila, Makati, Mandaluyong, San Juan, Pasay, and Quezon City (Abad, 1971). Even what was then considered as edge towns, such as Marikina and Muntinlupa, began to be considered as sites of manufacturing companies in the 1960s and 1970s (Santos, 1981; Camagay, 2004).

This steady overconcentration of people and industries in such a particular agglomeration of settlements inevitably led to the indiscriminate and haphazard development of subdivisions and eventual existence in lands that were converted for residential purposes. By the 1960s, Las Piñas, Cainta, Taguig, and Malabon emerged as outlying towns of Greater Manila (Encarnacion, 1969). During the same period hundreds of hectares of fishponds and salt beds in Manila’s Tondo district, Caloocan, Navotas, Parañaque, and Las Piñas were being converted into urban spaces for living and making a living (Land Use and Urban Development in the Manila Metropolitan Area, 1971). With the establishment of factories, the construction of residential subdivisions followed suit in Marikina and Muntinlupa (Santos, 1981; Camagay, 2004)

It was only a matter of time when this continuous concentration of people, economic activities, and reactive land conversion in a group of increasingly interrelated settlements wherein Manila and other emerging local government units served as hubs would result in urban problems whose scale went beyond the borders of individual towns and cities. In effect by the 1960s, problems such as disorganized subdivision development, a wanting water supply, the need for better sewerage and drainage services, floods, lack of housing, and open spaces, as well as lack of coordination among local governments were already at a metropolitan scale (DPWTC IDMBR, 1973).

But of all metropolitan-level concerns, none received the most attention from planners and academics than Manila’s escalating traffic congestion problems. In the UPIP document The City and the Third World (1971: 98), it was argued that Manila’s central business district (CBD) was the most congested CBDs in the world and that it was “literally being choked to death” by vehicular traffic. It was seven argued that the untenable traffic situation in Manila was the main reason for the development of the Makati, then considered a suburb of Manila, as a financial center. A year later, transport planner Sigurd Grava (1972) lamented that if no proper planning and

management of Metropolitan Manila’s transport system would be undertaken, even ordinary trips taken by people would soon become intolerable.

One factor that led to the metropolitan region’s traffic situation was the inordinately high concentration of private vehicles, not only in the Metro Manila Area, but also in adjacent provinces whose inhabitants’ regular activities clearly involved making trips to and from the former. In 1968, the MMA as well as Bulacan and Rizal Provinces had vehicle volumes that increased at an annual rate of 20% (UPIP, 1968). By the mid- 70s, it was noted that Metro Manila had 1 passenger car for every 12 people, a ratio that was far larger than the national average of 1 private vehicle for every 60 individuals (MTACOM, 1976). This problem of too many vehicles was exacerbated by the twin realities that decades into the post-war era, the country’s road system was barely improved (UPIP, 1968) and, as a result, the MMA was a metropolis whose transport needs were being served by a “small town transport system” (UPIP, 1971: 19-20).

All of these aforementioned interconnected urban problems, compelled urban planners and policy-makers to control and manage these concerns and, if possible, guide the direction of future urban development. As such, these urban concerns that afflicted contiguous settlements and the intent to prevent such kind of unsustainable urbanization from spreading uncontrollably to other areas, were the factors that motivated people from government and the planning profession to find ways to identify, determine, and properly frame the extent of Manila’s metropolitan area as a precondition to managing its problems and guiding its development.

Conclusion

The historical geography of how the Manila Metropolitan Area was perceived and developed by planners, academics, and business groups clearly demonstrate that metropolitan regions are not natural entities but are carved out by specific motivations. Academics defined an agglomeration of settlements that they studied, businesses staked out the geographic extent of their zones of operation, while urban planners and government policy-makers determined regions based on then existing and projected population, land use, and economic patterns in order to address the urban problems and manage the direction of development in such regions. All the spatial extents of these different metropolitan versions when conveyed, compared, and sieved in cartographic form clearly reveals a Metropolitan Manila that can be

likened to a matriyoshka, a Russian doll with smaller versions of itself nested inside of it.

Yet despite these different imagined iterations of Metro Manila how come it is only the version promulgated and promoted by PD 824 that has seeped into our consciousness to the extent that it has become second nature for Filipinos to imagine the region as made up of 17 contiguous local government units? How come Filipinos are not familiar with these other Metropolitan Manilas?

The answer is that many of these metropolitan versions were simply plans and suggestions that never got off the drawing board, so to speak, and, therefore, never became common knowledge. In reality, what we know and what we consider to be real or true is promoted and legitimized by influential institutions such as the state.

Aside from proclaiming the existence of a place through legislation and establishing institutions whose mandated functions cover such an area, educational institutions play an integral role in promoting, legitimizing, and normalizing what we know as true. Schools play an integral role in this regard as such institutions are even capable of making individuals to imagine and consider as real particular things, phenomena, or places even without the benefit of experiencing these. And in the case of places, regions, and boundaries, maps play a role in legitimizing spatial knowledge (Winichakul, 1994). In this regard, maps that are used as teaching aids in schools serve as tools to propagate a particular geographic imagination among people and to persuade these individuals to consider this as part of their reality (Dando, 2010) and even to provide them with a reality that is beyond what we could normally see, feel or experience (Wood). Therefore, it would not be far-fetched to think that maps of Metropolitan Manila in its current form, both with it as the main subject of interest or as an inset map found within a cartographic presentation of the Republic of the Philippines, that was taught to students all over the Philippines during the past four decades has been greatly responsible in ingraining upon the general public a geographic imagination of a Metropolitan Manila whose territorial metes and bounds do not correspond to its current actual extent.

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