The Matriyoshka Settlement: a Historical Geography of the Evolving Definitions of Metropolitan Manila During the Marcos Era
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The Matriyoshka Settlement: A Historical Geography of the Evolving Definitions of Metropolitan Manila 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 Rizal 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 Intramuros, 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 tram that extended from Binondo all the way to Malabon, 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.