Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. x, 274 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-226-64314-4.
Metro Manila historians—Daniel Doeppers, a social geographer based at the University of Wisconsin, the late anthropologist Felipe Landa Jocano, and the late political scientist Manuel Caoili, both from the University of the Philippines—would be thrilled to read Marco Z. Garrido’s book. Following their footsteps, Garrido provides a compelling new read based on careful archival and ethnographic research.
Garrido takes his place in the generation of young transnational scholars working in the fields of geography, urban planning, and urban sociology who are interested in spatial forms shaping class relations and lived experiences of democratic experiments in cities in the Global South.
His book, however, is not just another historical or ethnographic study. It is a very political geography based on an ethnography of class relations and housing conflicts in a metropolitan context. Classed interactions occur organically in highly unequal urban neighbourhoods. In Garrido’s account, the urban poor, colloquially called “squatters” living in informal settlements, or slums, have quotidian, regular, and episodic encounters with upper- and middle-class residents of gated communities, swanky condos, and other enclaves reserved for the ultra-rich, the rich, and the wannabe rich. His political ethnography uncovers spatial relations of proximity heightening peoples’ awareness of spatial inequalities, categorically and systematically imagined, negotiated, asserted, reasserted, and fossilized.
Like other good social geographers, inspired by Marxist political economy and class analysis, Garrido insists classes must be studied relationally. Using Bourdieu’s concept of social classes mapped on to social spaces, he pays attention not only to classes as an “analytical category” mainly “on paper,” but also as a “social group” in “real life.” Daily social interactions shape spatial boundary impositions and negotiations, particularly around urban housing, or human settlements in the metropolitan inner cities, fringes, and peripheries. These taken-for-granted classed interactions in Manila’s patchwork of squatter settlements, middle-class subdivisions, and gated enclaves for the rich are not just about cultural proximity, familiarity, and conflicts. They also shape contentious politics, democratic participation, and social protests. If relational class analysis, made alive and vivid by colourful ethnographic data, is at the heart of Garrido’s important research, then feminist, gender, and spatial analysis are its limbs.
Take for example the book’s introduction. It recounts how Philippine President Joseph Estrada was elected in 1998 with the widespread support from the C, D & E market classes; then deposed in the 2001 EDSA II people’s uprising reprise of 1986’s EDSA I, which led to the installation of of Vice-President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Three months later, Estrada’s arrest to face corruption charges under the new government was preceded by street demonstrations, known as EDSA III, led by “bathless and toothless” (3) urban poor supporters clamouring for his reinstatement as they barricaded Estrada’s mansion. Estrada’s rise and fall in these historical events marking the start of “political dissensus,” borrowing from Jacques Ranciere, form the opening lens through which Garrido pursues broader theoretical questions about urban class structures, politics, and social interactions.
Divided into two parts with several chapters, part 1, “From Urban Fragmentation to Class Division,” examines the urban development process that led to the patchwork of Manila’s classed residential housing patterns and formations. In part 2, “From Class Division to Political Dissensus,” Garrido shifts his attention towards class conflicts shaping electoral politics and the politicization of classed identities. Accompanying the book is the “Patchwork City Archive,” an online addendum offering additional insights into the research project’s trajectory through charts, maps, colour photographs, and short videos, including Garrido’s digital ethnography observing Estrada during the 2010 presidential campaign trail.
Chapter 1 contextualizes the book within available mainstream scholarship on urban economic restructuring in global cities since the 1970s. Its analytical approaches draw from Bourdieu’s concept of social class, Charles Tilly’s work on unequal and hierarchical social relations, and Georg Simmel’s studies on class identity and interaction. Drawing on rich ethnographic observations and the intimate details of Manila urban life through in-depth interviews, Garrido gives readers insights into the quotidian experiences of proximate urban relations and the physical-symbolic barriers structuring intra- and inter-community relations in the city.
Patchwork City explains the heterogenous patchwork of Manila’s chaotic, inclusive slums and secluded, exclusive enclaves, showing how their interdependent, if not porous, spatial and definitional boundaries are relationally produced. It provides an empirically grounded portrayal of competing perspectives and understandings of spatial orders between slum dwellers or informal settlers (also called squatters) and dwellers in the enclaves of the rich or the gated subdivisions in Manila (also called “villagers” or village dwellers).
Manila’s shifting postwar class formations, particularly its rising middle class, have spatially formed and reproduced causal relations of interdependence, proximity, and (un)familiarity between neighbours, strangers, passersby, migrant workers, street vendors, and other peddlers in a “patchwork city” where the “housing divide” is a visible signifier of “class cleavage” (32). This spatial proximity, Garrido argues, has the effect of “altering class relations for the worse” (54), where upper-middle-class enclave residents view their living spaces as under siege (chapter 3) and construct physical and symbolic spatial boundaries for social distancing (chapter 4) long before the COVID-19 global pandemic reached Metro Manila.
The homeless urban underclass (masa, lumpen) or urban poor city dwellers (maralitang taga-lungsod) experience these spatial boundaries as forms of exclusion, imposition, and discrimination (chapter 5), yet the upper-to-middle classes view members of this demographic as “political dupes” whose constituency votes can be bought by corrupt politicians (chapter 6). In contrast, urban poor people themselves desire recognition from their leaders, whose performative politics (many are popular movie and television actors, such as Joseph Estrada, Isko Moreno, Aiko Melendrez, and Herbert Bautista) may sometimes appear sincere, sometimes coherent, sometimes effective (chapter 7).
Such chaotic local dynamics shape and weaken democratic institutions and electoral politics. Slum residents, Garrido documents, bear stories of stigma, discrimination, and marginalization from villagers who experience fear, insecurity, and spatial encroachment, generating politics of resentment and frustrations with democracy on both sides of the divide. Thus, it should not surprise readers how these deep-seated inequalities and injustices breed populist authoritarian sentiments searching for security and strong willful rulers.
Edsa III street demonstrations in support of disgraced President Joseph Estrada, following strong allegations of corruption, magnified the class dualisms and divides in the metropolis’ politics of dissensus (chapter 8). The book concludes by offering observations on the class dimensions of the affective structures and local experience of democracy, as well as the structural bases supporting the growth of personality-based populism, from the time of Estrada (1998–2000) to the reign of President Rodrigo Duterte (2016–2022).
Patchwork City contributes to urban geography through its political-sociological-ethnographic understandings of space, politics, and urban experiences in a country plagued by persistent urban poverty, stubborn social inequality, and structural unemployment within the Global South. It will interest scholars and general readers, as well as beginner and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in sociology, Southeast Asian studies, political science, political geography, social movement studies, and urban planning studies. More elaboration on the gendered landscapes and dynamics of daily life, and gendered navigation of private and urban spaces in Manila’s “patchwork city” would have also made it appealing to feminist geographers and planners within international development and other interdisciplinary studies.
Leonora C. Angeles
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver