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Desperation in Manila

Visitors to the Tondo can be easily overwhelmed by the stench and squalor. "Houses" are very small, with few basic amenities, and they are erected from any available materials on any available piece of land. This often means using stilts to build over polluted, reeking waterways or building around water pipes or beneath bridges or overpasses.

Equally appalling is the failure of city and national governments to assist their citizens. Malnourished, unclad children can be seen scavenging waste dumps for food or anything of value to sell. Schooling is unaffordable for most families. One wonders whether purported sustainability efforts are having any effect on this huge portion of the world's population.

Despite such appalling surroundings, many people maintain a sense of pride, and this is sporadically evident in plants and flowers being placed outside slum houses, forming small urban gardens.

Nonetheless under such impoverished demographic stresses, the environment buckles. In 2003, an outbreak of cholera and gastroenteritis led to numerous hospitalizations and deaths. E. coli bacteria were found in the irregularly running water supply system. Ironically, the water system is owned by a public utility company that prides itself on its sustainable development visions, initiatives, and commitments.

Children routinely suffer from respiratory problems, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. The child mortality rate is high even by Philippine standards. The Tondo is an epidemiological time bomb.

What of Sustainability?

Certainly, sustainability efforts in the past 20 years have brought massive ideological shifts within governments — at local, regional, and national levels — and brought about social and environmental betterment in many cities.

Nonetheless questions remain as to how governments are coping with the process of globalization and urbanization. Given the spatial, institutional, and economic facets of contemporary urban movements, are architects and planners helping to overcome the physical and cultural gulfs between the haves and have-nots?

Urban environments like the Tondo demonstrate how governments are failing to meet the challenges of a globalizing, urbanizing world despite widespread adoption of sustainability rhetoric.

The people in prosperous regions have huge collective environmental footprints due to high levels of consumption, exceeding the sustainable carrying capacity over the long term, and globally, if not locally. Where humanity is concentrated on the landscape without development, the sustainable carrying capacity is exceeded locally, if not globally, and immediately.

The Tondo's massive needs should be a wake-up call to those with an interest in urban place and form. Concerned professionals can help (re)build communities, protect the environment, and provide livable conditions for those with the weakest economic and political voices, who are being left behind by globalization and rapid urbanization. The question for us should be not whether sustainability is failing but how we development professionals are failing sustainability and the city.

Century-Old Problems

Postindustrial urban problems have been understood and addressed for about 175 years. Indeed Victorian Britain's urban problems after the Industrial Revolution were the same as those in the cities of the developing world today.

By the 1830s, British authorities knew that living in dense slum districts shortened people's life spans. By 1842, the association between an individual's surroundings and ill-health had been proved. At the same time, statistics for industrial cities were showing that avoidable ill health and mortality were, among other factors, reducing the economic potential of the nation and killing more people annually than any war Britain had engaged in. Average life expectancy was shown to be 13 years less than it could have been.

The Victorians knew that physical cities were products of their societies, and new Victorian cities produced different social and political dynamics. These cities were linked economically to other settlements to form a domestic and international social and economic system. Thus the city in Britain was the cause and, through policies, the cure of laboring class burdens.

The emerging civic consciousness in 19th-century Britain placed great emphasis on improving health and well-being. It reached its apogee before 1914 in the Garden City paradigm, a social and environmental idea similar to modern sustainability thinking.

Urban Reforms

The persistence and rise of urban troubles in recent decades necessitate a reappraisal of urban intellectual enterprise with regard to requirements, purposes, and ambitions. We should see this in the context of providing pertinent urban assistance in the evolving contemporary world both within and outside technocratic domains.

Strategies should be devised for building political motivation and for being more responsive to local conditions and resources as expressions of modernity. This will help affect more positively the daily lives of those most impoverished in urban resources, health, and welfare.

Concurrently, by building outside the technocratic domain, architects and planners, whose practices are embedded in cultural and political processes, may be in a healthier position to convince urban elites that the world is not only at war with terrorism or national security but at conflict with disadvantage, as the Tondo demonstrates.

In this light, designers may be able to better identify the city in social terms, demonstrating that urban society is not just a spatial form but an evolving yet cohesive system of values, norms, and social relations.

Also, importantly, designers through their practices, and by rethinking how they characterize urban predicaments, will eventually be able to modify the social values and benchmarks acceptable to governments. These modified values could ultimately be manifested in laws relating to urban development and its associated problems.

Moreover, by redefining the social and spatial processes and regulations that have restructured urban territories and social meaning, the design community will be better able to condition the possibilities and limits of social and urban development, both locally and globally.

Maybe in this way, sustainable development can help raise the quality of all kinds of life, including especially the growing numbers of urban citizens left behind by economic and urban advancement in metropolitan centers like the Tondo.

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Dr. Ian Morley is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is author of numerous papers on urbanism and civic design.

SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Dwellings built on stilts between a water pipe and the seafront in the Tondo District of Manila. Photo: Ian Morley Stilts support houses above the waterline, beneath a bridge. Photo: Ian Morley Greenery in the Tondo: a small act of beautification. Photo: Ian Morley A littered open space provides a play area for local children. Photo: Ian Morley Slum dwellings built beneath an overpass. Photo: Ian Morley Few Tondo children enjoy the luxury of education and instead find amusement in whatever ways they can. Photo: Ian Morley Relatively high-tech repair shop housed within a slum dwelling. Photo: Ian Morley   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.