Manila, City of Islands: A Social and Historical Inquiry Into the Build Forms and Urban Experience of an Archipelagic Megacity

by Edwin Wise

You will never think of Manila the same again . . .

Manila, City of Islands evokes Manila’s rhythms, colors and sights, capturing the city’s totality and uniqueness.

Wise avoids the sententious clichés of the bad rich and the good poor. There are no heroic guerrillas or demonic Americans or redemptive romantic nationalists. Rather, he subtly explains urban behavior as a result of tensions between kinships and strangers, technology and history, and therefore explores in a clear-eyed manner the multiple layers of private cities that comprise Metro Manila, from the gated cities of the rich to the private worlds of the poor. The traditional public spaces of both the classical and modernist city have been almost eviscerated.

With a wry skeptical eye, Wise melds painstaking urban anthropological-ethno-meth-odological observation, classic urban sociological analysis, and filleted social theorizing into a seamless elegant whole that rarely misses a beat.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology

238 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Jam Pilarca · Rating 4 out of 5]

“If we lose the multiple contact points, we risk losing any positive side to urbanity, as we are more easily able to construct the “other” as different and our room for empathy is lost.”

I’d happily recommend this book to anyone who has always wondered why Manila is the way it is: Why is the traffic so bad and why is it so hard to solve? Why is it so hard to meet people outside my immediate circles? Why do we have so many gated communities across socioeconomic classes? Why are there so many malls?

While I found this to be a dense read, every time I picked it up I had difficulty putting it down. Maybe because it paints an accurate picture of the experience of living in Manila and how the city’s design (or lack of it) shapes that experience. And so despite my struggle with the complex ideas this book introduces, I saw snapshots of my own experience: the gated community of my childhood home, the small provincial town I’d spend many summers in, the high rise I now reside in as an adult, the malls I’d spend most weekends in, the informal settler communities I have to frequent for my work.

There’s this portion that discusses how the Ayalas built their first gated communities with the promise of safety from an unstable post-war Manila and how many developers have followed suit even today, designing our city around this notion of an “us” and a “them”. It struck me because I realized the very institutions that I enjoy today are the ones that keep the city divided. A divided city makes it more difficult for the state to provide unified solutions, thus furthering that divide.

It’s almost depressing when you realize how fragmented Manila truly is and how deep the problem runs, rooted in our history and present day institutions. The problems run so deep that it makes you wonder if these will be solved within our lifetimes. But what I take from this book is how a healthy city doesn’t have an “us” and “them” and whatever the solution is, the “other” needs to be at the heart of it. And so when we say we want Manila to be better do we mean better for us or for everyone? And if the latter, have we really thought of what we have to give up?

[Ice · Rating 4 out of 5]

A perspicacious view of Metro Manila, perhaps one of the best books abut it that I've ever read.

[Beatrice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this book! I would have enjoyed reading an urban inquiry like this one but written by a Filipino author.

Always welcome for suggestions!