hapit na madugta’s Reviews > Making Sense of the City > Status Update

The needs, wants, and desires of everybody else are marginalized; these desires normally include the desire to be unharmed by noise and environmental pollution, being able to safely walk the streets, or more generally, simply having a say in the transformation of their environment."

If we thus ask the question according to whose desires the larger city of Metro Manila is modelled, then the answer has to point to a number of powerful families who engage in private urban development and mold their urban land according to their particular desires - along the alleged desires of the wealthy tenants of their constructions.

"As cultural artifacts, [cities] can be understood as 'man's most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire.' Cities, thus, are expressions of human desires. The question to ask, however, is how human desires are expressed, filtered, and selected to give shape to the city...