Geography Brown Bag Colloquium Series: Home unmaking and re-making among the urban poor within neoliberalism

For the fifth Geography Brown Bag Colloquium Series of the first semester, Dr. Chester Arcilla from UP Manila Department of Social Sciences discussed the politics of home among the urban poor. His lecture titled Home unmaking and re-making among the urban poor within neoliberalism discussed neoliberalism as complicit to the undoing of urban poor people’s homes.

The home is defined as physically incomplete. This specific definition goes beyond the concrete and tangible structure of what makes a dwelling place but also includes the “tactical and strategic process of negotiating different relationships from which new lives…can be built [and] is a much an everyday politics of citizenship.” In the same vein, home un-making is defined as more than the undoing of the physical materials that make up a home but also the destruction of its imaginary components. As Dr. Arcilla said: “the processual notion of home-(un/re)making enables a better understanding of urban poor lives within neoliberalism.” He cited the Sitio San Roque demolition in 2014 as a case study. The evictees were traced five years after in order to understand the process of their home-remaking through focus group discussions and ethnographically-inspired storytelling sessions.

The commodification of government housing projects is found to be unaffordable, undemocratic, and unsustainable. Due to the fact that the resettlement areas for displaced families are often deemed unlivable (situated away from their primary source of income), the dual housing crisis entails an increasing trend of unmet housing needs while having low-occupancies in existing socialized housing stock. The displaced would eventually find their way back to the slums to start the process of home-remaking. In some cases, the relocation units are even sold off to provide funds for travel, ironically wielding the “very instrument that the state uses to displace the urban poor—socialized housing […] burrow back into the city.”

Once reinstated, the construction of a dwelling place is done incrementally. As Dr. Arcilla remarked: “Materials and design depends on the available finance and the level of state surveillance against encroachment--made of recycled, flimsy and light materials assembled within the fastest possible time and with least cost.” The parts of a home are spatially segregated (sleeping, cooking, eating, bathing and living areas) to increase mobility and security as an active response to the continuous “clearing” operations done on the area.

“[The] blighted, dirty, fire-prone’ squatter housing are in actuality homes-in-construction of the poor.”

* Quoted statements are taken from Dr. Chester Arcilla’s presentation