Geography Lecture 2025: Naoki Fujiwara on suburbanisation and relocation in the Philippines

The UP Department of Geography through the Environment and Development Geographies (EDGE) research group, and the Geography 105 (Economic Geography) class present Naoki Fujiwara of Hiroshima University. 

His talk titled Spatial Politics in Suburban Areas, Philippines happens on Thursday, 30 January 2025 at 11:30AM in the Geography Conference Room of Pavilion 2 Building of the University of the Philippines-Diliman. 

The lecture is open to the public.

Abstract

In transforming new spaces suburbanization simultaneously involves an influx of new residents. The growing populations entails not only land conversion and the establishment of new collective housing but also an increase in ‘new voters.’ This paper compares the relocation projects in Metro Manila to develop suburban areas, such as Bulacan province, and how they brought about the transformation of political structure consolidated by feudalistic nature with similar historical change in Japan. In Japan, following the aftermath of the World War Two up to the oil crisis in 1973, the national government had to establish a great deal of collective housing, called ‘Danchi,’ in order to deal with the lack of housing supply in urban areas after the carpet bombing air raids of the war. In Osaka too, large scale collective housing was set up in suburban areas, but it enhanced the political participation of residents to local and national governments due to unhappy with their uncomfortable living conditions in ‘Danchi.’ 

In the Philippines, the number of relocation sites in suburban areas has been increasing in the wake of displacement from the ‘danger zone’ along the river as well as infrastructure projects. It concomitantly enables a critical moment to transforming local politics in accommodating relocatees from Metro Manila. I first examine the differences between the history of development in Japan and that currently taking place in the Philippines. Second, drawing on the case of Pandi, Bulacan, I explicate the context of political change in the wake of relocation projects in the 2010s at local and national levels. In doing so, this paper situates the term spatial politics that is critical to a better understanding of political change in the urban age.

Naoki Fujiwara is a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hiroshima University. He received a PhD in Political Science from Kobe University, Japan. His research interests include urban politics, spatial politics, neoliberal urbanization and gentrification in the Global South.