Makati: The Geometry of Inequality

In one of the spa pools in Manila, a wealthy Filipino man offered me his account of Philippine society. He had the manner of someone who has thought about this often enough that the thinking has settled into a kind of resigned precision. The country operates, he said, on essentially three levels. At the top, a very small number of families, perhaps a few hundred clans, who have owned most of what is profitable to own since before independence and continue to do so. At the bottom, the majority, who are genuinely poor in ways that are different in kind from poverty in countries with functioning welfare systems, and who have adapted to their circumstances with a resilience he described as happiness but which might be better understood as the successful management of expectations that were never set very high. In the middle, a growing class that has absorbed American ideas about prosperity from decades of television and has discovered that the gap between the idea and the available reality is very wide, which produces a specific kind of frustration.

This is not a uniquely Philippine structure. But the specific shape of it in the Philippines has a specific history. The Spanish colonised the archipelago for three hundred and thirty-three years and during that time created a landowning class, the principalia, from among the local élite who cooperated with the colonial administration and received in return the right to hold land and collect tribute from the populations on it. This class, which became known in the later Spanish period as the ilustrado, educated its sons in Manila and later in Spain and produced the intellectual leadership of the independence movement, which meant that independence, when it came, transferred political authority to people who had been beneficiaries of the colonial economic arrangement and were not structurally incentivised to dismantle it. The land reform that might have redistributed the agricultural economy never fully happened. The families who owned the haciendas in 1898, when the Americans arrived, were largely the same families, or their descendants, who owned them in 1946, when independence came.

At the top, a very small number of families, perhaps a few hundred clans, who have owned most of what is profitable to own since...

Ferdinand Marcos added a specific dimension to this. His twenty-one-year rule, the last nine under martial law, produced a form of crony capitalism in which political access was monetised with a systematic efficiency that moved enormous quantities of national wealth into private accounts. The Marcos family’s accumulated assets, still being litigated and recovered by the Philippine government decades later, are estimated at between five and ten billion US dollars, extracted from a country whose annual GDP in the mid-1980s was approximately thirty billion. When he left in 1986, the Philippines was carrying international debts of over twenty-six billion dollars, much of it borrowed at commercial rates during his administration and much of it spent in ways that enriched the people who arranged the loans rather than the infrastructure they were supposed to fund.

Makati is where the current arrangement makes itself most visible. It is a district of glass towers and private security and shopping malls of a standard that would not look out of place in Singapore or Dubai, sitting inside the broader Metro Manila with the quality of a city that has been air-dropped into a different city and is maintaining the distinction with armed guards at every entrance. The guards are armed because the arrangement requires armed guards. An enclave of extreme wealth in a metropolitan area of twenty-three million people, many of whom live in conditions that the Makati towers look down on from a considerable height, does not maintain itself through social trust alone.

The Greenbelt mall, which is five interconnected malls arranged around a landscaped garden with a lake and a modern open-air church at the centre, is the most architecturally ambitious retail space I have visited, which is a sentence I did not expect to be writing about a shopping centre in Manila. The brands are international, the prices are in pesos with implied reference points elsewhere, and the landscaping between the buildings is genuinely beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when a significant amount of money has been spent on making them look effortless. I spent more time there than I had intended.

Across the road, in a department store more directly comparable to what you find in Leeds or Sheffield, I bought a pair of Columbia convertible trousers. Lightweight, quick-drying, with zip-off legs and a number of pockets that exceeds what any reasonable person requires. They cost fifty pounds. I bought a second pair on my return from Boracay. In two years of travel across twenty countries in all climates, they have been the single most cost-effective purchase I have made, which tells you something about the relationship between price and value that the Greenbelt’s brand logic tends not to foreground.

1898,

The families who owned the haciendas in 1898, when the Americans arrived, were largely the same families, or their descendants, who owned them in 1946, when independence came.

Beyond Makati, the Manila that doesn’t appear in the Greenbelt’s orbit: the jeepneys running through streets where the buildings are made from whatever materials were available, children selling cigarettes at one in the morning, the distance between the towers and the streets below measured in something other than metres. The armed guards at the mall entrances are not decorative. They are the necessary expression of a geometry that nobody designed in exactly this way and that nobody has yet found a mechanism to redesign.

Dave

A British ginger seeing the world one questionable decision at a time. Based wherever the wifi works.

Makati: The Geometry of Inequality

“The land reform that might have redistributed the agricultural economy never fully happened.”

Lightweight, quick-drying, with zip-off legs and a number of pockets that exceeds what any reasonable person requires.

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