Makati: The Island of Wealth in a Sea of Poor

Makati: The Island of Wealth in a Sea of Poor

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“In the middle, a growing but frustrated class that has absorbed American ideas about what prosperity looks like from decades of television and is discovering that the ideas don't match the available outcomes.”

In one of the spa pools in Manila, a wealthy Filipino man offered me his theory of Philippine society. He had a precise, slightly weary manner of speaking, the register of someone who has thought about this enough times that the thinking has settled into a kind of resignation. The Philippines, he explained, operates on essentially three tiers. At the top, a very small number of families, a few hundred clans whose names recur across the country’s economic history like refrains in a song, who own most of what it is profitable to own. At the bottom, the majority, who are genuinely poor in ways that are different in kind from poverty in wealthier countries, and who have, he suggested, adapted to their circumstances with a resilience that he described as happiness but which might be better understood as a particular form of survival. In the middle, a growing but frustrated class that has absorbed American ideas about what prosperity looks like from decades of television and is discovering that the ideas don’t match the available outcomes.

He was not describing a uniquely Philippine problem. The specific architecture of the thing, the specific families and the specific history that produced them, is Philippine, but the general shape is familiar from a long list of countries where colonial extraction established patterns of wealth concentration that independence did not disrupt. The Philippines was administered by Spain for three hundred and thirty years and then by the United States for fifty, and each administration had different ideas about what the archipelago was for, but neither had among its primary objectives the equitable distribution of the resources it was extracting. The families who owned the land and the businesses when the Americans arrived in 1898 were largely the same families, or their descendants, who owned them when the Americans left. Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled from 1965 until his removal in 1986, added a specific layer of presidential family to the ownership structure and removed a significant quantity of national wealth to overseas accounts and shoe collections, but the underlying pattern predated him and outlasted him.

At the top, a very small number of families, a few hundred clans whose names recur across the country's economic history like refrains in a...

Makati: The Island of Wealth in a Sea of Poor

Makati is where the upper tier of the current arrangement makes itself most legible. It is a district of glass towers and guarded streets, wide pavements and air-conditioned malls, and it sits inside Metro Manila with the quality of a different city grafted onto the existing one. The views from the upper floors look out over the rest of Manila, the density of it, the rooftops and the traffic and the extraordinary volume of people making do in circumstances that the view from the towers tends not to dwell on.

The security in Makati is visible and constant. Guards at the entrances to buildings, guards at the entrances to car parks, guards at the entrances to the shopping centres, each one carrying a weapon that ranges from a pistol to something more significant. The density of armed presence would feel alarming in most places but in Makati it functions as the background noise of the district, unremarkable once you’ve been there a day or two, the private security force that an enclave of wealth in a city of poverty requires as a basic operating condition.

It is a district of glass towers and guarded streets, wide pavements and air-conditioned malls, and it
sits inside Metro Manila with the quality of a different city grafted onto the existing one.

The Greenbelt mall is where I spent more time than I had planned to. It is not one mall but five, connected in a loop around a central garden of considerable design ambition, with a lake and trees and a modern open-air church at the centre, lit at night in a way that makes it look like an architect’s rendering of the idea of a garden rather than an actual one. The brands in the shops are international and expensive. The prices are in pesos but the implied reference points are global. Inside the mall you could be in Dubai or Singapore or any of the other cities where this particular form of curated consumption has become the primary mode of public space.

What I actually bought, at a shop across the road from the Greenbelt, was a pair of Columbia convertible trousers. Lightweight, quick-drying, with zip-off legs and more pockets than any reasonable person requires. They cost about fifty pounds, which is the most expensive item of clothing I have bought in my adult life, and they were worth every penny. I bought a second pair when I came back through Manila after Boracay. Some purchases are easy to justify in retrospect.

1898

The families who owned the land and the businesses when the Americans arrived in 1898 were largely the same families, or their descendants, who owned them when the Americans left.

Makati: The Island of Wealth in a Sea of Poor

They cost about fifty pounds, which is the most expensive item of clothing I have bought in my adult life, and they were worth every penny.

The city beyond Makati, the Manila that doesn’t feature in the Greenbelt’s orbit, is a different experience of the same place. The jeepneys, the brightly decorated former American military vehicles that are the Philippines’ defining mode of public transport, run through streets where the poverty is not an aesthetic backdrop but an actual condition, where families live in structures made from whatever materials are available, where children sell cigarettes at one in the morning because someone has decided this is what the money situation requires. The distance between those streets and the Greenbelt is in some cases not very far at all. In most of the ways that matter, it is considerable.

dave@launchcx.com

dave@launchcx.com

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

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