Urban Environments and Health in the Philippines

A Retrospective on Women Street Vendors and their Spaces

Mary Anne Alabanza Akers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000336719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Urban Environments and Health in the Philippines offers a retrospective view of women street vendors and their urban environments in Baguio City, designed by American architect and planner Daniel Burnham in the early twentieth century, and established by the American imperial government as a place for healing and well-being.

Based on a transdisciplinary multi-method study of street vendors, the author offers a unique perspective as a researcher of the place, to ultimately ask how marginalized women authenticate and democratize prime urban spaces for their livelihoods. This book provides a portal to another way of seeing and understanding streets and people, covering spatial units at multiple scales, design imperialism and its impact on health, and resilience strategies for challenging realities.

Blending subjects of architecture, planning, and health, this book is an ideal read for those interested in fields of urban planning and design, public health, landscape architecture, geography, and social sciences.

1 Decolonizing the read

I A decolonizing process

Strong sentiments reverberate about how the West desires, extracts, and claims ownership to colonized people’s ways of knowing and the myriad of things they create. But then, at the same time, the West rejects them and deny opportunities to center these local cultures in their everyday lives (Smith, 1999). The call to decolonize is a strategy that involves confronting unequal power structures. Decolonization is a theoretical, and often contested, term that has been used to connote the cleansing of European influence or American domination. Formerly viewed as a condition and process held within the realm of political economy, government, and history, decolonization has now permeated cultural anthropology, literature, geography, architecture, and many other fields of study. In most of these academic disciplines, decolonization implies an intentional change of attitude and worldview—a cultural practice by the colonized to reclaim the indigenous roots that were stripped from them. The process shifts power imbalances in a way that dismantles dominant production of knowledge, binary thinking, and decontextualization. The striking down of colonial preeminence leads to a state of mind that validates local experiences. It repositions and empowers marginalized voices and accepts the multi-faceted nature of people and their communities. Part of the decolonization process is recognizing a principle that can be expressed as,

I have to navigate the world and not live isolated from it. It is essential that I remain engaged with the world but I have to continually re-evaluate and reframe my position, and self-negotiate with realities that come with it.

After decades of research and practice in the field of urban planning and design, both formal and informal, I have published and presented various aspects of the multi-year street vendor study at academic and professional conferences around the world. I am now at a phase in my intellectual journey where I have achieved an awareness of my thought evolution. A constant dialogic conversation in my mind about the Philippines and its colonial past has transformed and deepened my perspective of authenticity. Educated at the University of the Philippines, the most progressive and “maka-masa” (for-the-people) institution of higher learning in the country, especially during the revolutionary years of the 1970s, I am no stranger to the discourse of colonization and its impact on our land, culture, and minds.¹ This retrospective narrative is a product of the on-going process of decolonization.

As I re-examine the robust quantitative and qualitative data, as well as personal memories and observations, I can offer a richer and deeper perspective of Baguio City’s women vendors and the relationship between urban environments and their health. Through my decolonization journey, I have come to trust in a natural unrushed transformation that requires careful assessment and intentional actions to shape my worldview. I do not blindly follow the rhetoric that permeates academic discourse and social media, but as a pragmatic urban planner, I process various points of view, ponder their applicability and relevancy to situations in the Philippines, and then claim my position in the discourse. As a decolonizing academic practitioner, I situate myself in a malleable space from which I write this book. Much like the police in Fletcher’s study of police officers (1992) who understand that a “street degree” is never fully achieved because of the ever-changing nature of people and urban environments, I cannot and should not claim that I have arrived at being a decolonized person. It takes an entire lifetime to peel so many engrained layers of American colonization. As the iconic humanist geographer of our time Yi-Fu Tuan states, “[t]he life of thought is a continuous story, like life itself” (Tuan, 1977, p.v.).

What is entailed in decolonizing the read of urban environments, particularly the streets of downtown Baguio? To reiterate, it is not a linear process. One of the most basic strategies I use is to first identify colonized cues and how the colonizer stereotyped urban places. I file these observations but understand there are other layers to unravel in order to read the street well. Several academics of Filipino heritage have written about the decolonization process. In their very limited studies of Filipino Americans, they start the process by providing a historical background of the Philippines and the influence of colonizers in almost every aspect of Filipino life (Halagao, 2004; Strobel, 2001). David (2009) developed a decolonization cognitive-behavioral therapy. One of the first steps he promotes is for clients to recognize their mental schema and thought patterns. Similar to his approach, decolonizing the read of urban environments involves culling fragments of physical factors of space, people’s cultural and economic behavior in a street setting, and their sense of territoriality, among other socio-spatial constructs, and then embedding this constellation of attributes into a package, wrapped with a ribbon of continuous decolonizing lessons.

Decolonizing the read also implies “de-Filipinizing” the read. The Spanish and American colonizers imposed the concept of one nation as they proceeded to control and subject the inhabitants of an archipelago of 7,107 islands. They insisted on “unity” for a population that is culturally, ethnically, religiously, and socially diverse. The roots of Filipino nationalism stem from a group of Filipino men, an emergent bourgeoisie educated in Manila, in Madrid, Spain, and in other European capitals (Rafael, 1990). Self-identified as the ilustrados, or “enlightened,” they called for reforms to improve the lives of Filipinos, but a different group, composed of peasant farmers, established a revolutionary campaign to fight for independence from Spain. But the “Filipinization” of the country has centered this national consciousness around the “Tagalog-speaking” region, often regarding the rest of the archipelago as peripheral. Even worse, they have completely marginalized the indigenous groups in the Cordilleras and the Muslims in Mindanao, the southernmost large island. Therefore, a way to decolonize the read of Baguio’s downtown streets is to accept and celebrate the “archipelagic” nature of sites—in other words, to treat every place-node as distinct, and not place them in a hierarchical or binary arrangement. It is especially critical for the reader to be aware that Baguio residents, as well as Cordillera and lowland day workers—who are experts in navigating the terrain—manipulate and interpret space very differently from lowland visitors. Furthermore, the historical and cultural experiences of people from Baguio and the Cordilleras vary from those in other major regions of the country.

Semiotics and the need to understand the spatial culture and history of the place are at the forefront of the effort to decolonize the read. A dialogue took place as I observed that the streets and their elements communicated meaningful messages back to me. The street speaks with multi-colored signs, asymmetrical overhangs, retail fixtures extending over the sidewalk, vendors and their wares, blasts of car exhaust, loud music, whiffs of roasted corn—a cacophony of visual marks, sounds, and smells. I mentally processed these codes as I returned again and again to re-read the sites. A back-and-forth movement of language and interpretation continues to this day.

A disclaimer is warranted here. An oversimplification of concepts and theories and the overgeneralization of observations may seem apparent in some sections of the book. When these appear, the intention is not to gloss over them but to imply that these thoughts are peripheral to the discussion at hand. The purpose of the retrospective is not to build an intellectual argument about informal vending and the politics of space, thus it does not engage in in-depth analysis of contestation, world systems, gendering or feministic theories of work, and other constructs. Rather, it is written to illustrate the intersection of place, health, and micro entrepreneurship in tangible ways for practitioners and applied researchers to create solutions to urban issues. Perera and Tang (2013) put forth their belief that theories erase local realities. They further explain that Western theory building is based on abstraction which excludes the specificities of knowledge.

Furthermore, with the prevalence of Western-oriented literature, I chose to cite materials that were applicable to the Global South, and deliberately sought authentic writers who were from the place or had otherwise become deeply connected with it. As part of my decolonizing journey, I have been conscious of scholarly sources that propagate an extractive researcher behavior and attitude. I consciously did not include those materials because I believe they reinforce the positionality of Western privilege in the urban design and planning domains of knowledge.

My journey of reflection involved explicating some of the ideas that guide this retrospective—not to summarize the history or catalogue intellectual place thinkers, most of whom, as mentioned earlier, are Western male scholars who view the world from a specific perspective. As a decolonizing scholar and practitioner, I read, digest, and reflect on various theoretical and practical perspectives, and then I assess their applicability to my discourse on Baguio City. I do not blindly adhere to certain dominant ideologies simply because other scholars have. Many of these Western theories have been widely discussed and argued all over the world and, often, their cited publications are readily accepted without critical evaluation of their merit to the analysis of local contexts in the Global South. For example, not all Marxist-oriented contributions to the debate on inequality and hierarchical spheres of global economies, nor feminist and postcolonial canonical traditions are germane to the retrospective’s purpose. The spatial framework advanced by Castells and Harvey is very abstract and applies to larger-scale areas like nations, regions, and cities. Smaller places, at site-level scale, are off their theoretical radar. Furthermore, they fail to account for the experience of individual actors and details of spatial structures (Low, 1996). Instead, presented here are the building blocks and selected key reference points that are useful in the retrospective process. A single influential theory does not capture the foundational groundwork in the discussion about women vendor experiences and the intersection of health and setting.

Even well-meaning, or rather oblivious urban scholars who profess to be advocates for Global South issues continue to articulate their ideas from a Western perspective. For example, a call was extended for a theoretical paradigm shift in the literature. Recognizing the lack of an appropriate urban theory to explain the “complex lived realities of citizens in the Global South” (Parnell and Robinson, 2013, p. 6), scholars proposed an alternative planning praxis rooted in the South—a universal socio-economic and environmental concept of rights that offer a “profound moral base for planning.” Exemplary of Western scholars who intellectualize non-western conditions, they advocated theory-building and policy development based on empirical and analytic methods that produce data stored in an explicit and formalized system. This type of paradigm shift is unnecessary because it reeks with the usual moralistic imposition on the Other, classifying colonized people’s realities as universal data points rather than delving deep into their realities.

As I engage in the decolonizing process, I have learned to apply strategies through my own framework of self-discovery and revelation. I have learned how place is stereotyped by the colonizer. However, I have developed a discernment for the appropriate application of Western principles/knowledge. For these approaches to be valid in the local context I ask these questions: How are these thoughts substantiated with reflective experiences of the colonized worlds? Are people’s lives placed front and center in the discourse? As an urban planner I have refrained from using a universal standard for reading cities. Rather, I have replaced anesthetic order with the lens of complexity, increased understanding of nuances, and overlays of temporal elements. Finally, I have learned to classify features of places only when necessary and only as a preliminary step to reading urban environments.

II The case for researcher authenticity

In the critical analysis and interpretation of places, one ought to consider the role and positionality that the researcher plays in forming a perspective and constructing knowledge. In the early phase of my academic experience, I carried insecurities about my value as a Filipina researcher. The effects of colonialization on my intellectual worth meant that I complied and deferred to Western scholars who studied various aspects of Philippine life and society. But I found their scholarship to be lacking in depth and context. As I matured professionally and intellectually, I gained the confidence to question and critique their interpretations. I have become a judicious academic. I am determined to stand up and be heard.

A researcher of the place holds a special standing in the research setting. This “insider/outsider” position is a gift (Yakushko et al., 2011). Much like the betweener², the authentic researcher has easier access to study participants because of language and cultural connection. I am able to listen intently to the women interviewees with less preconceived judgments than an outsider brings. I am sensitive to the subtleties of body language, diction, tones, and colloquialisms. In addition, as a betweener, I carry with me a bundle of knowledge extracted and processed from the vast realm of literature accessible to a privileged academic. But more importantly, I contribute my personal knowledge and meaningful recollection of these Baguio streets and how they have shifted and evolved. Like learning a language, the more one is immersed in a place from birth, the larger the domain of words for describing it. Accordingly, growing up in Baguio City and spending most of my professional life there affords me a more robust vocabulary of places.

A basic tenet that I uphold as I decolonize the read of Baguio is taking a stance of confidence that as a researcher-of-the-place I have the legitimacy to construct culturally appropriate knowledge. The emphatic call for Asians, and other people of color in the Global South, to build our own narratives about our cities is there (Giwa, 2015; Hou, 2010; Hou and Chalana, 2016; Perera and Tang, 2013; Sen, 2017). Our interpretations are crucial in building vernacular urban thought. Our points of view must be respected as valid because we are well versed in the nuances of peoples and places. We need to continue to centralize our narratives instead of subordinating and suppressing our voices as scholars of the place. Outside researchers often present flat perspectives that carry limited substance, often confirming their superficial knowledge base.

Of course, there are challenges. It is inevitable that differences, whether cultural, socio-economic, or educational, affect the interactions between researcher and participants (Nast, 1994; Zhao, 2017). As a betweener, I may have different values and priorities from the women vendors and I am cautious about imposing my views on the best solutions for their respective situations. The power differential between the women vendors and myself results from a dissimilarity in socio-economic class. I come from an educated middle-class family, one of the core Filipino families in Baguio City during the early rise of the city as a regional center. Old-time Baguio residents typically are familiar with the Alabanza surname because of our family owned souvenir stores, apartment buildings, a famous meat store, and other businesses. My father, Joseph Alabanza, was the first City Architect and Planner for Baguio, and the official responsible for implementing Burnham’s design. He is also known as the founder of the architecture degree program at St. Louis University, the first undergraduate design program north of Manila.

Nevertheless, the metaphor of “betweenness” denotes commonalities between the researcher and the researched, depending on the context of time and place (Kobayashi, 1994). It is constructive to acknowledge our differences and then to work and collaborate in imaginative ways. Although I did not give my last name unless asked, many vendors knew of my family. Needless to say, this was more beneficial than detrimental to the conversations we had during the multi-year study. I believed I gained their trust because I was accepted as a “Baguio girl,” an insider. Focusing on my “Baguio-ness” assisted me in gaining access, formally and informally, to the vendor worlds. Note that knowledge gained from these research experiences percolated through a process of intense observation, interpretation, reflection, and, eventually, abstraction.

Yet, betweeners have to be cognizant of their fluid identities in the research circumstance, considering that many have migrated from the Global South to study in the Global North and have adopted Western ways of knowing. As we return to conduct research in our homelands, we must come fully equipped to handle the tensions that will likely occur. We must heighten our awareness of our biases and modified beliefs as a result of migration and immersion in Western academic cultures. A strategy I used to mitigate partiality and to strengthen the degree of authenticity was to employ research assistants from a local university at which I served as a faculty member in the 1980s. The University of the Philippines College Baguio provided me with highly competent staff from the Cordillera Studies Center. They validated and pre-tested the survey instruments I initially developed. After several days, we met and processed our field notes together. Compared to other researchers who are not of the place, I did not need lan...