I became interested in relating this article to this week's readings: "Planning to Forget: Informal Settlements as ‘Forgotten Places’ in Globalising Metro Manila" by Gavin Shatkin. I was attracted to the contrast this article puts up between informal settlements in Manila, Philippines, and planned development projects.
Informal settlements are housing that people build wherever there is open land, whether it's seen as public or not. This can be behind a seawall, around railroad tracks, etc. There are informal settlers on the open lands of a main college campus I used to visit. As the article says, 40% of the city's population resides in informal settlements, yet these areas and their population are invisible to urban planners.
This idea really stuck out to me, after reading Mrazek's Engineers of Happy Land. In the book, there's sort of this absence of anyone not seen as part of the modernizing process. There's a sense that integrating infrastructure and new technologies into society is an activity that belongs to certain people. This, like the above article, brings up the question to me of not only who are the "engineers" of infrastructure, but also who infrastructure is built for. Also, I want to ask: are informal settlements an infrastructure?
Additionally, here is a news article on clashes between informal settlers along drainage canals and city plans to improve drainage infrastructure in preparing for the storm season:
Shelley
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Week 2 Precis: “Forgotten Places” of Infrastructure
While looking for information on the
history of infrastructure in the Philippines, I became interested in this
article’s title: "Planning to Forget: Informal Settlements as ‘Forgotten Places’ in
Globalising Metro Manila" (Shatkin 2004). The idea that urban
planners “plan to forget” certain parts and populations of the city struck me
as an interesting comparison to the “engineers of happy land” in Mrázek’s book.
Shatkin argues that city development
is planned by certain actors (national bureaucrats and politicians with access
to developmental resources, those in local political economies, and
international development specialists) with a blind eye to the 40% of Manila’s
population living in informal settlements (Shatkin 2004: 2475). Informal
settlements are housing that the most impoverished city residents build wherever
there is open land, whether it's seen as public or not. This can be behind a
seawall, around railroad tracks, college campus grounds, etc. Shatkin gives us
an image of what might not be a negative space of infrastructure, but rather an
integral, and persistently forgotten space of infrastructure. Rudolf Mrázek, in
comparison, gives us images of what is planned—the excitement and hope
surrounding infrastructural development projects.
Mrázek 's Engineers of Happy Land gives its readers snapshots of many
different people who became invested in Indonesia’s projects of infrastructure
and modernity. (This reminds me of actors being “enrolled” into infrastructural
projects in Ashley Carse’s “Nature as Infrastructure” (Carse 2012: 554).) Mrázek
uses “technology as a method” rather than a topic of focus (Mrázek 2002: xvi)
to show the ways society was imagined and engineered via technological
developments. Throughout the book, Mrázek presents us with primary sources
expressing the hopes, critiques, and expectations of Indonesian society as
these infrastructures are constructed. There also appear, however, disruptions
to those expectations.
Engineers
of Happy Land also shows us disruptions in how infrastructure is expected
to be used—especially by the non-European populations. In one example, as the
“third class” train compartments become available, the expected order of the
train gets lost—at least only in third class. First class passengers complain
that there is an odor in third class. Third class passengers travel with their
livestock. This is a bit comparable to informal settlements. Often, informal
settlements are built upon or around infrastructural spaces, like beside
railroad tracks, and behind seawalls. A tension exists in the way people who
cannot afford to use infrastructure “properly” end up using it in their own
way. This tension can be seen in a news article depicting the efforts of city developers
to remove informal settlements from Manila’s drainage canals.
In 2013, Manila city authorities
found the need to maintain city drainage infrastructure by evicting informal
settlers from the drainage canal banks (Cabrera 2013). The primary concern for
planners is that there needs to be room for the river, or else the water cannot
drain. Informal settlers are viewed as blockage, or detriments to the
infrastructure’s proper functioning. The project allocated 231 million US dollars to relocate
19,444 families into housing constructions. The informal settlers refuse to relocate to the suburban
housing constructions, and away from their centrally located settlement, for
fear that there will be no work opportunities there. In this example, unexpected
uses of infrastructure disrupt its functionality. Government authorities
prioritize the health of the infrastructure, thereby prioritizing a middle to
upper class’s use of the drainage infrastructure, rather than the lowest class’
use.
“Forgotten” people and places are
part of infrastructure—whether they are informally living on top of it, or
disrupting its planned existence with alternate uses. By comparing the Mrázek
and Shatkin writings, I am left with the questions: who is infrastructure built
for, and can it really be used by people outside that target population? Can
informal settlements be seen as a part of infrastructure—even though they are
an unplanned use of infrastructure? Are informal settlements “engineered”?
References
Cabrera, M. (2013, July 12).
Informal settlers face eviction from Manila’s riverside slums to prevent
flooding. Thompson Reuters Foundation. Retrieved from
http://www.trust.org/item/20130712122655-xu2o8
Carse, A. (2012). Nature as
infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed. Social
Studies of Science, 42(4), 539–563.
Mrázek, R. (2002). Engineers
of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Shatkin, G. (2004). Planning to
Forget: Informal Settlements as “Forgotten Places” in Globalising Metro Manila.
Urban Studies, 41(12), 2469–2484.
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