By REX MENARD CERVALES

A stone’s throw away from steel and glass skyscrapers, Tatay Pedro Matucan, 82, roves around streets littered with rubble from demolished houses still gaping with buckled concrete pillars and bent rust-eaten steel. He whiles his morning away like this, to move his feeble knees. Since 11 hospitals, including those in Rizal where they had once relocated to, failed to treat his wife’s asthma five years ago, Tatay Pedro has spent most of his days alone, searching and longing.

“Naramdaman ko parang kasubo katama [masyadong malungkot] na ako na lang isa. Wala akong kausap,” Tatay Pedro said. “Sa isip ko, ako na lang isa. Magkakape ako mag-isa.”

He had sold their housing unit for what measly amount he could get in exchange for a decent funeral for his wife. He then settled in a hole-in-the-wall shack made of wooden planks and patched-up tarpaulins in Sitio San Roque in North Triangle, Quezon City. He had no one to run to in his family back in Negros Oriental, because five of his seven children had already passed away.

For Tatay Pedro, San Roque is more than just someplace he could toil away at a construction site or sell 50 to 80 pieces of balut at night. It has instead served as a repository of his family’s memories. His home and those of nearly 17,000 other families, however, came under siege when the 256-hectare Quezon City Central Business District (QCCBD) project was undertaken at their expense.

Before long, it became clear this sort of supposed development of San Roque constitutes a deliberate attack on the urban poor’s right to the city. It creates cartographies of exclusion rather than inclusive urban spaces as it continues to sideline the underserved residents’ scramble for public goods and utilities, while attending to the cosmopolitan pleasures of a select affluent few.

Gray Area

Tatay Pedro has witnessed how any room for climbing up the economic ladder has shrunk as the development sprawled over the 37-hectare land. He migrated here 30 years ago in hopes of looking for a space where his family could prosper. Still, despite the ever bleaker prospects, he refuses to leave what has become his home. “Ayaw [ko umuwi] kasi dito namatay ang mga anak ko at ‘yung asawa ko,” Tatay Pedro said.

Residents like Tatay Pedro, though ensnared in a vicious cycle of poverty, persisted amid the rapid urban transformation of a landscape once envisioned to be a refuge for those fleeing a hardscrabble life.

The USD2.6 billion-loan from the World Bank during the Marcos era set this master plan to unprecedented heights. The late dictator’s mega-infrastructure endeavor focused on building highways, theatres, and convention centers on lands acquired by displacing settlers en masse. The National Housing Authority (NHA), then, ejected so-called squatters' colonies and at the same time promoted private participation in housing ventures.

Such public-private partnerships continued well into the 1990s when the government began to authorize private firms to develop public assets through contractual agreements, purportedly to address the country's infrastructure gap. Businesses, in turn, thrived on profits via concessions and surveys that hike up land values.

The same process of spatial isolation has edged the San Roque residents out of the picture. The construction of Vertis North, a mixed-use development project which covers San Roque, has so far ejected over 10,000 families. Like the recreational and activity centers Trinoma and Eton Centris, the project under the P65-billion QCCBD master plan fulfills the 2009 joint venture agreement between Ayala Land, Inc., the NHA, and the local government of Quezon City.

Besides propelling competition for scarce resources, this development drive has exacerbated the erasure of slum-dwelling households that stand in the way of giant real estate developers' more ambitious bid for revenue raking.

Tight Corners

Afternoons in San Roque find children frolicking above piles of debris and concrete fragments. They would rush to and swim in the brackish esteros while their mothers are bent over their washboards outside shanties braced by corrugated tin and wooden stilts. Men play basketball on a dusty court and teenagers mill about the vacant lot behind the community’s public stage.

Such familiarity with the detritus of near collapse conceals the resident's alienation from their own home.

In areas where expansion is imminent, guards knock at doors to give residents the option to voluntarily demolish their own house or stay on, at a larger cost.

Those who refuse will have their houses torn down, while residents who opt to relocate will receive a 100,000-peso offer and a housing unit elsewhere in Quezon City, Bulacan or Rizal. There, they must still pay monthly amortization and endure intermittent access to electricity, water, and other services.

Tatay Pedro knew this all too well when hardships in the relocation site prompted his family to return to San Roque just within a month of their evacuation. Unlike in Montalban, Tatay Pedro said he gets to have at least a sip of coffee while sitting on his rickety bench in San Roque.

“Sa Montalban, wala ka naman makain. Talagang gutom na gutom ka,” he said. “Kung magkasakit ka doon, saan mo dadalhin kasi wala namang ospital doon?”

Yet returning to San Roque never proved an easy choice, either. In 2010, nearly a thousand residents moved out due to illegal arrests and imposed restrictions on home repairs, among other forms of harassment. Too often, armed men roamed around intimidating locals and fencing off some areas. Community leaders have also been bribed to persuade others to accept paltry compensation.

Amid attempts to forestall further evictions, Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap in San Roque (Kadamay-SR), an urban poor organization, denounces such offers by the NHA.

“Hindi ‘yan palaging naiintindihan ng NHA," said Kadamay-SR chairperson Estrelieta Bagasbas or Ka Inday, as she is more familiarly known. "Masakit sa loob namin na ganun [ang] kategorya sa tao—lalo lang silang pinapahirapan."

The community's resistance seemed to have been met with more woes. Suspicious fires, for one, damaged portions of San Roque earlier this year and in 2004 and 2005. One resident even suffered miscarriage during a confrontation with a private guard about to destroy their home.

“Nasa komunidad kami pero parang ikunulong kami, inilagay kami sa isang hawla na binabantayan. Ang pinakamasakit doon, mas masahol pa sa hayop ang pagtrato sa amin ng ganitong sistema,"said Ka Ricky Inidicio, another leader of Kadamay-SR.

Common Ground

The residents have long strove to build a fortress against attempts to intrude on their community.

In 2010, San Roque residents marched to the NHA to oppose a then impending massive demolition. When the local government facilitated even wider-scale demolitions in 2014, the residents of San Roque forged ahead in a clash against around 600 personnel of the Quezon City police and the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) division. For six hours, they braved tear gas, water cannons, and truncheons. The confrontation injured at least 18 residents.

Recently, the residents propped up barricades to guard the homes of another 271 families who face the threat of demolition. The NHA also saw them at the forefront of protests against the office's inaction in the face of their calls for decent housing, minimum wage, and a say in decision-making processes concerning infrastructure projects in the area.

In a July 29 dialogue, however, Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte vowed to implement a moratorium on clearing operations while she reviews QCCBD negotiations. She claimed a certificate of compliance must first be renewed by the Local Housing Board which she heads, prior to demolition. While the residents see a glimmer of hope in the benevolence so far shown by the new administration, they remain guarded in their optimism.

Ka Ricky believes that while there still awaits an uphill battle, there should be no room for docility. They derive their motivation from the resilience of not just the families affected but also the alliances formed in solidarity with the former.

“Ang pikatinatatanganan talaga namin ay ang lakas ng mamamayan,” he said. “Ang pinakaimportante talaga ay ang mabuo ang pagkakaisa ng mamamayan ng Sito San Roque.”

As a case in point, the volunteer group Save San Roque Alliance includes students, architects, engineers, and artists. The alliance has teamed up with Kadamay-SR to initiate a counterproposal that factors into account the residents’ own vision of San Roque.

“Naniniwala kami sa karapatan sa siyudad ng maralitang lungsod—na dapat kasama sila sa pag-unlad ng siyudad na pinapagana at tinatayo nila. Kasama dapat sila sa paghulma at pagdisenyo ng siyudad,” Arvin Dimalanta, convenor of Save San Roque Alliance, said.

Capacities in mapping and city planning are thus built alongside engagement in educational discussions and activities like cultural nights and the protest art of Sining San Roque. These efforts underscore how the right to the city entails the residents' right to intervene in the transformation of their urban space. Besides, any plot of land only becomes habitable for, and can be reclaimed by, a community where solidarity, trust, and interdependency are cultivated.

For Tatay Pedro, whatever the case is to be made for hope lies in the relentlessness of struggle—not in isolation but as a collective.

“Sinasabi nila na ‘wag na ako sumama sa rally. Pero sabi ko naman, mas mabuti ‘yung sumama ako sa rally kaysa sa dito lang ako [nakaupo],” he said. At the end of the day, the residents' stake in San Roque is no less than a demonstration of their mutual reliance on the very people whose humanity has been swept out to the margins. ●

This article was first published in print on August 27, 2019.