The City as Illusion and Promise (original) (raw)

initiated several round-table discussions on the city, later inviting colleagues from other departments, such as English, Filipino, History, Sociology and Anthropology, and Economics to join the conversations. The discussions were enlightening, and became an opportunity for us to challenge our own understanding of the city, widening our perspectives and allowing us to expand the scope of our inquiries even as each of us remained within our own disciplinal assumptions and trajectories. The collection of essays in this book is the result of these exchanges. While the range of questions and research methods varied significantly, from the more concrete and empirical, to the more abstract and speculative, one senses that the essays do have shared concerns, and that they all struggle to make sense of the same phenomenon-namely, the city, and Metro Manila in particular. From the nine essays in this anthology, three themes eventually emerged, thus forming the sections of this book. In Part I: Contesting Spaces, our first three essays discuss the ways by which the city becomes the site of struggle for the allocation and ordering of spaces. In "Great Transformations: The Spatial Politics of Citybuilding Megaprojects in the Manila Peri-urban Periphery, " Jerik Cruz examines "transformations in the geographies of governance