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Two years ago, our School participated in a project called “Asi alink” which
was a collaboration of two European and two Asian universities. The project
aimed to produce a curriculum entitled “U rban Land Management and Poverty
Alleviation.” Our School was assigned to prepare the module on “Exp eriences
in Urban Land Management and Poverty Alleviation.” My colleagues, Dr.
Bravo and former Dean Endriga, and I had the opportunity to review the
literature on various urban development processes and patterns both in the
industrialized West and in Third World countries.
What came out from our review tended to negate the intent of the course,
namely, to demonstrate how urban land management (and by implication,
urban planning, broadly defined) can be an instrument for, or an approach to,
poverty alleviation. Using the spatio-temporal perspective in our review, we
found that in the process of urban development the poor are invariably the
victims: they are either spatially excluded or socially marginalized. Some of
our findings are highlighted below.
• In the city of antiquity, there was a 3-tier social structure with the priests at
the top, the artisans and bureaucrats in the middle, and the outcastes at
the bottom. Only the top two lived in the city. There were no urban poor
then. The poor lived outside the city.
1
Public lecture delivered as part of the UP Centennial Lecture Series at the School of Urban
and Regional Planning, U.P. Diliman, August 8, 2008.
2
Professor and Director of Training, School of Urban and Regional Planning, University of the
Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City
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work in factories or as stevedores in the docks. In the resulting social
structure the poor workers occupied the bottom rung. The higher classes
having fled to the suburbs, the poor huddled together in crowded slums
near the factories resulting in appalling housing conditions.
We also noted that the poor are not better off than their foreign counterparts in
their experience with urbanization and urban development. Consider the
following bits of information.
• Spanish land policy has led to the dispossession of native inhabitants. Pre-
colonial natives had free access to common land. Upon colonial contact
the Spanish king took these common lands awarded large tracts as land
grants to favored Spaniards. The natives were dispossessed of their land
and became landless vagabonds. During the later part of Spanish regime,
the Spaniards acquired more lands for export crop cultivation in landed
estates. More landless peasants and laborers became farm workers. The
social structure became more complex but the poor always occupied the
bottom. The Spaniards also built towns or pueblos where the center was
reserved for the rich and powerful while the poor peasants stayed in the
rural hinterlands.
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planning that segregate land uses through zoning and isolate the elite from
other social groups through “g ated communities” also referred to as bourgeois
utopias. Post-modernists’ agenda is the empowerment of the least powerful
by eradicating subordination (and domination) and creating a society that
allows the free expression of group difference. Iris Marion Young summarizes
the post-modernists’ position in terms of “a n ideal of city life in which social
relations affirm group difference.” They envision a city where different groups
dwell alongside with other groups interacting in city spaces. Likewise, they
envision a city politics that is democratic and not dominated by one point of
view and that recognizes and provides voice for different groups without
assimilating them into one homogeneous community. Their motto: “D ifference
without exclusion.”
If the image of planning and planners is all that dark as painted by the
foregoing critics, should we planners and policy makers feel guilty and
embarrassed? Or do we get riled listening to those uncomplimentary words
and feel the urge to rise to the defense of our discipline (profession)?
Personally I think we ought to search our souls and sincerely say mea culpa
and promise to behave better from now on.
Toward making you and me “b etter” planners and not the villains that the
critics make us out to be, I suggest that we stop regarding planning as a mere
technique that is neutral and value free. Planning is a normative discipline, not
content with merely describing what is but always seeking to determine what
ought. We ought to apply our knowledge and expertise toward attaining a
vision, an ideal. I don’ t know what that ideal should be. But I would be content
if we all strive to help establish a just society.
To this end we can make social justice the guiding principle, the foundation of
our planning praxis.
Social justice principles. The philosopher John Rawls in his book A Theory of
Justice, formulated principles to guide the assignment of rights and duties in
the basic institutions of society and to define the proper distribution of the
benefits and burdens of social cooperation. Rawls laid down two principles:
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2. Social and economic inequalities, e.g. wealth and authority, are just
only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in
particular for the least advantaged members of society.
Let the geographer David Harvey lead the way. Harvey digested Rawls’ book
and came out two years later with his book Social Justice and the City. In a
chapter entitled “So cial Justice and Spatial Systems,” Harvey explored the
possibility of applying the principles not only to individuals and social groups
but also to the planning and management of spatial systems such as cities
and regions.
And what are the bases of such claims on the social product? Harvey
identifies eight:
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5. Merit – claims may be based on the degree of difficulty to be overcome
in contributing to production, e.g. those who undertake dangerous or
unpleasant tasks (garbage collectors), or those who spent long periods
of training (medical surgeons) have greater claims than do others.
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Harvey summarizes the principle of social justice when applied to territories
thus:
There are other interpretations of the causes of injustices that exist in the
contemporary city. One is provided by the post-modernist and another by
political ecologists.
2. Marginalization. “Ma rginals” are people who are excluded from the
mainstream of society by reason of race, ethnic origin, gender, age,
and other attributes.
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Environmental Justice. This is a subset of social justice concerned with the
distribution or maldistribution of environmental consequences, the inequality
in exposure to environmental hazards and risks among certain sectors of the
population. Political ecologists like Andy Merrifield and Raymond Bryant are
concerned with analyzing the spatial and temporal impact of natural resource
exploitation like mining, logging, fishing, or cash crop production on vulnerable
groups like indigenous people, subsistence farmers and fisherfolk. In the
urban setting, political ecologists turn to issues of industrial pollution and other
effects of industrialization and urbanization on disadvantaged groups.
There is already a growing literature on these latter two perspectives and they
deserve a longer review than we can accommodate in this paper. Certainly
they deserve more focused attention in some future forums.
Assessed against the foregoing formulations how does our country and its
territorial subdivisions – regions, cities, towns, barangays – measure up?
Consider the following:
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a. Full protection to labor, organized and unorganized, local and
overseas, full employment and equal employment opportunities
for all.
The review found that the beneficiaries of the programs saw their lives having
improved despite many weaknesses of the government agencies that
implement those programs. The policy response to the challenges of giving
preferential treatment to the disadvantaged is already in place. What is
needed is effective implementation.
Let us now examine selected issues under the lenses of social justice and
explore how planners and policy makers may respond accordingly. Let us
group the issues according to the particular focus of each of the three
perspectives on social justice presented above, namely, the redistributive
mode, the people empowerment agenda, and the environmental justice
perspective.
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1. Food. Adequate food is what everyone needs to survive and
therefore no one should be without it. The planning and policy
problem is how to make it available at the time it is needed and how
to make it accessible to everyone. It is a problem involving
production and distribution.
It is one this score where urban and regional planners can make
substantial contribution. In the preparation of the comprehensive
land use plan which is a mandate of all local governments, planners
can assist in designing a well-conceived urban form. An urban form
is the combination of the built and unbuilt environment. A well-
conceived urban form is one that properly locates the built form and
effectively protects the unbuilt one. One of the areas that should be
kept unbuilt are the good agricultural roads. Planners can do well to
regard the urban form as not just a matter of drawing shapes and
forms. They should realize that behind the schematics is a life-and-
death issue, our national food security.
2. Water. The fact that 80% of our population enjoy safe, clean
water is not a basis of cold comfort because the remaining
unreached 20% are mostly the poor. The poor are unreached
because they are unreachable. These are the rural dwellers in very
scattered settlements. The poor are unreached also because they
cannot afford the cost of piped connection. In reality however, the
urban poor are paying more for the water delivered by enterprising
private providers.
3. Shelter. I shall not deal with this very complex issue at length
here. Let me say that the poor who are suffering from inadequate
shelter are doubly aggrieved by the fact that they are also most
vulnerable to environmental and human-caused hazards. This is
mainly because the relatively risk-free areas have already been
reserved by the affluent sectors of society. Nothing short of a
radical land reform can address this problem but I will leave that to
the politicians. For their part, planners should acquire all the know-
how to be able to design disaster risk-sensitive settlements. More
important, they should not allow themselves to be used by property
developers who violate known standards and their technical
knowledge and professional judgments.
Under the Indigenous People’ s Right Act, indigenous people who are
awarded titles to their ancestral domains are required to prepare the Ancestral
Domain Sustainable Development and Protection Plan (ADSDPP) as one of
the instruments by which they can enjoy and protect their rights to the domain.
The land also requires that the ADSDPP be integrated into the
comprehensive plans of the host local governments concerned. Now the
mechanisms and mechanics of effecting such integration are not yet well
studied. The field is therefore open for pilot studies to develop a framework of
integration that is both culture-sensitive and empowering to the indigenous
people.
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environmental impact assessment system. It is a known fact that many, if not
most, project proponents constantly seek out ways to get around the
seemingly complicated and costly process of securing an environmental
compliance certificate as a cross-cutting measure. Planners who are involved
in development projects should not allow themselves to be used to justify
making short cuts and compromise the common good. On the social
consequences of environmental projects, social justice requires that we do not
load much of the burden on the poor. For example, we need to review our
propensity to locate waste-handling facilities in areas where the poor
predominate, or the practice of aligning new road constructions to traverse
poor communities. Running your road through a low-income neighborhood
may be the least cost alternative but the affected families are least able to
absorb the cost of dislocation.
There are certainly many more issues, but this forum cannot take up most of
them. Let other venues pick them up.
Conclusion
Thus we have seen that if we take the principle of social justice as the
foundation of our planning praxis the opportunities for meaningful
engagement are limitless. Choose the interpretation of social justice that suits
your taste. If you are inclined toward the redistributive mode of dispensing
social justice there is much room for new and creative ways to meet basic
needs and to alleviate the plight of the underprivileged, the marginalized, and
those vulnerable to natural and human-made disasters. If you choose to
engage the roots of oppression of whatever kind or stripe, I wish you good
luck. And if you want to take up the cause of environmental justice you will not
run out of issues to fight and you will find yourself in a growing company of
like minds. All this requires that we need to look at planning less of a
profession than as a vocation. If we apply our knowledge and expertise to
advance the ideal of a just society, then we need not feel guilty or
embarrassed being a planner.
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References:
Bryant, R. & Bailey, S. (1997). Third World political ecology. London: Routledge.
Harvey, D. (1973). Social justice and the city (Part II). Baltimore, MD.: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Harvey, D. (1996). Social justice, postmodernism, and the city. In Fainstein, S. &
Campbell, S. (Eds.), Readings in urban theory (chapter16). Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.
Rawls, J. (1995). Justice as fairness. In Stein, J.M. (ed.), Classic readings in urban
planning (pp.63-73). New York: Mc-Graw Hill, Inc.
Smith, D. (2002). Social justice and the South African City. In Eada, J. & Mele, C.
(Eds.) Understanding the city (chapter 4). Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers.
Other Sources
Alikpala, R. (2005). Philippine efforts to meet MDG Target 10. Presentation for
Asia Water Watch 2015. Asian Development Bank. 17 November 2005.
Retrieved July 26, 2008 from
http://www.adb.org/documents/events/2005/Asia-Water-Watch-
2015/Presentation-Alikpala.pdf
Asialink Project. (1995). Package III: Experiences in Urban Land Management and
Poverty Alleviation. In Urban Land Management and Poverty Alleviation. On-
line course developed by the University of Dortmund, Germany; ITC, The
Netherlands; Wuhan University, China; and the National College of Public
Administration and Governance and the School of Urban and Regional
Planning, UP Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines.
Pagsanghan, J. (13, July 2008). Evaluating RP's asset reform. Philippine Daily
Inquirer. pp. A14.
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