Everyday urbanization: The social dynamics of development in Manila's extended metropolitan region

Attempts at understanding the urbanization process in Southeast Asia have, in recent years, focused on the emergence of extended metropolitan regions around primate cities. Many have argued that with a landscape of intensivel y mixed 'rural' and 'urban' activities, such regions represent a distinctiv e Asian form of urbanization and a challenge to the conventional urban-rura l dualism. The implication, both in theoretical and policy terms, is that s uch regions of mixed land use form new 'urban' landscapes that will persist into the future on the basis of balanced 'agro-industrial' development. Dr awing on fieldwork in a town on Manila's agricultural periphery, this paper argues that such understandings present a static view of these regions, li mited by macro-level data and analysis. A more ethnographic understanding o f the social processes of 'everyday urbanization' at the interface of the ' urban' and the 'rural' dispels any sense of a stable rural-urban landscape or balanced development. The evidence points to an incompatibility of funct ions leading to the gradual 'squeezing out' of agriculture due to a changin g economic calculus in agricultural households brought on by labour market shifts; environmental conflicts between agricultural and urban-industrial a ctivities; social and cultural transformations in rural society; a politica l framework of bureaucratic corruption in the regulation of urbanization; a nd the influence of personalized power relations in agi arian society.