“Manaog Lang Ko Sa Ayala”: A City Owned By Corporations (Part 1 of 2)

One of The Diacritic’s article categories is the Think-piece, an argumentative essay format where the author presents their original point-of-view. The aim is to present research-like rigour and an investigative spirit, but through an accessible format that doesn’t require specialist-level background knowledge. In this preview, Joshua Vargas takes us to the Philippine city of Cebu.

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The sunsets are often dramatic in Cebu, where every year more buildings scrape its purple sky. Around this time (before COVID), most workers are beginning their long commutes home in the sprawling Philippine metropolis, considered second only to Metro Manila in economic significance.

But a growing sector of the population is clocking into work at this time of the day. Cebu is one of Asia’s, and indeed the world’s, hubs for business process outsourcing (BPO). It was ranked first among 50 “Emerging Global Outsourcing Cities” in a study by Tholons and CyberMedia, ahead of larger Asian cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Ho Chi Minh.Sequiño, Agnes C. ‘An Environmental Scanning of the IT-Enabled Business Process Outsourcing Industry in Cebu’. Liceo Journal of Higher Education Research 6, no. 1 (2009): 179. https://doi.org/10.7828/ljher.v6i1.54. Multinational corporations utilize the city’s educated and English-literate workforce to fulfill service roles such as medical transcription, software development, and taking calls for clients half the world away—explaining why the city and its workers are awake at night, synchronized to New York’s time zone.

These workers are not scattered evenly across the city, though. They tend to concentrate on specific parts of town—the parts where the skyscrapers are. One enters these districts noticing the aesthetic markers of a socioeconomic divide. Scattered roads suddenly snap into rigid grids, and bumpy pavement flattens into smooth surfaces punctuated by speed bumps and green spaces. The huts and corrugated metal sheets that usually line the roads fade, and in their place is a seemingly endless row of 24-hour cafes, American fast-food brands, and bubble tea shops. Towering above them are the city’s major office buildings, bearing the logos of major corporations—as if to say, “this is my part of town.”

And it is, indeed, their part of town.

“Manaog Lang Ko sa Ayala”

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Check out the Ayala Center Cebu area in Google Street View.

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When Cebuanos say they are “going to Ayala,” what they really mean is going to one of those estates, or the Ayala mall inside them. What makes this an interesting phenomenon is that Cebuanos, and arguably most Filipinos, rarely refer to large developments by their actual names. Four residents of Cebu who were interviewed for this article noted that very few people use or even recognize the names of developments like “City di Mare” and “Mactan Newtown.” They referred to the former as either “Filinvest” (the development’s owner) or “SRP” (SRP being “South Road Properties,” the commercial name for the land reclamation project where City di Mare is located). The latter was referred to by some Cebuanos as “Megaworld,” after that project’s owner. This habit, according to my interviewees, probably stems from the earliest large developments in Cebu, which tend to be malls like SM City Cebu and Robinsons Fuente, where the corporate branding is used as the place’s identity.

In the case of Ayala estates, the name “Cebu Park District” has little recognition among Cebuanos. They do recognize the marketing names “Business Park” and “IT Park,” and the latter is especially memorable for workers in the BPO industry. But according to my interviewees, most people colloquially refer to both places (most especially the former) as “Ayala.” This feels like a more natural choice according to my interviewee, 19-year-old university student Lara Batulan at the University of the Philippines Cebu, who says that she “prefer[s] calling Cebu Business Park by Ayala Lands or just plainly Ayala, and I call all other establishments like SM Cebu by its name” (emphasis mine).

This preference, of calling the estates by the names of their owners, has a number of implications. One is the conflation of the space and its owner. In referring to Ayala both as a landowner and a place, people solidify the connection between the two, making the place’s ownership its primary quality. I struggle to explain what this does to our imagination of the place, so instead I will liken this habit to the practice of calling married women by the names of their husbands. That practice, which accompanied old English norms of coverture (a woman’s inability to “enter into economic contracts in her own right”Bailey, Joanne. ‘Favoured or Oppressed? Married Women, Property and “Coverture” in England, 1660–1800’. Continuity and Change 17, no. 3 (2002): 351–72. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416002004253.), reinforced public perception of a husband’s power over and ownership of his wife.

More importantly, it indicates how natural and intuitive it has become for Cebuanos to imagine parts of their city as belonging to a corporation’s ownership. This is understandably intuitive when it comes to the earlier malls like SM City Cebu, which are indeed singular buildings owned solely by a single developer. It starts to elicit questions when we consider that this phenomenon—of corporations being more readily seen as owners of parts of a city—now applies to larger scales, especially estates.

I will explore this phenomenon in a two-part series. This part will cover how people experience this divide between corporate estates and the “other” Cebu City through the experiences of my interviewees, including university students (like Lara) and workers from the outsourcing industry. The next part, “You Can Have Your Cebu And Eat It Too,” will present a hypothesis of how Cebu ended up in this situation, and what it could mean for the city’s future.

…but they’re nice places

No doubt, the estates are deemed to be exciting places to be in. Recor Frank Elvas, 20, felt so when he moved from Zamboanga City to pursue a chemical engineering degree at the University of San Carlos. His campus is in Talamban, a little less than three kilometers from Cebu IT Park (though the distance may sometimes feel exacerbated due to heavy traffic), and he and his friends go to IT Park once in a while to hang out, grab a bite, or shop.

Recor thinks that the general opinion of people in his age group is that the estates are nice and convenient places for hanging out with friends. He felt that they are a draw especially for young college students who moved to Cebu from comparatively less developed parts of the Philippines. In our interview, he said:

I love to hang out [at Cebu IT Park] during my free time. And these townships are so wide and have lots of stores and malls you can go to. It’s like you have a lot of choices to make.

Recor Elvas, university student

Lara, who is a native of Metro Cebu, also feels the same, though she does not spend all her time on estate-like projects. Many of her friends live in Mandaue, the neighboring town to Cebu City proper, so they prefer spending time in Mandaue malls such as JCentre and Parkmall. However, she acknowledges that the estates are “Cebu’s centers of social life” and “great hangout places,” saying that they are “the few best choices for roaming, or laags, in Cebu.”

Jix Javate, 34, spends most of his time in Cebu IT Park working night shifts in a BPO company. He patronizes IT Park cafes and coffeehouses as they are open 24/7 and located near his office, and he does hang out around the area sometimes with his friends. But he also feels that the estate caters to two separate audiences—people like Lara and Recor who travel from outside of the estate for recreation, and people like himself who function as a sort of “captive market” that participates in the place’s economy for convenience.

The estates’ mix of office space and retail apparently seems to be working well for the companies. Jix notes how his company’s engagement team was excited at the news of a new mall, Central Bloc, opening at IT Park, because the mall’s cinema would make it easier to plan welfare activities. He and his colleagues would sometimes gossip about which stores were opening.

Jix notices that more estates and estate-like developments like IT Park are being announced and developed around the metropolis. He and his colleagues look forward to news of new developments, which recently seems to come more often. This is becoming a pattern so constant that Cebuanos and Cebu residents are noticing. Jix notes:

Cebuanos tend to really like, um, exploring what is new. So when they realize that there’s a new project and all that, so they’re kind of excited…

…so they will really go, you know, [out of] their way to experience what are those new businesses that are brought by these [developments]…
…and after a few months they’re like—I’ve been to that place already.

Jix Javate, outsourcing worker

But the overall impression by Cebu residents, at least according to my interviewees, is that the estates are positively received. Jix says that, even though he sometimes has concerns about traffic congestion and how these developments will affect people who live nearby, he generally feels like these developments are something to “really look forward to;” their opening points to new businesses and jobs. He is, after all, employed in an industry that is closely tied to the opening of estates. He describes the general optimism Cebu residents seem to have about increasing development.

Our university students agree. Recor says that he thinks it is a “good thing for the future of Cebu,” adding that other developers’ attempts to challenge Ayala will create competition that could “make the economic status of Cebu greater than before.” Lara concurs, saying that “these projects are great for Cebu’s economy because real estate and entertainment establishments really do help the province’s economy to skyrocket.”

Nice Places (Not For Us)

Yet Lara, having grown up alongside the accelerating expansion of corporate land ownership in Cebu, has some hesitations. She is concerned about the question of who the new spaces are for and who would ultimately benefit from the concentration of development in specific places and at the hands of large developers. She talks about this at length:

From what I’ve noticed in their ads or their physical promotions in malls, these projects are marketed as key to a luxury lifestyle to the new, younger elite generation of Cebuanos as well as the outpour of retired foreigners looking for affordable yet amazing homes in Cebu…

…while it’s good for Cebu economy-wise, I don’t think that this type of constant industrialization will do the Cebuanos any good in the long run, because these establishments were built for the rich, these properties will just get more and more expensive. This type of capitalist scenario only benefits those who can afford to buy these establishments, and a majority of those are Cebu’s old rich, and the large percentage of foreigners who are looking for luxury lifestyles for more affordable prices, compared to their home country’s prices. Basically, only very few Cebuanos can [benefit] from these projects in the long run.

Lara Batulan, university student

This seems to reflect a key anxiety that these spaces are built for more privileged residents, leaving a “majority” of Cebuanos behind. The sense that different spaces are for different social groups or classes is connected to what urban theorists like Saskia Sassen and Neil Brenner call polarization, a trend of globalized cities exhibiting growing inequality,Brenner, Neil. Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays. Vol. 156;156.; Book, Whole. Bauverlag: Birkhauser, 2017. as capital and high-paying jobs start concentrating in some areas. University of Chicago professor Marco Garrido noticed that this phenomenon happens in Manila, which results in an “urban fragmentation.”Garrido, Marco Z. The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila. Book, Whole. London; Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 2019. Garrido describes fragmentation as the creation of spatial and social boundaries between privileged and less privileged social groups existing near each other. But I feel that Lara describes it best when she lamented about the estates:

I have to say that these places push for a more emphasized class divide, with some establishments preferably “for the low to lower middle class” and others being for those “upper-middle to high class.’

Lara Batulan, university student

Jix shares a similar sentiment when he talks about how he prefers shopping for groceries and novelties at Carbon Market, a relatively distant location, when he is not at IT Park.

[mfn referencenumber=Addendum]Coincidentally, the Cebu City government announced on January 11, hours before this article was posted, that Carbon Market was to be redeveloped, through a joint venture with Megawide Construction. Efforts are being made to assure vendors that they will not lose their livelihoods, and that an ‘inclusive’ redevelopment is being targeted. If this is true, the facilities should definitely be better for both vendors and consumers. Yet it is notable that a private company, through its unsolicited proposal, is afforded a lot of agency in shaping Cebu’s urban form.[/mfn]

He describes Carbon Market as attracting “all people from all walks of life” due to its vibrant trading culture and low prices, describing it as a more “authentic” place than IT Park. Interestingly, he says—verbatim—that “when you go to Carbon Market, you would really experience the true essence of being a Cebuano.” While I can’t make a generalized conclusion from his statement, I find the language very interesting. It seems to suggest that a “Cebuano” does not really belong in an estate like IT Park.

But after all, the estates are self-contained communities. They starkly contrast with the surrounding areas of their cities. They become a form of what Garrido calls the “enclave,”Garrido, Marco Z. The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila. Book, Whole. London; Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 2019. spaces within cities that serve as a concentration of upper-class residents and capital. Despite not being gated like exclusive residential subdivisions or “villages,” they nevertheless feel different to those outside their target demographic, especially the urban poor who often feel like they have “no right” to be in these places.Garrido, Marco Z. The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila. Book, Whole. London; Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 2019. Stepping into these estates feels like teleporting into a new world or a different country. Filipinos and tourists feel this dissonance so much that vlogs and memes are regularly made about how estate areas feel more like the developed Western world than part of the Philippines. The divides between socioeconomic groups can be seen in the contrasts between the places where they work and live.

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A Cebu travel vlog showing the typical reaction to seeing Cebu IT Park in contrast to the rest of Cebu.

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Questions of Ownership, Formality, and Informality

Jix experiences those contrasts every day. Although he has worked at IT Park since moving into the city, he has never actually lived in IT Park despite the estate’s supposed “work-live-play” environment. The reality is that most of the workers employed by the companies that set up their offices in estates are priced out of the estates’ housing markets. The “work-live-play” pitch is not for them.

Workers, according to Jix, usually live outside of the estates in what he calls “informal” housing, which is located in “slum” areas. He calls houses in the estates or other exclusive enclaves “formal” housing. These dichotomies, of formality/informality and enclave/slum, are key to understanding the socio-spatial fragmentation of Cebu—that is, the division of the city not only along geographic boundaries but also social groups. In The Patchwork City, Garrido’s book on this phenomenon as observed in Manila, he describes the division as not just a reflection of class differences in urban form. The urban form “intensifie[s] class relations”Garrido, Marco Z. The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila. Book, Whole. London; Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 2019. because it makes those differences more visible; enables experiences of discrimination and class consciousness; and leads to residents of a city feeling as if not all of the city is theirs.

Jix says:

When I started [working in IT Park] way back then, I had to choose [an area] 2–3 [jeepney] rides away from the office because of, you know, the cost of the rent, all that… But when I found out that there are, you know, places that you can stay near IT Park, so that’s when I decided to move near IT Park.

Jix Javate, outsourcing worker

He reiterated that both his original residence and current location are “informal” areas, and that he currently stays in a “slum” at the fringe of IT Park. He learned about this location from his colleagues, with whom he feels he can talk about this comfortably because there is a shared sense of housing insecurity being a problem among BPO workers. “There is talk of getting your own house in a more “formal” area,” he says about workers’ aspirations, “but we live by the now”—alluding to how he and his colleagues acknowledge that “formal” places are out of their reach.

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A comparison of the street level between a neighborhood like Jix’s (left, photo by Jix Javate) and Cebu Park District (right, photo by Joshua Vargas).

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What exactly makes a place formal or informal? When Jix was asked to clarify, he struggled to find the words. He says that he knows that a place is formal or informal partly from hearsay, but mostly from “feeling”—implying that this status can be sensed in the way one experiences the city. Probed on what makes him think a place is formal, he says that it is somewhere that is “quiet, reserved, the residences are arranged… everything is in order.” In contrast, the informal place is “loud and not in order.”

But Jix thinks the fundamental difference is something else:

Informal places are the ones that are not supposed to be occupied by people, like say… a squatter’s area and all that. Formal places for me are something that… you really own, you have papers for it and like, say, it’s official that it’s yours, so it has a title, uh, it has documentation that it’s yours, and it’s also a land—like say for example, the villages that is being developed by big companies and all that, so yeah, I think that’s how I see formal and informal places.

Jix Javate, outsourcing worker

Jix, despite calling his own home “informal housing,” still believes in a social expectation that people are “not supposed” to live there. In using the popular phrasing “squatter’s area,” he reproduces the connotation those words carry, which Garrido notes is overwhelmingly negative and even akin to a moral judgment of the integrity of its residents.Garrido, Marco Z. The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila. Book, Whole. London; Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 2019. Most strikingly, however, Jix realizes that, in his mind, one of the defining features of “formal housing” is legal ownership. To him, residents of exclusive villages, despite not having control over the spaces where they live, have more ownership of their homes because they have the papers for it. Jix says that “informal housing” residents and owners have a chronic land insecurity because of land disputes between developers and the government, leaving the perceived legal status of much land in Cebu very ambiguous.

This combination of reliance on intuition and a value placed on ownership yields a peculiarity: since one can’t really tell by looking at a place whether or not one has the papers for it, it is possible that a person who owns a bungalow, as well as the land underneath it, might still appear to live in an “informal” area due to the nature of the surrounding area. So, I wonder: is legal ownership itself really the factor? Or is it rather a feeling of ownership? Though I am not in the position to conclude right now, perhaps people in Cebu are now convinced that their “ownership” of a part of a city is only secure if it is “granted” to them, even if not unconditionally, by these developers—after all, Jix mentions that a place is more “formal” if it is developed by “big companies.”

Resistance—and Practical Acceptance

An outside observer might feel that this is an unacceptable level of social polarization and wonder if Cebu residents want to resist the trend. This certainly is the case for those among the urban poor whose livelihoods clash with the visions of real estate companies and development-oriented mayors. This led to some pushback, aided by civil society groups and community organizations. Yet this resistance seems to have limited success, if any. Marcel van Kampen and Ton van Naerssen argue that their inability to stop authorities from carrying out forced demolitions and relocations, especially in the case of the neighborhood of Carreta in 1998, indicates a lack of power in that people have to fight against the shaping of the city in ways that disadvantage them.van Kampen, Marcel, and Ton Van Naerssen. ‘Globalization and Urban Governance in Two Asian Cities: Pune (India) and Cebu (The Philippines)’. European Planning Studies 16, no. 7 (2008): 941–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654310802163736.

However, Jix says that those among the lower middle class, particularly those whose jobs are provided by the BPO industry or by other companies that operate in these estates, are much more accepting of the status quo. He frames the land insecurity and lack of access to prestige as “sacrifices” workers are willing to make to take advantage of the opportunities available in Cebu. Jix said that Cebu call centers offer decent salaries and benefits that one would struggle to find in cities without a BPO industry, like Pagadian in Zamboanga del Sur where Jix lived before moving to Cebu. The informality of his living area is therefore not a matter of survival, as it may be for, say, the fishing communities blocked from the sea by the South Road Properties (SRP) land reclamation project.van Kampen, Marcel, and Ton Van Naerssen. ‘Globalization and Urban Governance in Two Asian Cities: Pune (India) and Cebu (The Philippines)’. European Planning Studies 16, no. 7 (2008): 941–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654310802163736. It becomes a normalized social drawback to accept in order to receive the upward social mobility that the BPO sector provides. In his words:

I think what really… what really made us decide to stay in this area is… the practicality… practical in such a way that, you know, it’s something that we can afford, the climate’s decent, it’s much convenient…
…considering that it’s informal, but the thing is, I think if you’re here for quite some time, the very first thing that you would really do in a big city is really to look for practicality… Most of those who [have] higher positions are living in this area. They do have cars, they do have, like, you know, business on the side while working in the BPO industry, but still they decide to live in this area because it’s practical.

Jix Javate, outsourcing worker

Iron Caged…?

In 1934, German sociologist Max Weber published “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” a heavily influential work of social theory in the past century. One of the book’s famous contributions is the understanding that a person born into a capitalist system will see the system as an “unalterable order of things.”Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: C. Scribner, 1958. They therefore accept the circumstances given to them as ‘just the way things are,’ and act in ways that they need to in order to survive in a capitalistic world.

Jix’s statements seem to suggest a vision of the future like Max Weber’s. My interviewees mostly speak of Cebu’s direction as if it is inevitable and as if the companies have, and will continue to have, the power to reshape cities in ways that create economic growth and popular excitement, even if it comes at social costs.

But Cebu was not always like this. Before the information age, and back when Cebu attempted to concentrate foreign investment in government-created manufacturing and export zones, no one could have foreseen the full extent of today’s trend of corporate territorial expansion. With the COVID-19 pandemic raising questions about the value of office space in the future as well as accelerating the replacement of outsourcing using artificial intelligence, concerns are also mounting over the sustainability of Cebu banking its urban destiny on developers fulfilling a demand for office space—a demand largely generated by outsourcing.

So how did it become like this? I will present the rough sketch of my hypothesis in the next part. I will also show how outsourcing and Cebu’s urban divide are fundamentally connected; why these estates play a huge role in Cebu’s economic status; and what the future may hold.

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Part 2 of this series, “You Can Have Your Cebu And Eat It Too,” will be released in the coming weeks.

This is the last of our three “teaser” articles before our official launch on January 18. Follow our Facebook and Instagram to be notified as soon as new content is released!