 Hi everyone, we're gonna get started. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi, thank you for joining us today for our leaps. Our speaker today is Professor Giordano Romaglio, Associate Professor of Development Planning for Diversity at University College London. As usual, my name is Anna, I'm a PhD student here at the Urban Planning Program. I'll be moderating this section, a couple of logistical things to look at. So first of all, we are recording today's lecture so if you don't wish to be recorded, please keep this in mind. After the presentation, we'll have time for Q&A. We will start our Q&A session around 2 to 15 p.m., so we'll have enough time for everyone's questions. I will give everyone opportunity to ask that question, but please limit yourself to like one question at a time probably. And to ask questions, please just raise your hand and I will give the other to you. And with that, I am delighted to introduce our speaker for today. Giordano Romaglio is an Associate Professor in Development Planning for Diversity and the Co-Director of the Master of Science Urban Development Planning Program at the Barclay Development Planning Unit at University College London. Spending the fields of urban geography, development studies and feminist urban political ecology, the research explores the social-special trajectories of urban development in the Philippines, with a particular focus on disaster risk governance, resilience building, urban regeneration, and the intersectional dynamics of dispossession, displacement and collective action that accompany them. Giordano has more than 15 years of professional experience of working with non-government organizations in the UK, Canada, East Africa, Latin America and the Philippines to support their operational and strategic interventions related to diversity and social inclusion, gender mainstreaming, HIV AIDS, housing and homelessness, youth offending and food security. Much of this work has focused on building institutional capacities to work with marginalized groups and to embed intersectionally attentive policies and approaches into their development practice. So please welcome Professor Romaglio. Thank you very much, Anna. Thank you all for welcoming me here today. I'm absolutely delighted to be here and to have an opportunity to share with you what is the essence of like the work that I've been doing for the past 10 years. So starting off in my PhD, like many of you today. And now is kind of I'm expanding that work. So, as indicated by the title today, we're going to be speaking about informality in the city, and specifically looking at that in the context of Metro Cebu, which is where I've been working since 2014. And just to kind of contextualize this focus. So as I said, this is like both my current, my past research, which I did in my PhD, and it's showing my evolving research trajectories, right? So what I'm hoping to do today, it's the first time I've presented it all as one, is to really showcase the links and like center my analysis of urban development in the city through a lens of informality and really trying to think through the ways in which the treatment of informality is like really central to urban development plans, but also to kind of what I call technologies of governance that relate to climate change sustainability and resilience building. So hopefully I make that case effectively today. I've been saying that I really push you to kind of help me think beyond what I'm presenting you today because I'm trying to expand particularly the latter part of my presentation. I'm trying to think differently and outside common tropes of urban development. So if you have any ideas, we can talk about it during the questions or, you know, afterwards when we when we meet for drinks. Right. So to very quickly situate my research, the Philippines is a lower middle income country in Southeast Asia, made up of over 7000 islands. And in terms of urbanization, the majority of Filipinos still live in rural areas. Okay, but, you know, bit by bit, it's kind of becoming more urban. And at the moment, it's estimated that 48% of the population in the Philippines is now living in cities. And among urban residents, approximately 38% are estimated to be living in informal settle. Okay. The Philippines is also one of the most disaster affected countries. And it routinely experiences a whole host of different types of climatic and environmental hazards, such as typhoons and earthquakes, but also landslides, floods, fires and the kind of everyday hazards connected with global warming. And also I would argue with like poverty and infrastructural deficiencies connected to urban park. Right. Metro Cebu is no exception to any of this. The city is is located in the central Visayas, which I've circled and read there. It's the capital of that region. The second largest metropolitan area in the Philippines has a population of just under 3 million people. And within that kind of agglomeration, approximately 41,000 households are considered to be informal settlements. And 10,000 of those households are situated in areas that are in like river banks or coastal areas that are very exposed to hydro meteorological hazards. And you can see this here in flood map. It's a dated flood map. But nonetheless, it kind of the dark red area shows the areas of metro region that are prone to flooding. My research focused in my initial PhD research was focused in where those five kind of circles are. So I wasn't only looking at areas that were like evidently flood prone or at risk of flooding but also areas that were prone to landslides areas that were prone to fires because they were high density and land settlements so on. And although at the time of my original research or my starting I research in 2014. Sebu hadn't yet been affected by any major catastrophe. Okay, not since the 1990s. And I say that any major catastrophe that that was like recognized at an international scale. Okay, so like typhoon high end. One of the largest, I think it was the strongest storm at the time ever recorded 2013. So that affected the northern part of Sebu but not the city itself. And a few weeks before typhoon high end on this island right here. A bit further, kind of, yeah, east of Sebu, there's an island called behold they had a huge earthquake and that received a lot of international attention. Well, so the fact that risk is very much part of the everyday fabric of the city means that it's also been quite integral to the ways in which urban development plans are being conceptualized and like imagined and realize, right. And the city's actually been recognized nationally and internationally as a leader of good practice and resilience and in disaster risk. Now this, these kind of claims, we could call them were tested in December 2021 when typhoon Odette, which was a little bit less strong than typhoon high end because arguably more damaged past right through the center of the city. Resulting in over 200 deaths and a huge amount of damage to infrastructure and it left people without water and electricity for months. So, calls for creating a resilient disaster proof and more recently sustainable city. I would argue are intimately connected with and driven by Sebu's world aspiration. Okay, and these world ambitions are evident in a number of different facets right I'm going to trace through some of these right now. So, this is a picture of it park this was built thinking like the 1990s early 2000s. It's like, I've called it a Singapore style like it right like buildings wide pavements. You know, very kind of luxury high rise condominiums nice restaurants where the JP Morgan's and then price waterhouse Coopers are all kind of based a lot of finance organizations. That's this is it park okay and this was like built with the aspiration of drawing in foreign investment for business process outsourcing right. You've also got these welding aspirations featuring in in this kind of residential or gated community projects right. This is a billboard I took a photo of and it's a. It's a gated community that spires to your claims to contribute to the transformation of Sebu into a world class lifestyle destination. You've also got the Mac 10 export Mac 10 export processing zone so opened in like the 80s 90s and again it's an effort to draw in for an investment. And then a more recent development here is the SMC side complex right this is super mall it opened in 2015 and at the time it was it remains one of the largest in the world. Okay. But it's clearly depicted in this photograph here, which I took. Same mall next to one of the neighborhoods that I was working in for my PhD. These kinds of urban imaginaries often fail to account for or are in some ways at odds with urban reality. Right. I think both worlding both disaster risk management and worlding aspirations are very much premised around these kind of imaginaries of a desirable urban future that sit in opposition to an undesirable or dystopic alternative. That's rooted often in present realities right or at least perceived reality. And I would argue that these mutually reinforcing agendas as I see them of modernization and disaster risk management represent an emerging system of governance in Metro Sebu. That is prompting a socio spatial reorganization of the city along socio economic lines. And very much as I'm seeing as my research kind of expands its realm of focus. I would argue that the targets of this kind of urban governance system are very much informal actors and space. Right. And I see this kind of narrative that seeks to kind of erase them from the city or pause. These processes are taking place through a discourse regime that relies on arbitrary moral categorizations of informal spaces and economy and economies that are premised around ideas of risk and vulnerability. Right. And these ideas are being mobilized to legitimize the displacement of these groups or the erasure of these spaces from the city. While also and this is really important obscuring the role of the states of the private sector and of neoliberal urban development kind of trajectories more broadly in both producing and exacerbating conditions of risk and vulnerability. And we could argue of informality itself. Right. And you can see this in this image here right this was taken from a brochure from 2010. A mega sebu development project brochure, which was essentially a mega urbanization plan that was spearheaded by prominent business owners and endorsed by the city governments. It was a neoliberal approach to a market oriented approach to urban development that explicitly sought to encourage future investments and harness the city's full potential as a global economic hub. Right. Here's another image from the same brochure, which features rather dystopic images of informal settlements, congested streets and an overflowing landfill, which are pitted against this utopic watercolor that prompts the reader to imagine a mega sebu in the city. Right. Now these pictorial depictions of sebu of today, as a chaotic polluted overpopulated and inherently risky city very much seems to situate the urban poor at the heart of many of these issues right, or at least as like emblematic of them. And this here I'm going to draw an Asher Gertner's work so what's happening here is this equation of slum related nuisances with slums themselves right. And within this what what we're seeing is this kind of an insinuation of the urban poor's vulnerability come culpability in terms of flooding coastline degradation environmental pollution and all these things right. And what I'm arguing is that these subjective notions of risk and resilience have become very deeply entangled in the epistemologies of modernism that are being propagated in sebu, and that these are really operating as a technology of governance and I'm going to go into that in a bit more detail shortly. So disaster risk management is is a core feature of sebu's master plans for building a globally competitive sustainable and resilient city region right. And one example of this is the spatial reorganization of the city or the proposed spatial reorganization of the city through an urban cluster system. Right. And this is like, so it's what they're trying to do is create like different zones for different types of uses and and quite crucially enforce them strictly. I've taken this from the document. And the interest here the reason that this is being kind of put forth is so that you have less hazardous urban spray spaces that are free from landslides and floods we see this kind of mobilization of safety of disaster risk to legitimize this, these urban planning zones. Right. So within this, one of the key things I want to draw your attention to is there was a proposal to change the actual city limits. Okay, so this is this is the move. And this kind of along here, not really a top graph, this is Thailand, right, really affects urban development in sebu because there's only so much area, not only because it's an island but because the topography doesn't lend itself to easy development. What they were proposing here is to draw the city limits to exclude the hilly areas of the mountain. Right. There's also a proposal to develop or create a green loop to promote kind of, they call it attractive urban functions. Right. They failed to elaborate on what attractive or less attractive urban functions constitute. Right. Now these efforts to promote functional safe and environmentally friendly urban areas are very much being presented as desirable and beneficial for everyone. Right. The reality is, is that it's likely to have quite damaging impacts on lower income populations. Right. Particularly because many of those people are actually residing in the hillside, sometimes not even by choice they're being relocated there from danger zones within the city to municipal relocation areas in the hillside Right. So, and the other thing to know is that if you fall outside the city limits, your right to take part in elections, your access to public services will differ quite great. Right. So there's some interesting political dynamics that are also going on here. Right. I think that this display really reflects efforts to mark Cebu as an exemplary center. Right. And here I'm drawing on Chris knows work and theorizations to understand Southeast Asian urbanism in many ways as a spectacle of order and development. Right. And this notion of like a spectacle. I think Asher Gertner also plays with that in his work on on the world class aesthetic right. He argues that this takes shape through the dissemination of a compelling vision of the future and the cultivation of a popular desire for such a future, normatively presented around a clean comfortable and nuisance free imaginary right a spectacle that enables an aesthetic mode of governing or rule by aesthetic that facilitates and legitimizes plans for world class city make. And this fabulous book here that I would highly recommend to all if you haven't read it. She contends that neoliberal logics underpinning these modernist tropes and technologies of governance serve to recast problems as non ideological and non political issues that require technical solutions right. And I'd argue that in the Philippines and in Cebu specifically that these worlding ambitions are being bolstered and legitimized by the climate crisis, really, and disaster risks that like prevail in the area, and by efforts to govern or adapt to climate change into these risks, right and build more resilient cities. I find the work of Kashia Papaki. She's based at the LSE and she's recently published a book tracing her research in Bangladesh looking at like shrimp farming in areas of the Bengal Bay, right. And she frames very similar dynamics taking shape in Bangladesh under the concept of anticipatory ruination. Right. She argues that anticipatory ruination facilitates dispossession through the production of alternative landscapes in response to what is seen as inevitable ruination due to climate change. And that this entails the erasure of other histories of ruination and discourses that highlight the politics of ongoing dynamics of ruination in the present and beyond climate change. So a lot of ruination going on there but the crux of what she is saying is that by by anticipating a future a dystopic future and presenting climate change is something that is like, and the effects of climate change is something that is inevitable and inevitably bad. You're basically you're obscuring the fact that, you know, this might be happening but there are other ways for us to address this and that the outcomes aren't guaranteed right if we approach the problem slightly differently and the solutions differently, we could have different outcomes. That's the crux of what what she's arguing here. So in taboo, this anticipatory anticipatory ruination is very much material, materializing through the clearance of informal settlements, and specifically the clearance of informal settlements from waterways and coastlines. Now demolitions of this neighbor nature have been ongoing for some time, and they're very much promoted as necessary to protect vulnerable communities from exposure to floods. Another related hazards, while simultaneously and helpfully they would say removing the structures and individuals seem to be causing the floods right the houses that are blocking water and the garbage that comes from these houses, right. So in 2013, the city government began a major program of flood management that was entitled the reduction of danger zone project right, and this was led by a municipal body that I think rather aptly named itself the prevention restoration order beautification and enhancement office. So we've got a lot of different kind of values kind of coming into play in this naming of the office that's responsible for danger zone reduction, right, and flood management by informally by quite violently displacing and demolishing people's homes, right. Now this photograph here taken next to the Mahiga Creek. So this was one of the first areas in the city that was kind of targeted for this flood management program. And over the course of my fieldwork in 2016 and 2017. 357 of the 714 families that were living along the Mahiga Creek on the Mandawi city sites there's lots of cities that make up the metro area. So, these houses were basically forcefully demolished under this program. Right. And there were plans ongoing and since 2016 plans have continued under this kind of flood management narrative and an objective. Right. And what I think is really interesting and important for us to think about is the fact that of the 3912 informal informal settler families that were identified and classed by the government department as living in a dangerous home. Right. They were only classed on this basis, due to their proximity to waterways. Right. There was no discussion of other informal settlers that were living in areas that were prone to landslides that were prone to fires that were in heat traps. And as I said, often connected with government relocation programs. There's there's a real focus on hydro hydrological risk. And waterway specifically and I think we can think about that critically when we think about the name of the operating body that's looking at beautification of the city and restoration of order. Right. So I'll leave that with. I also want to now draw just a link to Maria Alvarez work so she's a colleague at the DPU she's finishing her PhD right now she's been tracing kind of flood management programs in passing, passing city in Manila right and she also found very similar kind of flood specific danger zone designations and did some really interesting work for her masters where she actually traced the origins of the term danger zone, not to disaster risk and climate related things but actually to which is a law that explicitly looks at kind of governing and managing informal settlements. Right. And kind of delineates the eviction processes connected with them so there's a very clear link between dangerous zone definitions as she argues, and the objective of kind of informal settlement erasure or evictions. Right. So, my objective and kind of bringing your attention to all of this is not. It's not to criticize disaster risk management efforts in the city or the kind of very needed ambition of facilitating more collaborative urban planning that was like at the heart of the mega school development project right. What I'm trying to do here and what I think is important for all of us to reflect on is the socio spatial implications of these mass infrastructure projects and approaches to kind of thinking through risk and resilience and sustainability. That necessitate the often forced displacement of thousands of the city's most vulnerable residents right. And also, I want to draw attention, we need to think about the kind of the moralistic and very stigmatizing undertones that inadvertently mark particular communities as the cause not only of their vulnerability, but of the city's susceptibility to flooding. And this packaging of disaster risk management and resilience through world in narratives offers a validation of anti slum rhetoric right, and it very conveniently obscures the culpability of the state and private and commercial developers in the production of risk and of disasters right. I'm going to share with you a brief ethnographic vignette that I think speaks to these complex politics at play that are very conveniently being kind of pushed aside right. This is a photograph taken from an informal settlement about 350 meters from the Mahiga Creek. Okay, so it's not it's not on the waterway. It houses just over at the time it has approximately 400 families, right, and these families for the most part had been living in this studio. It's called studio aroma they've been living there. You know, for, for a long time. Okay. And I mean like, like decades. Okay, when the area, even around them was predominantly wet, like wet lens they grew water spinach so it really didn't look like what it looks like today. Okay. In the 1990s, a family whose elite family the Philippines known as the aboites, they own that lot, and they decided that they wanted to start reclaiming the lots to prepare it for future development right. And in 2015, they entered into a joint agreement and a joint venture agreement with the alas, which is another very prominent business family in the Philippines they own a lot of big malls. They own a lot. I'll just leave it there. So they entered into a joint venture with them to construct several high rise condominiums and commercial outlets on this lap. Right. Now, through this process of reclaiming what was a wetland and filling it in. Right. Studio aroma no longer sat up here. They started to sit slightly lower down. Right. And they became the receptacle of water and run off from the surrounding area. And someone that I spoke to who lived in the area said to me, there are many big changes to our area since this development started. The water that's coming in from their development is now rushing towards our area. And since there's nowhere for the water to pass it's staying in the area, like in our basketball courts. Obviously the water would flow out, but because of this development, it's much worse. And I feel that this really highlights the almost insidious ways in which like commercial enterprises are into they're really implicated in the production of risk and insecurity, right. But that goes on missed and this is happening all over the city and not just in Cebu, not just in the Philippines, like I think that happens everywhere, including London, probably in New York to you know, and we don't tend to think about that. Right. Flooding is not the only type of disaster that affects residents. The city has also experienced a share, bear share of fires. Some of them quite, quite damaging though luckily, no one died. So there were, there was a major fire in 1994, another one in 2003, and a third one in 2010. Right. That one destroyed all of the structures in the area so the pictures that I've been showing you constitute a rebuilding after 2010. Now in October 2015 when they entered into this joint venture agreement, what the developers did is they boxed off the entire settlement, because to protect their land, right. So residents were like, okay, this is really worrying because we're affected by fires and you just basically boxed us in. So can we have fire exit and they said, well, well they first ask, can you take the walls down and they said no. And they're like, well, can we have a fire exit and so after months and months of lobbying. And they said, okay, they turned one of these gates into a fire exit, which we should know is locked from behind. Okay, the gatekeeper of that lock is located, you know, probably a kilometer away, half a kilometer away walking from the same entry. They've just left them the tiny entry to be able to kind of get in and out 400 families so approximately five people per family, you get a sense of what's going on. I'm not sure how good of use that fire exit will be right. In the end, it didn't matter. This, this settlement has since been demolished that people are now living in different areas. But the reason I'm telling you this story is because, again, like the fire risk within this area. If you were to engage in discussions about it would be because of densely located houses, it would be because people are using light materials to build their homes. The discussion wouldn't be about the fact that they've just literally boxed people in. Right. The same goes with the flooding story I told you about before. And fires are often a precursor to eviction. Right. So this is another kind of dynamic going on. There's many stories of suspected arson, especially on privately owned lands such as in city aroma where landowners would use the exodus proceeding a fire as an opportunity to fence off an area and prevent residents from re-entering. Okay, again, this puts residents in very kind of precarious circumstances because they try to stay in an area to prevent that from happening so that they can maintain, you know, a claim to their land and rebuild. Now this socio-spatial reorganization of the city along socioeconomic lines that's emerging on the back of world ambitions has been very much ramped up following the election of Mayor Mike Grandma in June 2022. I should note as well that in 2010 my grandma was also the mayor. Okay, so like he's kind of popped in and out. We could talk about that later, but he was reelected in 2022. And in his inaugural speech, he declared his vision to create a Singapore-like Sibu. Now, I want to spend the last part of this presentation looking at the weight, the incursion of the logics that I've kind of presented to you. Right. And there's kind of modes of governance, how they've been kind of creeping in and starting to target the informal economy. Right. And I'm going to do this by focusing on a rather contentious initiative, past couple of years, to modernize Catupon Market, which is a public market in the city. It's the oldest and largest public market in the central Visayas, arguably one of the oldest ones in the Philippines, because there's actually evidence that it's been operating as a key trading port prior to Spanish civilization in 1565. If you remember my map at the very beginning showing the central Visayas, it's such a strategic location, like Sibu was supposed to be and started off as the actual capital of the Philippines. Right. Because it was a key trading port that connected all of the different islands. It's also where the Spaniards first landed. Right. So I'm saying all this just to say Catupon matters, like it's an important historic site. It's an important point of trade. Anything that's coming north or from the north moving south by boat, probably going to pass through Sibu. Okay. So it gets its name. I think this is important to know. Catupon gets its name from, because it used to operate as like a coal, what would you call it, like a coal factory and you can see the old coal potters like standing right there. So the entire area was covered in like soot and dust, including many of the inhabitants and people that resided there. Right. So the area's been largely stigmatized as like dirty as like unclean and the residents of that area have been largely stigmatized according. Right. Now, many people move to Catupon to engage in trade. Right. And happen to get covered in the soot that was there when it was operating the moment, at least at the time that I started this particular piece of research. And in May of this year, there were approximately 4000 ambulance vendors, and about just under 2000 stall holders that were operating here and that's just registered right because there will be a whole bunch of people. There's this girl down here who arguably are among kind of most vulnerable and poorest who rely on that market to trade everyday subsistence right so they'll collect shells from the shoreline. They'll collect shells for rice and that's that's how they sustain themselves on a daily basis and they're not accounted for in these figures. Now in January of 2021, the city government entered into a joint venture agreement with mega wide construction company. Right. And this is a firm should be noted that has also been contracted to build and has built most of the city's big malls. The joint venture agreement set up plans for the commercialization and privatization of the Catupon public market right and the aspiration was to transform it into a business center that consisted of like wholesaler hub transportation hub lifestyle village with shops and restaurants and airport check in. And they also have like a park with a chapel so it was like covering several bases. I would ask you who this is serving right something to hold in the background but this was, this was the proposal. It's very much been a project that's pitched as a heritage preservation and economic revitalization endeavor, right. The construction was due to be kind of implemented over a five year period. And in an entailed relocating existing vendors install holders to this multi story complex here, right, I think it was a four story complex. And on the right you see Puso village, right, so Puso village was supposed to be the city's newest shopping and gastronomic destination, featuring homegrown like kind of favorites and well loved food brands that showcase the heart and soul of Sibu so I'm quoting here from brochure and the construction of the village in the shape of Puso, the hanging rice right this is a Philippine and Sibu specific meal delicacy, right, you can see it's really playing on identity of Sibwana, right. And the church across the streets they constructed a huge replica of the Sentinel Union which is a saint that again is really central to Sibwana culture and to the Philippines more generally, right. Now, very similarly to the urban development narratives that I introduced you to you in the context of disaster risk management. This project is also being presented as a solution to carbon problems in infrastructure sanitation and the environment. And they also state that it aims to revitalize carbon history and heritage and economic relevance towards a first world Sibu. Okay, so this is what this is like the ambitions and aspirations kind of project. So, the revitalization or redevelopment of the market is very clearly tied to welding logics of the neoliberal right and you can see this not just in the naming of mega wide subsidiary Sibu to world who are supposed to be the kind of governing body that would be responsible for conducting fees from vendors and for maintaining the market, right. But you also see it in the aesthetic mode of governmentality that's being explicitly articulated in the kind of program motions and also in this kind of narrative here from a representative of the Sibu city market authority. And he said I'm just going to pull a couple of things out. You know, when the city is aiming for Singapore like city, everything should be pleasing to the eyes, especially to the tourists. Everything should be nice and clean and orderly so we see, again, these narratives of restoration order beautification playing out. Another thing that was really interesting is that this kind of very kind of Bukodian governmentality kind of narrative coming through in the sense that people should be disciplined in this Sibu like, or Singapore like Sibu, right. People should be disciplined, cleaned, and orderly. All right. So what happens, well, taking advantage of lower numbers of vendors and football during the lockdowns that were imposed due to the pandemic. The project was ushered through without public consultation. An injunction, interestingly, was also simultaneously filed by the Sibu Port Authority, who actually owned the land on which the Puso village was being built. Now you'd think that you would maybe check with the owners of the land before you went to build these, right, but they didn't. The Port Authority said we had loaned the land to the government. And so it was not, it's not like lawful for them to engage in a private development joint venture agreement without consulting us or involving us in the process. So that, that injunction has been upheld. As of recently this is all happening like imminently as we speak so that there was a court hearing a few weeks ago so that's been upheld, which means that the Puso village that you saw constructed there has been constructed but can't be used. Okay. So, what that means is that you had this whole group of investors who would like they were supposed to, they'd invested money in this they were supposed to be operating in Puso village they couldn't do that anymore so they're really upset they're kind of banging on the doors of the city and the city government, the city government to like calm them down they're like okay, fine, we're going to move you here to this other area, which is freedom park and work barracks where there were high concentrations of food vendors. That was where that in that that big four story building was supposed to be built right instead of having all these kind of private entities that were in Puso village, but moved, and they were moved. There was a lot of space for them basically people who were residing in work barracks and freedom park were told with very little notice that they had to dismantle those stalls. We're talking people that have been there for generations. Okay, many people also living, living at these stalls so that they can operate for as many hours of the day as possible, literally, almost overnight having their livelihoods and homes demolished right. So people were able to push back, but the majority were forcibly relocated to an interim building. I just, I'm showing you this this is basically have one market here. So we're talking a huge area, right. This just shows some of the destruction caused in kind of as physical evidence. This is where people were moved to right. The impact on vendors has been huge. Okay. If you remember the amounts of vendors that I'm speaking about so what we have is a situation where people have been sent to kind of second third floors of this building. And they've lost their customers, their incomes been hugely affected because there was no consultation or like this wasn't was planned by someone but it wasn't done. This approach like just made it so difficult like they couldn't tell their returning customers where to find them right. And I think some of these kinds of narratives here which I'm not going to read out but they just speak to the multiple types of impacts right not just like economic but also effective right huge amount of stress. And you can see here like that's the lot that the size of a lot that people are given. It doesn't matter if you had over the years built up a huge area for selling your goods, which you will have purchased it's not like they just squatted it right so there was there's an economic trade that goes on in these phases. You're not compensated for that, you're given a short kind of area in which to operate from on the third floor of a building that nobody's going to go to right so many of them stay empty. And a major concern, another major concern about this redevelopment project, apart from the location that they now fund themselves in comes down to the costs associated with trading. Right. So, the proposal, which again is being negotiated and fought back against the proposal is that that if this goes ahead, instead of paying 20 pesos per per bucket. Right, so let's say like 50 cents for arguments say, instead of paying 50 cents per bucket of goods that you're bringing into the market, you're now going to have to pay 240 to 270 pesos. Right, and that amount is not going to be collected by the city government it's going to be collected by Cebu to world by private entity. Okay. Yeah, there's, there's a lot going on here there's a lot of different layers to this but what what is essentially here is the privatization what's happening is the privatization of a public market and a public good. Right. And this is a quote from friend journalists and activists who's been working with the carbon vendors and trying to raise awareness in the city about what's going on. And he said, when he spoke to the city he said by your own admission carbon market is overcrowded. So how come you're reducing its size. How come instead of five buildings you're now only going to build to, and you compensate for this by having like a third floor but who goes to the third floor. Right. So even in malls in the Philippines like when you go to the third floor there they're almost empty right nobody goes, nobody goes up there. And he's making links to these aspirations of turning carbon into a world possible right on the back of everything that happened with the Port Authority, the plans that I showed you originally have been scaled back considerably. What you have now is like a one level area in Freedom Park where the vendors from Puso Village are now located. You have the interim building. I mean everything has been scaled back so drastically. The question is like where are people going to go. Right. So I think what a lot of this kind of I'm going to start to draw this to to a bit of a close here I think what we see is really a politics of boss ism playing out. We see this in different ways and boss ism is a term that was coined by John Seidel. And he's referring to the prevalence of local power brokers who achieve sustained monopolistic control within given territorial jurisdiction and use their discretionary powers over zoning ordinances, instruction contracts and police forces to oil their political machines right and to serve as gatekeepers to foreign investors and Manila based investors and also I would argue Cibuano investors right. So you see this this politics of bosses and really playing out. When we think about formality and informality. It's helpful to think about this political economy that is very evidently taking shape. Right. There's another really critical side to the story that I want to kind of finish with. And that is how people are responding to and resisting these boats of governance. Right. So, the market vendors actually first heard about these proposed changes via Facebook. And when they started to see that there were plans to redevelop the market. A few of them started doing their own research. So they started kind of scratching beneath the surface checking like newspapers and so on. And the more that they found out about the post public private partnership. They realized, like, for example, the costs for a banner the differences that we're going to and real implications what this would mean for vendors, they went to the streets they took to the streets they had megaphone and they started telling people what was going to happen. And this marked the birth of what is now the carbon Hanon Alliancia so Hanon means like people so it's like the the alliance of people from carbon. Right. And this is a network of vendors who are actively lobbying to stop the privatization of the market. Right. Now, these individuals don't identify as activists. Okay. And very importantly, they told me they are not against modernization. Right. They would like to see investment into the market, obviously, you know, but what they're against is the approach that's taken place. And the privatization the inherent privatization of what is a public good a public service a public space. So it's a huge part of their, their content. Right. So in terms of those strategies, yes, they take to the streets and they're kind of just educating people about what's happening and trying to mobilize a collective resistance of like critical, critical thinkers who are pushing back and asking critical questions. Right. They've also actually challenged that they've gone into a legal hearing to challenge the proposed amendments to the market code. And the ways in which the state has unlawfully approached the demolition of of market vendors to date. And the whole the premise of the joint venture agreement they argue is unlawful because of how it was approached. I would also argue that ambulance vendors, just by staying put so by leaving their stalls empty and by actually being on the streets are actually resisting. They're almost it's a way of like claiming, making themselves build like visible and claiming their rights to the city their rights to livelihoods and the rights of the public market as as an entity in it in and of itself. Now, shifting back to thinking about disaster risk management. Informal settlers are also pushing back. And one of the main ways that they're doing this is through the formation of homeowner associations, which are essentially state mandated institutions that service like a formally recognized institutional platform through which informal settlers are able to negotiate with state, whether that's for like improved services for access to resources to support disaster risk management, or, you know, to negotiate relocation packages and support, if they do need to be evicted. Right. So I think in coming together and sort of registering formally as a homeowner association, these settlers are making themselves visible to the state in the same way that cardboard Hanon is making themselves visible as like a political group. And I think in the context of homeowner associations and the cardboard Hanon alliance, what we see is this like really important sites through which knowledge is being generated you see social capital being mobilized. And like, when we think about questions of resilience and adaptive capacities, this is arguably hubs where where this is taking, taking place right it's really vital sites of urban resilience. So to conclude, I think what I would say is that welding aspirations and aesthetics, and these like claims or links to resilience to sustainability to heritage preservation. And function, but certainly in Saboo's context I would argue are functioning to legitimize the dispossession and displacement of urban for people, and specifically informal spaces and economies from the city. The privatization of public space through narratives of collective good also needs to be thought of really critically right we need to think about like who's who's benefiting from this and what actually happens when you. What happens to the social contract when you privatize a public goods such as a market, right. And also what are the underlying causes of in the case of the market of informality of uncleanliness of garbage buildup is it is it the people selling their themselves or is are there other things that play like the absence of infrastructure the lack of like, you know, a cohesive approach to waste management, governed by local government that's taking shape in these spaces and actually, you know, are we addressing structural causes through privatization or are we obscuring them. And lastly, I think the work of homeowner associations the work of the vendors themselves really speaks to the fact that alternatives are possible. Okay, so thinking back to Cassia, a proxies work like, and I'd encourage you to read her book, if you haven't, because actually, there's another way, if you if you engage with the people that are actually affected more than anyone by these issues of climate change by issues of waste management by issues of urban development and gentrification right if you speak to people that live in these neighborhoods and are routinely affected by these things, they have ideas for how you can fix them, they have ideas for where to target investments. In the case of carbon market. This group of vendors worked with lawyers, urban planners, architects designers they have their own plan for the market. At the moment, the city is not engaging with them on this but their plan costs several hundred million pesos less than the plan that the government is putting through. Right. It's well thought through plan engages with all the necessary legal basis right so alternatives exists. The question is like, how can we give more space for alternatives to come through and I think you're all I believe PhD students many of you will come from practice like I think something to leave us with is like to think about what's our role as academics as practitioners and whatever spaces we come from how can we kind of give more space to creating and opening up alternative visions for these urban. I will stop there. Thank you very much. I hope I didn't speak to you. Thank you. Thank you.