Actors in Global City Formation

International Journal of Policy Studies Vol.8, No.1, 2017

Actors in Global City Formation: The Case of the Entertainment City in Metro Manila

Kidjie Saguin National University of Singapore, Singapore

Abstract The process of global city formation remains poorly understood and existing literature points to either the transnational economic class or the bureaucratic-political elites as the lead actor in the integration of these cities to the global economy. But global city formation can be seen as a product of a private-public partnership, whereby various state and non-state actors play a role in the ability of the city to claim global city-hood. This paper examines an emerging urban megaproject in a developing country, The Entertainment City, to explicate the roles actors play in global city formation. It finds that in such emerging global cities, the national government has shown greater efficiency in the design and implementation of a global city vision. Private, non-state actors are engaged as the main instrument to link up to the global economy while local governments act as the ‘enablers’ providing the ideal environment for these private firms to operate in. The paper derives some implications by identifying a gap in the incorporation of social welfare planning in urban development.

Key Words: Global Cities, Megaprojects, Metro Manila, Privatised Planning, Philippines

INTRODUCTION Many governments around the world still aim to be have a global city but the process of becoming one remains largely unexplored (Sassen 1991; Brenner 1998; Olds and Yeung 2004). Typologies have been offered (Olds and Yeung 2004; Hill and Kim 2000) but only cover cities that come from advanced economies. If the global economy is increasingly becoming a global circuit rather than a hierarchy, cities from developing economies can emerge to become global cities by adopting specialised functions needed in the international economy (Sassen 2002 & 2008). But if emerging cities can become global cities, how does this formation go about? Such process of claiming global city-hood remains poorly understood, particularly among emerging cities from developing countries. One of such cities is Metro Manila. Metro Manila is more accurately a city-region (Scott

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2001) comprised of 16 cities and one municipality sprawling over 630km2 with a total population of 12.764 million making it the biggest urban agglomeration in Southeast Asia (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2014). Compared to other Asian megacities like Tokyo, Metro Manila does not automatically conjure an image of a global city. However, the global city functions it performs in the international migration and business outsourcing circuits points to its potential. Metro Manila acts a key node in sending about 4 million contract labourers to key cities all over the world (Tyner 2006; Tyner 2000). The proliferation of central business districts (CBDs) scattered throughout Metro Manila allowed for business process outsourcing (BPO) industry to thrive with Manila only ranking next to Bangalore as the top destination for outsourcing (Boquet 2013; Tholons 2014). Metro Manila’s global economic integration is rooted in the ensuing competition between different land-owning private developers in fashioning their own business centres that integrate elements of a global city. This particular trend in urban development makes the state’s active involvement in planning and developing urban areas to be an exceptional phenomenon in Metro Manila. However, as some lands without historical legacies are freed up and as the state increasingly consolidates its power, the national government has become more involved in building business centres of its own, directly competing with existing privatised CBDs. Since 2007, the government set out to construct the most ambitious and distinctive claim to global cityness, The Entertainment City. This paper examines this case of a state-led urban integrated megaproject to explicate the role of different actors in global city formation. It seeks to answer the questions: who are the actors involved and what roles do they play in global city formation? The following section sets out the analytical framework of global city formation. The current literature puts global cities into a dichotomy based who is the lead actor in the global city but such conceptualization limits the identification of the roles that different actors (state or non-state) play in global city formation. Next, global city formation is contextualized within the historical development of privatised planning in Metro Manila. The failures of centralised planning and complex urban reality set the scene for the emergence of private land-owning developers who create exclusive spaces through integrated megaprojects. The Entertainment City, a 120-hectare gambling, tourist and entertainment megaproject, represents the state’s contestation of privatised planning. It is a manifestation of the accrued capacity of the state to efficiently manage an intervention in Metro Manila’s urban landscape, a departure from historical failures in urban and regional planning.


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ROLE OF THE ACTORS IN GLOBAL CITY FORMATION The global city literature have increasingly recognised the world as consisting of circuits rather than a hierarchical economic system (Parnell and Robinson 2012; Sassen 2002). While global or world cities are earlier conceived as the command and control centre for international banking, finance, and management as well as ideology (Friedmann 1986; Sassen 1991), global cities are more recently evaluated based on its function in the flow of commodities, information and capital and its relation to the political, social and cultural processes in the world economy (Knox 1995). Global circuits where these cities are located can be specialised and region-specific (Sassen 2008). Global cities like London, New York and Tokyo do not hold exclusive right to these circuits and control is more widely dispersed to other cities “that might best be described as having global city functions” (Sassen 2002, 12). These ‘global city functions’ go beyond finance and capital markets and include a diverse set of circuits like labour, tourism and business process outsourcing allowing cities of the South to claim to be a global city (Shatkin 2007; Robinson 2002). Despite the richness of the global city literature, scholars paid little attention to global city formation, in particular the actors critical to the process. Prior works premised global city as a by-product of globalisation and the consequent re-scaling of the state (Brenner 1998). More recently, Sassen (2012, 323–324) noted that “[c]entralized control and management … does not come about inevitably as part of a world system. It requires the production of a vast range of highly specialized services, telecommunication infrastructures, and industrial services.” Sassen’s argument echoes what Olds and Yeung (2004, 502) contended about the imperative to shift the global city discourse from the ‘characteristics of being’ to the ‘process of becoming’. It brings to the fore a deliberate examination of the role of actors and institutions, particularly the state, in the production of services and a city’s integration to the global economy. As argued by Berner and Korff, such global integration of cities is largely “incomplete and does not concern the city in total but only social, economic and spatial part of it” (Berner and Korff 1995, 280), which points to the fact that global cities are in fact ‘works-in-progress’. Global city formation can thus be viewed as a process that is largely contested and negotiated by actors involved in identifying which social, economic and spatial aspect of the city is integrated. But who these actors are remain largely unexplored. Hill and Kim (2000) identified New York City as a prototype of a ‘market-oriented city’, one that is led by a transnational capitalist class with private firms vertically integrated into the global economy. The extent of global city-hood is a function the city’s thriving financial and production services, a sector

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that defines both the economic and spatial life of New York City. In contrast to this Western ‘market-oriented city’, development states have shaped ‘state-centred world cities’ held “under the sway of a political-bureaucratic elite” (Hill and Kim 2000, 2178). Douglass (2000) have earlier argued that states, particularly in Asia Pacific, purposely engage in global city formation. Cities and states from this region “are intentionally adopting some form of global/world city discourse as they reshape policies in the light of perceived insights generated by this discourse” (Olds and Yeung 2004, 500). Although the intentionality remains questionable, existing literature point specifically to development states like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and Japan as having been successful in integrating global city discourse into urban development (Robinson 2002). The embeddedness of government ministries in business networks allow for an alignment of a “plan-rational economy with market rational political institutions” (Burgess and Carmona 2009, 14), largely carried out through some form of ‘public-private partnership’ (Yeoh 2005). Global cities thus exist in a spectrum based on a varying extent of engagement between the state and private firms, but in what form these partnerships take shape remain largely unexplored, particularly in emerging global cities. Emerging global cities are less integrated into the global economy, acting primarily as nodes to facilitate inward flows of capital, good and services (Olds and Yeung 2004). Most of these emerging global cities are ‘national projects’ that has to contend with politics between horizontal and vertical levels of the government.. Cities become spaces for reterritorialization of state power (Brenner 1998) because city governments remain weak, and thus, require national intervention to promote global city-hood (Olds and Yeung 2004; Douglass 2000). Thus, it is important to understand how the national government ventures into such ‘national projects’, the emergent role of local government in these projects and how such projects make use of private firms to integrate to the global economy.

METRO MANILA’S PRIVATISED URBAN DEVELOPMENT Metro Manila’s ‘process of becoming’ a global city fundamentally diverges from the Asian models of developmental state and illustrates the antipode of a strong state involvement. Urban planning of Metro Manila has been characterised as fragmented (van den Muijzenberg and van Naerssen 2005), weakly coordinated (Mercado 1998) and a failed experimentation in urban governance (Manasan and Mercado 1999). Authors van den Muijzenberg and van Naerssen (2005) point to a confluence of Spanish and American colonial history, land-owning


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oligarchs, failed centralised planning, fragmented local governance and strong urban social movements as factors that lead to the absence of a systematic and coherent vision of the city-region. Two failed attempts at master planning by the government are worth mentioning. During the American colonial period, Daniel Burnham was commissioned to create a master plan for the development of the capital city of Manila. He followed the City Beautiful movement focusing on aesthetically pleasing features of the city with grand boulevard, large parks and exhibit government buildings (Shatkin 2005). The second major attempt to centrally plan urban interventions was made during the authoritarian period under Ferdinand Marcos. With a team of technocrats, Imelda Marcos, who was, first lady, Minister of Human Settlements and Governor of Metropolitan Manila at the time, imagined Metro Manila to be a ‘City of Man’. The concept revolves around organic integration of the Filipinos into the city while simultaneously driving growth of the region by physical expansion, including land reclamation, and other measures to ‘beautify’ the city (van den Muijzenberg and van Naerssen 2005). However, the lofty visions of Burnham and Marcos failed to translate to actual implementation revealing the weakness of the state to carry out systematic urban development. This failure has been observed elsewhere particularly in other developing countries that do not have “neither the powers, the institutional capacity nor the budgets that were necessary to enforce the strong development control powers that underpinned master planning” (Burgess and Carmona 2009, 19). The Burnham Plan also suffered from being blind to the political reality and in fact, exacerbated the social inequality of being structured according to land ownership and tenancy (Kelly 1997). Marcos’ focus on the beautiful disenchanted the poor and the migrants who had to face deteriorating housing conditions (Shatkin 2005). Other efforts at urban planning have also foundered due to widening political differences between the national government and local elective boards aggravated by the shift towards greater local autonomy (Magno-Ballesteros 2000). The failed attempts at master planning opened the space for participation of non-state actors in the planning cycle resulting to a kind of urbanism that favours ‘privatised planning’ (van den Muijzenberg and van Naerssen 2005). Shatkin (2008, 384) characterised privatisation of urban and regional planning as private property developers’ assumption of “new planning powers and [development of] vision for metroscale development in the wake of the retreat of government from city building and the consequent deterioration of the urban environment”. Under privatised planning, private property developers operationalise their visions using urban integrated megaprojects usually envisioned to be self-contained developments, which differs with ‘edge cities’ as these are much larger, more scattered throughout the city-region and are built on a for-profit basis by a single private developer, or a consortium, sometimes

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with government participation (Shatkin 2011; Shatkin 2008). Such kind of private-led planning have resulted in the proliferation of self-contained development seen as a spatial manifestation of structural inequalities. Packets of efficiency and first-world amenities can be observed in areas such as the Makati Central Business District (CBD), Rockwell Centre, Ortigas Centre, Eastwood City, and Bonifacio Global City, most of which were developed by land-owning elites to be exclusive spaces with little comprehensive planning of the city-region. These CBDs are key to Metro Manila’s partial integration to the global economy. Such partial integration of these CBDs has come to define the ‘bypass-implant urbanism’ in Metro Manila (Shatkin 2008). This type of urbanism, found in other Southeast Asian cities but is most pronounced in Manila, puts primacy over megaprojects that are essentially self-contained development isolating the part of the city-region that is ‘global’ from what is ‘local’. Shatkin (2008) attributes this urban phenomenon to the privatisation of urban planning in the wake of the withdrawal of the state, which was a deliberate strategy of the government to leave urban planning to the market as part of the strategy for post-war recovery and rehabilitation in the late 1940s (Camba 2012). Camba (2012, 12) added “the government’s approach to this was to let the private sector roam freely. As the then Secretary of the Department of Economic Coordination, Dr. Salvador Araneta, stated “on the whole, government corporations should not engage in activities in competition with private enterprises” (citation in original article omitted). What occurred after is the pouring of capital to urban land-owning elites and subsequent consolidation of control over land use particularly as efforts to conduct comprehensive planning have failed. The visions of these urban megaprojects by non-state actors all claim to have aspects of a global city. Apart from incorporating global city into its name, Bonifacio Global City (BGC) is marketed as ‘a true child of the 21st century’ with a ‘charm and multicultural allure’ that nurtures one’s ‘passion to live, work and play’. The location of Bonifacio Global City is touted to guarantee connectivity (‘Locate Locally, Connect Globally’) due to its proximity to key roads and international and domestic airport (Go 2009). Moreover, having the Makati CBD within a close range of BGC has been likened to the evolution of Singapore CBD that will transform the two CBDs into a ‘collective CBD’ (Delosreyes 2015). Eastwood City is a ‘world-class’ integrated township comprised of ‘a state-of-the-art residential, commercial, business and entertainment complex’. More importantly, the CBDs are integrated into the global economy through the BPO industry, which is mainly located in these CBDs owing to its attractiveness as a tax haven. Around 80% BPO firms are located in Metro Manila, mostly coming from Makati, Ortigas Center and Eastwood City (Boquet 2013). Policymakers have been optimistic about the BPO industry’s integration to the global economy aiming to capture 10% of the total BPO


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market. These visions can be contrasted with how the national government’s Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) envisions the city-region. MMDA is responsible for metro-wide development planning and management of urban services that transcend local political boundaries. Instead of relating to global city discourse, MMDA’s vision of Metro-Manila is particularly representative of the difficulties faced by a Manila resident. For the MMDA, its role is to implement a development plan that meets “the challenges of transport decongestion, climate change, waste management, and disaster prevention among others, in order to achieve a decent quality of life for Metro Manilans.” Privatised planning is consistent with the influence of neo-liberalism and globalisation on statehood and urban citizenship where the state withdraws from direct provision of services to become an ‘enabler’ of the market through regulation (Burgess and Carmona 2009). In contrast with East Asian city-states, the state folds in urban development within the paradigm of national development suffusing urban restructuring projects with strategies to link to the global economy (Olds and Yeung 2004). Similarly, such privatised planning differs from how governments in American and European cities have increasingly used private-public partnerships to drive growth in marginal areas of the urban core within the framework of comprehensive planning (Fainstein 2008). But beyond globalisation, other scholars are quick to add colonial history, post-war open economy on real estate, ideological support for local autonomy and strong centralism of political and economic elites, particularly landowners as factors that paved the way for the emergence of privatisation of urban planning in Metro Manila (Garrido 2013; Connell 1999; Camba 2012; van den Muijzenberg and van Naerssen 2005). In Shatkin’s (2008) actor-centred analysis, the result of the confluence of factors reduces the states’ role, particularly local and national governments, to “providing the legal, policy, and regulatory frameworks” having “embraced the view that urban development is best left to the private sector” (Shatkin 2008, 399). Shatkin (2011, 81) further argued that the megaprojects implemented by the private sector are in fact “a predominant state strategy of urban development” wherein both local and national governments provide assistance in land acquisition, urban infrastructure and political support with some even going through public-private partnerships to reduce or spread risks, generate synergies in skills and build on each other’s comparative advantage (Burgess and Carmona 2009). The government also stepped in to provide substantial subsidies in making sure the surrounding environment is supportive of these self-contained developments (Shatkin 2008). Road and other transport system have been manipulated to ensure efficient flow of labour and capital into these megaprojects. For example, a railway-upgrading project intended to benefit the commuting middle class have generated gentrifying effects and led to displacement of informal

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settlements (Choi 2014). Inevitably, having the private developers with effective control over urban development has also sharpened the contradictions between the rich and the poor. The marginalisation of the poor is consistent with global city literature that predicted for greater intra-city inequality as a result of global economic integration (Sassen 2000), particularly since political leadership has also committed to the allegorical benefits of being a global city (Shatkin 2011). Using the case of Makati City, Garrido (2013) observed a ‘dual city’ where “provisions for the ‘public city’ are financed by a virtually private or autonomous city that hardly relies on local government for even the most basic services” (Garrido 2013, 180). While these megaprojects are privately-led, they are often contested and subverted through municipal clientelism that benefit from the (re)production of spatial segregation (Shatkin 2011; Garrido 2013). In other words, these enclaves become self-reinforcing as it generates enough revenues for local politicians to engage on populist politics, reflecting an optimal allocation of roles between the market and the state. Rather than forming a central vision of Metro Manila, each private developer creates a vision of their own ‘global city’. The fragmented vision of the city-region produces unequal economic and social development between the enclaves and the ‘public city’. These visions articulated in these urban integrated megaprojects have proven to be effective in their attempt to build a global city within a city. Although Bonifacio Global City was largely developed by private firms with land provided by the government, its success in transforming the military base to a self-contained development seems to point to increasing effectiveness and efficiency of the state in intervening in the urban space. As a result, there seems to be an emerging trend for the state to be more increasingly engaged in urban development, particularly evident in the case of the Entertainment City.

METROL MANILA AS AN EMERGING GLOBAL CITY THRU THE ENTERTAINMENT CITY The Bagong Nayong Pilipino (New Filipino Town) or more popularly called Entertainment City traces back its roots to the vision devised by Marcos of the reclaimed area in Manila Bay. The whole reclamation site of more than 800 hectares is called the Bay City, which is straddled by two cities – Pasay and Parañaque. The Bay City represents the one of three state-initiated megaprojects, the other two are the Bonifacio Global City and the upcoming Quezon City Central Business District called Triangle Park. To carry out the responsibility of reclamation,


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the Public Reclamation Authority (PRA; previously known as Public Estates Authority), a government owned corporation, was created under the direct auspices of the Office of the President in 1973. PRA is mandated to “develop, improve, acquire, administer, deal in, subdivide, dispose, lease and sell any and all kinds of lands, buildings, estates, and other forms of real property, owned, managed, controlled and/or operated by the Government”. While the ‘visioning’ of the Bay City is largely state-led, part of the lands have been privatised and sold to various private developers. The Entertainment City is touted as the “new central business district” of Paranaque City to rival other financial centres developed by land-owning oligarchs (Makati CBD and Ortigas Center). Other locations in the Bay City include Central Park Business 1 A allocated mainly for financial and corporate offices and the SM Mall of Asia, the biggest mall in the country. Government offices such as the Philippine Senate, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines are also located in the area reflecting not only vision of the place being a hub of Metro Manila urban life but also the centre of administrative and political power. Central Park Business II is owned privately by the Manila Bay Development Corporation, which hosts a mall and integrated bus terminal but the area remains largely underdeveloped. The mall owners and the Manila Bay Development Corporation are currently embroiled in a legal battle due to the failure of the latter to develop the area after 16 years of ownership. Another 173-hectare property is also owned by the family of the richest man in the Philippines, Tan Yu, and features residential areas. Figure 1. City of Dreams

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About 120 hectares of the Bay City, ten times the size of Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands, is allotted for the 10-year development of the Entertainment City (Fortune 2008). Similar to other existing urban megaprojects, the vision of the Entertainment City incorporates aspects of global city discourse. In a special ad ran in Fortune magazine, Ephraim Genuino, the former CEO of the Philippine Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) said that the Entertainment City “represents a vital turning point for the Filipinos. With this project, we aim to put the Philippines at the forefront of tourism development and the booming gaming industry – the two leading sources of revenue for nations worldwide” (Fortune 2008). For him, the world is a “global village and the more options for travelers, the better for the competition to improve its standards” with the Entertainment City offering an alternative (Gros 2015). The Entertainment City will feature four integrated hotel and resort-casinos with about 5,000 hotel rooms and one million square meters of hotels, shopping, gaming and entertainment. Through these investments, the Entertainment City hopes to propel Metro Manila into the international gambling circuit by raking in more than US$6billion surpassing Las Vegas and Singapore to be the biggest gambling hub in the world only next to Macau (Moss and O'Keeffe 2015). It is also designed to boost tourism inflow by one million annually as it will devote land for theme parks (one of which is DreamPlay by DreamWorks), a grand opera house, an indoor beach club, wellness centres, a retirement village, residential condominiums, office towers, a museum, Asia’s largest fountain, a university and the highest observational tower in Asia (Aquino 2015;

The Philippine Star 2009). The biggest property developer of the country is also slated to construct a mall complex, BPO centre and a hotel in a 9-hectare property (The Philippine Star 2015). The casino operators is set to take advantage of a slowdown in Macau due to a massive crack-down in corruption among Chinese VIPs (Moss and O'Keeffe 2015). It is also expected to be an engine of growth by generating 40,000 jobs in the hospitality sectors with additional 150,000 jobs under support operations, and tripling current revenue of US$500 million to US$1.5 billion once completed. By 2014, even prior to the opening of the second casino – City of Dreams, Philippines generated about US$2.5 billion and with four more casinos on the pipeline (Moss and O'Keeffe 2015). The government corporation PAGCOR’s development of the Entertainment City shows some aspect of coordinated action by the state apparatus resulting in rapid development of the Entertainment City (see Figures 2a and 2b). While much of the concept of an ‘E-City’ and ‘Cyber City’ were integral to Marcos’ development plan of the reclaimed land, it was only in the mid-2000s that actual physical development planning started to materialise. PAGCOR owns 50% of the total land area with the rest of the land under agreements with other government agencies (The Philippine Star 2013). In 2006, PAGCOR entered into a


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memorandum of understanding with PRA to acquire and develop a 40 hectares of the reclaimed land in 2006. In preparation of the development of the Entertainment City, 15 hectares of land allocated to the Nayong Pilipino (Filipino Village) Cultural Park in Paranaque was exchanged with another area in Pasay City in 2007. PAGCOR summarised the overaching principles of the development of the Entertainment City into the acronym, P.A.I.N.T., which stands for partners, architecture, investments, novelty and tourism. In an interview, Rafael Francisco, president of PAGCOR elaborated that while there is a master plan, the vision of the Entertainment City should be an outcome of a collaborative engagement with the private firms to ensure innovation: “There is a master plan. But this master plan is a guide post. We still need to see how the investors will like to help us in developing the master plan. For as long as the integrated resort model is there, and of course in the P.A.I.N.T. word, there's N, novelty. The novelty of their concept, like for example, their being a world class theme park. You could talk about, Singapore bringing in Universal Studios.” (Rafael Francisco, interview with Ricky Carandang in Mornings@ANC, 4 April 2008)

Figure 2a and 2b. Google Earth images of site development of Enterntainment City, 2014 & 2016

Doing such engagement necessitated overcoming many institutional barriers requiring legislative action. First, it involved the need to revise the legislation including a series of revisions of the PEA charter eventually leading to its abolition and creation of the Public Reclamation Authority in 2004. The second institutional barrier makes it imperative to change PAGCOR. While gambling is legal, gaming activities are restricted within gambling centres operated by PAGCOR. In 2007, this was changed by a revision in the charter of PAGCOR allowing the state-owned corporation to issue licenses and franchises to private firms, crucial to the vision of the development of the Entertainment City. While earlier megaprojects

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delegate much of the planning to private developers following broad policy guidelines, the Entertainment City is largely government-led, ‘visioning’ of which was a result of government planning. Planning for the Entertainment City began in 2001 but subsequent flooding and economic downturn delayed the implementation. In 2007, a terms of reference on an ‘integrated casino-entertainment complex project’ was issued to invite firms to apply for a PAGCOR license. By early 2008, two foreign casino firms already expressed their willingness to invest and apply for license (Austria 2008). In 2015, two casinos have opened – Solaire Resort and City of Dreams Manila. As part of a marketing stint, City of Dreams ran an ad featuring Hollywood celebrities Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, who personally visited the casino in 2014 (Aquino 2015). When the construction of the two remaining integrated resorts and casino (Bayshore City Resorts World and Manila Bay Resorts) commenced, it marked a validation of the government’s ambition in developing the Entertainment City. Former PAGCOR CEO Genuino was quoted saying: “Many of my critics say that a dream as grand as the Entertainment City… is just an illusion. But we have proven them wrong” (Fortune 2008). Key to making the Entertainment City truly global is the participation of international firms to materialise the PAGCOR’s vision as stated by former PAGCOR CEO Genuino: "Our project will rely on the concept of a consortium between international industry players, to come up with premier entertainment that would appeal to everyone” (Gros 2015). Solaire Resort is owned by local corporation, Bloomberry Resorts and Hotels Incorporated, but managed by an American firm, Global Gaming Asset Management, and constructed by architect and designer Paul Steelman of Las Vegas-based Steelman Partners (ABS-CBNnews.com 2012). The other resorts are operated by corporations from other gambling hubs - Melco Crown from Macau, Genting Group from Malaysia and Universal Entertainment Corp from Japan. Given the constitution restrictions in owning land in the Philippines, these international firms had to enter into an agreement with local business partners. Melco Crown partnered with mall-magnate Henry Sy. Genting Group while Universal Entertainment Corp recently announced a deal with former President Aquino’s cousin, Tony Boy Cojuanco. The partnership between international and domestic actors is critical to ensuring that the Entertainment City has access to the international casino junket system. Through PAGCOR, the national government plays the role of the property developer while the local government’s served as the enabler. Essentially, the local government restructures the urban space to cater to the needs of the national government’s ‘private city’. Discussion between the Paranaque City Government and business operators in the Entertainment City dwell on the need for peace & order/traffic management, road and street lights maintenance,


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beautification/landscape consistency management, drainage/water channel maintenance and solid waste management (PIO Paranaque 2015). As a result, Paranaque City Mayor Edwin Olivarez declared Entertainment City as a specialized investment district involving a creation of a satellite city hall that can issue permits and provide national and local government services and a police station and fire department to respond immediately during emergency situations (Lacsamana 2015). The local government is also studying the possibility of implementing a truck ban in the vicinity of the Entertainment City. The transport system is also being manipulated not only through the creation of bus terminals in the Bay City but also in the improving access to the airport. In 2014, construction of an expressway from the airport to the Entertainment City began and is set to be completed by April 2016 (“NAIA Expressway” 2015). The Light Railway Transit Line 1 is also being extended and is slated to have a station close to the Entertainment City.

BEYOND AN ‘ENABLING’ STATE In Metro Manila, it is clear that the visions of each urban integrated megaproject is to claim to become a global city of its own. While previous megaprojects are outcomes of privatised planning, there is an emerging shift in state-market relations in urban development. The shift is towards increasing involvement of the state in urban planning through large urban projects. The previous kind of urbanism is a competition between the urban projects owned and developed by private land-owning oligarchs. Metro Manila is experiencing a resurgence of governments—city governments and national government corporations—coming up with urban projects of their own. There are aspects of the Entertainment City that indicate a perpetuation of the ‘privatised planning’. The megaproject remains to be contested and subverted and a product of interreferencing with other Asian models (Shatkin 2011). Citizens groups have called the Entertainment City as ‘privatisation of the commons’ limiting access of the Manila Bay Park, a public space, to those who can afford the ‘city’s’ amenities (Severino 2013). While it remains unclear how citizen concerns were incorporated, PAGCOR seems to have softened the messaging used to sell the Entertainment City as a result of opposition against the gambling hub: “We went into the process of discussing this with different groups. We explained to them that because PAGCOR will always be related to gambling. We explained ourselves that PAGCOR has shifted from gambling to dining and entertainment. I'm very happy that society, as a whole, is understanding this model that we are trying to set up.” (Rafael Francisco, interview with Ricky

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Carandang in Mornings@ANC, 4 April 2008)

Just like the Bonifacio Global City, comparisons are being made with other Asian megaprojects particularly Singapore when discussing the Entertainment City. Although the principle of a gambling hub may have been obtained from the Singapore model, PAGCOR contends that the initial idea can be linked back to Marcos’ City of Man. Former PAGCOR CEO Genuino was quoted saying: “Long before Singapore even thought of integrated resorts, the Philippines was the first to envision an entertainment and leisure complex across Manila Bay” (The Philippine Star 2009). The features of the city will eventually include landmarks that will galvanise Metro Manila’s skyline as a global City. These landmarks will include the Manila Eye, an observational wheel similar to the Singapore Flyer but it will be partially submerged in sea (Aquino 2015), as well as the PAGCOR Tower, a 665-meter observation tower, which will be tallest tower displacing Tokyo’s Skytree (634 meters) and second tallest structure next to Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. Table 1. Roles in Global City Formation Actor

Role in the Entertainment City

National government through PAGCOR

• Visioning of city • Developing the property • Coordinating with other governmental bodies • Engaging private firms

Private firms through casino/resort operators

• Delivery of the vision

Local government

• Regulating and licensing of the private firms • Maintaining peace and order

What seems to depart from Shatkin’s idea of a ‘privatopolis’ is the role the state plays in urban development (Shatkin 2011). Shatkin posits that the private developers are largely responsible for the emergence of these enclaves with the facilitation and enabling by the state. The Entertainment City is designed and envisioned by the national government, particularly by its corporations. It is the national government who utilises the potential of cities to connect to the global economy. This implies that state power is enforced in different scales and the dichotomy of global cities of state-centred as in the case of East Asian developmental states and market-oriented as in Western cities as proposed by Hill and Kim (2000) only reifies the polymorphic nature of the role of the state in urban development. The local government fill in the traditional role of the state under neo-liberalsim with state as an enabler and facilitator of the operations of private urban developers but what seems to be changing is that the national government is doing planning similar to what Fainstein (2008) would observe in Western cities.


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Given that the state shows a better capacity to design and implement a vision, the Entertainment City represents a case where the state reclaims its function in urban and regional planning and increasing state involvement in ‘privatised planning’ through urban integrated megaprojects. The state essentially competes with the market in designing and implementing projects that shape the urban landscape. It does not however represent an effort of the state to crowd out the market in urban development. It still falls within the framework of a public-private partnership and do not directly aim to hollow out existing CBDs. However, the state now has to contend with the consequences of the failure and subsequent inaction to comprehensively plan Metro Manila. The gaping chasm between the ‘private city’ and the ‘public city’ is a manifestation of the responsiveness of the state to the preferences of the urban elites (Watson 2013). The state’s investment in creating private cities of its own only exacerbates the dualisation of Metro Manila. As Garrido observed in Makati, the creation of exclusive spaces such as the Entertainment City sharpens the social context of “class inequality… distributed in an extremely lopsided but predictable manner, such that the few rich are seen as existing socially and spatially apart from the many poor” (Garrido 2013, 180). Given bypass-implant urbanism and privatised planning, megaprojects will continue to be used both by the state and private developers to carry out their fragmented visions of the city. The fragmented vision becomes the character of Metro Manila’s urban space where “the planning of the parts now constitutes the planning of the whole” (Burgess and Carmona 2009, 26). By building the Entertainment City, the state perpetuates the bypass-implant urbanism that allows for economic elites to bypass the ugly, dirty and crowded ‘public city’ (Shatkin 2008). The polymorphic functions of the state bring about the continuous emergence of ‘private cities’ that can be instrumental to the improvement of the ‘public city’. But this remains to be seen when the national government treats such private cities as national projects. The national government does not have the political constituency a local government had, thus, facing no incentive to reinvest the profits from the Entertainment City back to the ‘public city’. The role of creating a constituency falls into the hands of civil society whose voice remained largely muted throughout the development of the Entertainment City. Civil society should demand to incorporate social welfare planning into urban development to counteract the negative impact of the megaproject on the quality of lives of the people (Fainstein 2001). The values of diversity and justice ensures urban social inclusion and “if planners do not attempt to foster it, the outcome will be increasingly segregated neighborhoods and municipalities” (Fainstein 2000, 465). Given that the Philippine government has demonstrated greater

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capacity for urban planning and ‘visioning’, the revenues of PAGCOR from 15% to 25% of the gross gaming revenues as well as 5% revenues from non-gaming operations can generate the necessary financial resources to jumpstarting the creation of creative urban solutions to metro-wide problems like transport and traffic management, flood control, solid waste management and housing. (Manasan and Mercado 1999).

CONCLUSION The global cityness of Metro Manila as a city-region remains contentious but the spirit of globalism is alive and well, albeit partially, in its CBDs. In Boquet’s conclusion, he argued that Metro Manila is not a global city because it still lacks the ‘hyperurbanism’ that would make the city-region a distinctive global city (Boquet 2013). With the Entertainment City, the national government hopes to bring Metro Manila to become an emerging global city with a well-defined cityscape rivalling other cities in the region. Improvements made in the airports and airline industry with the lifting of the ban of Philippine airlines in Europe have expanded Metro Manila’s international reach. While there is still a lot to be done, what seems to be clear is that the global city discourse will continue to be engaged not by the city-region itself but by the urban megaprojects, whether privately or publicly developed. Examining the Entertainment City brings to the fore an emerging departure from privatised planning in Metro Manila. The state, particularly through its corporatized instrumentalities acted in a coordinated fashion with the legislature to materialise the vision of a world-class gambling and entertainment hub. The government partnered with private firms to complete the vertical integration with the global economy and to truly make the city ‘global’. A contradiction lies in the Entertainment City as a spatial manifestation of the co-location of the dichotomised role of the state in global city formation, one that can be characterised as ‘state-led privatised planning’. The government exhibited the relative efficiency and embeddedness evident among state-centred global cities but with the clearly stated goals of market-oriented cities. This contradiction while it exacerbates spatialized social inequality, presents an opportunity for urban planners to reinvest in the improvement of urban services for the ‘public city’. Other non-state actors also need to step into the plate to create a constituency for incorporating social welfare into urban development. Future research can look into the consequences of such state-market arrangement. More specifically, there needs to be an analysis of the extent to which the Entertainment City or similar urban megaprojects contributes to the dualisation of the city. Studies can also be


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conducted to understand the dynamic nature of such megaprojects – Can national governments sustain such national projects? How do local governments demand to be included in such projects and what benefits do they seek? Another aspect that can be subject of inquiry is to understand how emerging global cities can transform to Hyper Global Cities (Olds and Yeung 2004). Findings from these research can provide a better guidance to policymakers, urban planners and city authorities in crafting their own pathways to global city-hood.

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Kidjie Saguin is a PhD student in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at National University of Singapore. His primary research interests are governance, policy capacity, public service delivery and social policy. He currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Asian Journal of Public Affairs ([email protected]). Received: March 16, 2017 Accepted with one revision: May 18, 2017