The Fight for the Right to Housing is A Fight of Metaphors
by Joy Icayan

On Sept. 23, 2010, 130 homes were taken down as the MMDA started the demolitions in Sitio San Roque, Barangay Bagong Pag-asa, Quezon City. The demolitions would be to give way to a 22B project to transform the area into the Quezon City Central Business District, a joint project between Ayala Land Inc. and National Housing Authority. The protests over the demolitions injured at least eleven people, seven of which were residents in the area.

The court issued a Temporary Restraining Order which issued a halt to the demolitions. The next day Pres. Aquino also issued the National Housing Authority to stop forced relocations of those opposed to it, until a comprehensive, orderly plan can be finalized.

The general public has chimed in, along with NHA, the CHR and various CSO groups on the plight of the informal dwellers, on what exactly they deserve, and they are entitled to on what their rights are. The talk is muddled with relocation packages, and the rights-based-approach on how to conduct these things. We hear numbers of those who have chosen to leave and settle in the relocation homes, and those who have chosen to stay. And then there are complaints. Everywhere there are complaints—from the lack of necessities in the relocation areas, in public forums where people, often anonymously, invoked the concept of nation and progress to judge these people for their sense of entitlement.

And often the fight is rooted at the metaphorical level of how we define development and growth and progress, and to go on, how we define a nation and who belong in it and the weight we’re willing to carry. We can choose to define development through new business districts and big shiny buildings and delegate those who do not conform to this standard to the other end of the spectrum. To do this, we need only the help of media who ask us not to ‘coddle’ the squatters, to be reminded of the petty crime that happens when informal dwellers huddle together, to use words like eyesore and lazy and criminal, to tell ourselves of the multitude of babies they seem to bring forth into an already overpopulated country. The burden they are, that which must be shed if we are to see any light.

Or we can choose to question our own metaphors, and how we’ve come to own them, how we’ve come to define a kind of development which includes some and excludes others, and what purpose this serves, and who.

And then perhaps we can dissect how exactly their concept of rootedness is different from ours, how we’ve come to dictate what is acceptable for them, how their relationship to their homes is much more trivial (perhaps also make of flimsier recycled stuff), how their sense of family and community—that which will be disrupted with demolitions and relocations is less valid than ours. Perhaps talking of dignity doesn’t merely entail provision of the minimums so people will stop complaining—but looking at those who are massively different, who live beyond our comfort zones (and beyond our personal meanings) at eye level, and letting them fight for the same abstracts that we have—as we undoubtedly, would.

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/metro-manila/09/24/10/aquino-steps-stops-qc-demolition

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/metro-manila/09/26/10/%E2%80%98better-relocation-conditions-north-triangle-settlers%E2%80%99

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