Overlooked Subaltern Urbanism in Gentrification: Care Work, Depletions and Countermobilities in Philippine Peri-urban Resettlements

Subaltern lives have been violently displaced from a large slum to make way for a central business district in Metro Manila in the Philippines and forcibly relocated to an overlooked peri-urban resettlement. Through this article, I offer a counter-overlooking, marking the centrality of subaltern disposability, depletions and resistances and of unliveable remote resettlements in the co-constitution of the gentrification of in-city and peri-urban spaces. This counter-overlooking is necessary to better understand the dynamics of elite accumulation in peripheries and subaltern homes. I gathered accounts of survival, difficulties and resistances from 18 evicted slum dwellers using storytelling and building on years of engaged ethnography. Gentrification displaces slum dwellers from high-value urban spaces, increases government revenues and decreases social service provision. The peri-urban spaces with mandated socialised housing absorb the displaced and subprime housing capital, fuelling urban expansion, but contend with urban ills, increasing unemployment and the need for social services. Remote resettlements extract subaltern lives and break up families and communities. The evictees’ capacity to survive, care for and from the family and community, and renew themselves is slowly depleted. This depletion is resisted through gendered community care work and ‘countermobility’, where evictees precariously return to the city to reunite family, habitation and livelihood. The very surplus subalterns that are disposed of from capital cities, thus, become one of the driving forces of city-making in overlooked peri-urban spaces.