Manila’s Tenements and the Humanitarian Impasse: Superhumanity conversations

In the article “Cardboard for Humanity ,” Andrew Herscher asks a series of important questions pertaining to humanitarian architecture and the inadvertent creation of new types of dependence.¹ He asks:

'Who or what is the humanitarian human? Might the humanitarian protection of humanity also involve a production of humanity, the fabrication of specific sorts of bodies and lives? And how might the humanitarian human exist in relation to other humans?'

In response to these initial questions, rather than add to Herscher’s perspective on the Gihembe refugee camp, I would like to present a comparative scenario, one that takes place under very different conditions: Manila’s tenement housing. The Philippines’ capital—a city in which politics, architecture, urban planning and humanitarian action combine to hide, remove, and create new human conditions—continues to respond to the desperate situation of its urban poor with a complex and disjointed system of planning and housing provision that has existed since the 1950s. Manila provides a platform to study the urban characteristics of a broken planning system, legal ambiguity, corruption and extreme economic divide in the production and removal of slums and their role within the city. It also provides a historical portfolio of humanitarian practices in response to such crises.