Winner of the Philippine National Book Award, this pioneering volume reveals how the power of the country's family-based oligarchy both derives from and contributes to a weak Philippine state. From provincial warlords to modern managers, prominent Filipino leaders have fused family, politics, and business to compromise public institutions and amass private wealth--a historic pattern that persists to the present day. Edited by Alfred W. McCoy, An Anarchy of Families explores the pervasive influence of the modern dynasties that have led the Philippines during the past century. Exemplified by the Osmeñas and Lopezes, elite Filipino families have formed a powerful oligarchy--controlling capital, dominating national politics, and often owning the media. Beyond Manila, strong men such as Ramon Durano, Ali Dimaporo, and Justiniano Montano have used "guns, goons, and gold" to accumulate wealth and power in far-flung islands and provinces. In a new preface for this revised edition, the editor shows how this pattern of oligarchic control has continued into the twenty-first century, despite dramatic socio-economic change that has supplanted the classic "three g's" of Philippine politics with the contemporary "four c's"--continuity, Chinese, criminality, and celebrity.

This book was how Nemesio E. Prudente came to be known from 1962, when Pres. Diosdado Macapagal appointed him president of Philippine College of Commerce, a school so obscure he did not know where it was. The 35-year-old Doc said PIC had been “treated like a street child” neglected and poor.

From its creation in 1949 until the 1960s, the Central Bank of the Philippines dominated industrial policy by means of exchange controls, becoming a symbol of nationalism for a newly independent state. The pre-war Philippine National Bank was closely linked to the colonial administration and plagued by corruption scandals. As the country moved toward independence, ambitious young politicians, colonial bureaucrats, and private sector professionals concluded that economic decolonization required a new bank at the heart of the country’s finances in order to break away from the individuals and institutions that dominated the colonial economy. Positioning this bank within broader political structures, Yusuke Takagi concludes that the Filipino policy makers behind the Central Bank worked not for vested interests associated with colonial or neo-colonial rule but for structural reform based on particular policy ideas.

Gentrification is a global process that the United Nations now sees as a human rights issue. This new Planetary Gentrification Reader follows on from the editors’ 2010 volume, The Gentrification Reader, and provides a more longitudinal (backward and forward in time) and broader (turning away from Anglo-/Euro-American hegemony) sense of developments in gentrification studies over time and space, drawing on key readings that reflect the development of cutting-edge debates. Revisiting new debates over the histories of gentrification, thinking through comparative urbanism on gentrification, considering new waves and types of gentrification, and giving much more focus to resistance to gentrification, this is a stellar collection of writings on this critical issue. Like in their 2010 Reader, the editors, who are internationally renowned experts in the field, include insightful commentary and suggested further reading. The book is essential reading for students and researchers in urban studies, urban planning, human geography, sociology, and housing studies and for those seeking to fight this socially unjust process.

Amidst the recent global financial crisis and housing busts in various countries, the Philippines’ booming housing industry has been heralded as “Southeast Asia’s hottest real estate hub” and the saving grace of a supposedly resilient Philippine economy. This growth has been fueled by demand from balikbayan (returnee) Overseas Filipinos and has facilitated the rise of gated suburban communities in Manila’s sprawling peri-urban fringe. But as the “Filipino dreams” of successful balikbayans are built inside these new gated residential developments, the lives of marginalized populations living in these spaces have been upended and thrown into turmoil as they face threats of expulsion. Based on almost four years of research, this book examines the tumultuous geographies of neoliberalization that link suburbanization, transnational mobilities, and accumulation by dispossession. Through an accounting of real estate and new suburban landscapes, it tells of a Filipino transnationalism that engenders a market-based and privatized suburban political economy that reworks socio-spatial relations and class dynamics. In presenting the literal and discursive transformations of spaces in Manila’s peri-urban fringe, the book details life inside new gated suburban communities and discusses the everyday geographies of “privileged” new property owners—mainly comprised of balikbayan families—and exposes the contradictions of gated suburban life, from resistance to Home Owner Association rules to alienating feelings of loss. It also reveals the darker side of the property boom by mapping the volatile spaces of the Philippines’ surplus populations comprised of the landless farmers, informal settler residents, and indigenous peoples. To make way for gated communities and other profitable developments in the peri-urban region, marginalized residents are systematically dispossessed and displaced while concomitantly offered relocation to isolated socialized housing projects, the last frontier for real estate accumulation. These compelling accounts illustrate how the territorial embeddedness of neoliberalization in the Philippines entails the consolidation of capital by political-economic elites and privatization of residential space for an idealized transnational property clientele. More than ever, as the Philippines is being reshaped by diaspora and accumulation by dispossession, the contemporary moment is a critical time to reflect on what it truly means to be a nation.