Urban Mobility and a Healthy City: Intertwined Transport and Public Health Policies in American-Colonial Manila

During the early American-colonial period (1898–1913) mobility and public health became intertwined policy areas. Innovations in transport technology and infrastructure were introduced to “cure” Manila’s unhealthy geography. In 1906 the Municipal Board institutionalized health and mobility as twin concerns by establishing the Department of Sanitation and Transportation. Intertwining health and mobility seemed rational for colonial governance, but its irrationalities soon came to light. In dissecting this understudied aspect of American colonialism, thisarticle provides new insights not just on the links between empire and technology but also on the concept of the colonial city as applied to early–twentieth-century Manila.Keywords: urban transportation • tropical medicine • municipal governance • colonial cit

The Cocheros of American-occupied Manila Representations and Persistence

Thisarticle discusses colonial misrepresentations of a marginalized occupational group in the American Philippines. Colonial authorities had pinned their hopes on the transformative power of motorized transportation, which they introduced in Manila. They regarded cocheros or carriage drivers as relics of a backward past that the progress of modernity would render extinct. However, the cocheros were not easily eradicated, and frustrated colonial authorities tagged them as barriers to modernity. Thisarticle analyzes this colonial discourse and offers a nuanced characterization of a voiceless yet ubiquitous group.Keywords: Urban transportation • working classes • American colonialism • modernity • imperialis

The Politics of Flood Control and the Making of Metro Manila

The emergence of Metro Manila as a political unit is inextricably tied to its history as a flood-prone metropolis. A comparison of flood-control efforts in the 1970s with those that preceded it in 1909 and 1952 demonstrates that flood control in Metro Manila has been a deeply political issue. Opposition from local governments derailed plans, which gained traction only under Ferdinand Marcos, who starting in 1972 initiated large-scale projects and neutered local autonomy by creating the Metro Manila Commission. Marcos’s flood-control program followed his regime’s technocratic, high-modernist approach to disaster mitigation and centralized metropolitan governance, with slum dwellers living along the waterways bearing the brunt of his undemocratic disaster governance.Keywords: natural disasters • urbanization • authoritarianism • high modernism • technocracy • urban poo