The Tondo Foreshore, and Rituals for Living on the Water
In the mid 1979’s, the Philippine National Housing Authority (NHA) established the Tondo Foreshore Dagat Dagatan Development Project office to plan and manage what was described as the “improvement” of that part of the Manila Bay. In anticipation of the convening of the first Habitat Conference to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1976, under the auspices of the United Nations, a competition was organized to solicit ideas about how this improvement could take place to the benefit of all concerned, in collaboration with Dagat Dagatan office and the NHA.
The Tondo Foreshore, which was the focal point of the competition, was then a swamp occupied by squatters who has built their houses on stilts over the water and who survived by fishing.
Their lifestyle was very much like that of the Vietnamese refugees who live along the shoreline of the Tonle Sap lake in Combodia, of the squatters who have built similar kinds of houses in Halong Bay, in Vietnam, or the Chinese immigrants who have erected what are known as the Klan Jetties off the shore of Georetown, Penang, in Malaysia.
Abdelhalim and his team, who had also worked together on the Tiburon Project previously, visisted the Tondo Foreshore settlement and, in the process of their survey, documented more than twenty different rituals that the villagers had goen through to lay claim to, or to possess, their place of habitation. These included the building of dams, the draining of water, the construction of pole foundations, and so on. Abdelhalim and his team then based their design on these techniques.
Their Submission did not win first place in the competition, but was exhibited, along with all of the other short listed schemes. In the Museum of Fine Arts in Vancouver, with a brief stop in Berkeley. The exhibition was entitled: “Building for the Poorest of the Poor”.
In the mid 1979’s, the Philippine National Housing Authority (NHA) established the Tondo Foreshore Dagat Dagatan Development Project office to plan and manage what was described as the “improvement” of that part of the Manila Bay. In anticipation of the convening of the first Habitat Conference to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1976, under the auspices of the United Nations, a competition was organized to solicit ideas about how this improvement could take place to the benefit of all concerned, in collaboration with Dagat Dagatan office and the NHA.
The Tondo Foreshore, which was the focal point of the competition, was then a swamp occupied by squatters who has built their houses on stilts over the water and who survived by fishing.
Their lifestyle was very much like that of the Vietnamese refugees who live along the shoreline of the Tonle Sap lake in Combodia, of the squatters who have built similar kinds of houses in Halong Bay, in Vietnam, or the Chinese immigrants who have erected what are known as the Klan Jetties off the shore of Georetown, Penang, in Malaysia.
Abdelhalim and his team, who had also worked together on the Tiburon Project previously, visisted the Tondo Foreshore settlement and, in the process of their survey, documented more than twenty different rituals that the villagers had goen through to lay claim to, or to possess, their place of habitation. These included the building of dams, the draining of water, the construction of pole foundations, and so on. Abdelhalim and his team then based their design on these techniques.
Their Submission did not win first place in the competition, but was exhibited, along with all of the other short listed schemes. In the Museum of Fine Arts in Vancouver, with a brief stop in Berkeley. The exhibition was entitled: “Building for the Poorest of the Poor”.
The team had originally entered the competition because they assumed that the motive behind it was altruistic, consistent with the reputation of the United Nations, who organized it, rather than that of the Marcos government that was then in power in the Philippines. As they subsequently learned, the real purpose of the competition was to defray criticism from the real intention of the Philippine Housing Authority and its Tondo Foreshore Project Office, which was to relocate the squatters, reclaim the land and develop it. The Dagat Dagatan Development Project Office remained intact long after the Foreshore was developed, in fact, in order to facilitate what an important research paper presented at a major United Nations conference later described as “loan recovery and infrastructure management functions” that had been planned for them all along.