Density Textures: The Shadows of Unplanned Urbanism

by Abigail Arellano PART 1 - Immersing to and fro

There is a quiet appeal to walking through our local streets that don't pull you to look at them and don't tug your attention for primacy. They simply exist, unembellished and uncurated, comfortable in their ordinariness. Places that are not funded to exist and are okay with just existing. But in cities like ours, the very streets that carry this modest charm also bear some form of tolerated decay.

During my college years, some mini “travels” of mine have led me to encounter a local book shop just along the Manila-Makati border, a few steps from where I live. Here, you could get books for free and leave books in return, just like the Book Stop Projects of WTA but without branding identities or a library network. It was inside an open residential garage, with piles of books overflowing shelves and spilling onto the sidewalk: a local gem under a Maluko tree, owned by an old man who did it solely out of his advocacy for literature and education. No funding, no marketing strategies, and no desire for recognition. I picked up a book that would have probably cost a thousand pesos elsewhere. There were plenty of age-appropriate books for different walks of life, including mine.

Reading Club 2000, still alive and well.

After the quiet joy of discovering the bookshop, my walks would inevitably lead me to its sociospatial opposite: a residential stretch where life is raw, chaotic, and is not occupied by energies that pull people in. The same area that nurtures organic charm also shelters disorder, showing how the everyday exists in both delicate and disruptive forms. In other words, the mundane can be uplifting or unsettling (depending on which side of the street you walk, I guess).

Sa Dulo ng Zobel Roxas

One of the mega junk shops and a tiny sippet of life around it in daylight.

This other place I'd like to mention and that I describe as a mega junk shop strip, is one of the top places I’ve been visually obsessing over. Unlike the random book shop that has an inviting presence, this one is the opposite–equally moving but towards a more upsetting degree.

For this essay, let’s call the area Dulo (“end” in English). Back in the day, it marked the end of the trip for jeepney passengers coming from Vito Cruz, because dense informal settlements walled off Zobel Roxas Street. Jeepneys had to turn around from here to start the return journey and tsupers (local jeepney drivers) called the area literally what it was: the dulo of the ride. I learned this only recently after all this time. 

The settlement was then evicted and cleared off to extend Zobel Roxas street by more than half a kilometer more until it intersects Kalayaan Avenue. Long story short, this later became an access point for big standalone junk shops occupying that very additional length—which is a lot. For its industrial capacity, I’m surprised there’s not much written on it on the internet (but also, not surprised due to the lack of attention and support for research institutions and the everyday invisibility of urban operational planning).

To this day, jeepney routes still end their trip from Vito Cruz at "Dulo" despite the extension of Zobel Roxas Street.

It was common knowledge to me, growing up, that this place is where I was “not allowed to go through alone.”  And despite its spatial relief from compact wooden houses tightly knit within the whole street area during the 90’s, it still remains an insecure 500-meter walk today. Walled by industrial-sized junk shops with active truck-loading operations every day, this street is left with towering solid industrial and commercial waste. To give more irony to the context I’m trying to build, this area is not an industrial zone. This has been the local environment of the residential settlements that remained from clearing the block, not to mention the two public elementary schools that hug this Zobel Roxas stretch. Definitely a different kind of everyday scene just a few steps away from the book shop.

Junk shops in the Philippines demonstrate a peculiar tension: they contribute to the recycling economy but often operate with little institutional or environmental support. Without higher-level waste management, the surrounding areas absorb much of the burden.

Shadow Infrastructure

There are multiple examples of circumstances like this in our country, but for now let’s put a quick spotlight on the primary establishments of the scrap trade. Junk shops in the Philippines are reduced towards the “informal” notwithstanding its supposed sustainable potential to contribute in waste management solutions and that these are dedicated to be formal enterprises. It’s not the junkshops and its operations that are the root cause of the harm–it’s the lack of strong policy backing for local systems that operate in the shadows of unplanned urbanism, which then become vessels of harmful impacts. Junk shops are mainly highly active warehouses with spaces for storing, selling, and buying solid waste. Most of these establishments go through a chain of manual labor to segregate and prepare valid items before they are weighed and released for recycling purposes.

Some definitions:

Shadow infrastructure refers to systems that operate alongside, or in the absence of, formal infrastructure—like roads, waste handling, and logistics that function without official recognition, yet are vital for urban life.

The informal sector encompasses economic activity that is legally unregistered or unregulated, though it provides livelihoods and essential services. Junk shops often fall into this category despite contributing to legitimate recycling chains.

Circular economy is a system of production and consumption designed to reuse, recycle, and extend the life of materials, reducing waste and environmental harm.

Some of us have experienced selling our bottles or electronic parts to our local junk shops, but like any other businesses, it expands more than just the immediate neighborly transactions. This process moves through a web of dealing through an almost colloquial system that involves other junk shop establishments, scrappers, and waste pickers with their karitons. This is a respectable industry that processes waste we generate in our homes, offices, and whatever space you are reading this from, and sell them to be reused. But most of these processes are informal activities (as classified by existing policies and development plans), which usually suffers from a lack of depth in holistic understanding. Despite the scrap trade’s participation towards a sustainable circular economy, the umbrella categorization of “informal sector” leaves these groups to habituate into the fate of unorganized and often unhealthy systems that deal with everyday garbage.

But as much as I want to defend the functionality of junkshops in the name of sustainability, operational neglect is complex. As much as the government has failed to follow through systematic actions towards urban progression, business owners such as junk shop operators are responsible not to hop on the lack of governance to provide policy for high operation spatial infrastructure in high-density cities. Junk shops in Zobel Roxas dominate the public streets and existing sidewalks with their industrial load of exposed variety of scraps that can get soaked in flood water when it rains. This is not charming anymore…it’s a grave multifaceted being of all sorts of bad. Somehow, even the communities, I reckon, have just accepted that this is their environment and everything is now somehow normalized.

Zobel Roxas, alive and well?

The Lived Everyday: Between Neglect and its Normalization

The spectrum between the appeal and the deterrence we experience within everyday spaces, in its (sometimes) quiet or often sketchy placement within our communities, is also what can be fed to the neglect that allows them to become vulnerable as a place.

Traveling through Dulo after all these years (I still pass by it going to work and back), what stays with me is the fact that this place is a community I often find very much awake even at midnight with small children still playing around. I may never fully realize what their everyday is like with and beyond the junkshop environment they humbly embrace and accept despite everything I wrote or read about.

For some, the everyday is a different kind of organic growth defined by remnants of historical layers of instability and systematic inadequacies. This kind of every day is just how it is, which presents a different kind of humility. The kind where even resistance and the mere longing for betterment become pointless efforts, smiling through a reality you and I just pass by.

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What now?

These are not uncommon scenes in Manila, or even beyond the Metro: density showing different kinds of weights in forms we are familiar with but somehow unspoken in the dimenions of urban laws. Urban operations that keep our infrastructure and utilities in place somehow are cast aside.

Waste Management in the Metro has been an obvious issue within the infrastructure of our cities, seeping through and from our neighborhoods. It somehow belongs to a place order does not want to belong to, so it's not given importance that much. So what now?

Strengthening policy support. This includes:

• Clearer zoning guidelines specific to junk shop operations within typologies of community types.

• Safer storage and waste handling standards junk shop owners should comply with

• Infrastructure support for waste sorting and recycling

Designing for coexistence. Cities must imagine waste management systems as a vital urban function, where:

• recycling operations remain economically viable, while neighborhoods remain livable and safe

• waste flows are organized rather than improvised

soon

Part 2 Recognizing our Urban Metabolism