Land, Infrastructure, and the Geographies of Class Power in the Early 21st Century Philippines

Abstract

This dissertation considers the relationship between capitalist class power and urbanization in the global South through the rise and transformation of large, diversified conglomerates in the Philippines from 2001 to 2025. It draws from postcolonial urban theory to provincialize claims about the relationship between the concentration of wealth and global urbanization. It also draws from Polanyian economic geography and sociology to recentre attention on urban land as a focus for understanding the relationships between place, history, and ongoing reinventions and resurgences of class power. Through a critical reading of corporate disclosures, interviews with business and regulatory elites, and a critical discourse analysis of the artefacts of market design, it forwards the following arguments. Firstly, that the present transformation of Philippine capitalism owes to irreducible, place-specific contours of market-oriented reform as shaped by economic nationalism, a moralized understanding of economic life, and elite capture of the state’s role in creating and enforcing property relations. Secondly, that the recent successes of Philippine-nationality conglomerates are built upon a nexus between global flows of labour and remittances, and embedded advantages with respect to land ownership and regulatory capture. Their position astride this nexus enables oligopolistic and oligopsonistic power, mainly coded as nationalist protectionism, but also as invocations of market orthodoxy in newly-privatized activities and assets. Thirdly, that in maximizing these advantages, these conglomerates have converged on a pattern of vertically-integrated rentierism across property development, energy, water, telecommunications, and transportation infrastructure, and banking. Throughout, these arguments are brought into dialogue with the landscapes of privatizations, urbanizations, and infrastructure crises, highlighting ideational and material dimensions to place. This research illustrates the role of commodity fictions, as embedded in a place and its history, for the new geographies of class power. In particular, it involves the continuity of rentierism as a class interest in a Southern, peripheral society, across cycles of both boom and bust in their material interests and of ideological fashion. It draws attention to an enduring role of land that has more in common with previous rounds of accumulation than with the prototypical financialized, gentrified role of cities in accumulation, and therefore argues for attention to smaller spatial and institutional scales, and longer temporal scales, in pluralizing the geographies of class power in the 21st century.