Paper short abstract:

Urban renewal and sprawling in the name of metropolitan accumulation pushes informal settler families out of their right to the city. The paper seeks to analyze the socio-spatial implications of spatial mismatch and alienation of a socialized housing project in a peri-urban relocation site.

Paper long abstract:

Rapid urbanization continues to be a defining megatrend in the Asia-Pacific region. As cities expand in the Philippines, especially in Metro Manila, the outskirts, or peri-urban fringes, have become a site of capital flows under the pretense of provision of the right to adequate housing. Against the backdrop of neoliberal urban planning, the study presents a sequential mixed-method participatory research. It examines the socio-spatial implications of the housing-employment mismatch based on direct (commuting-based job accessibility and employment-based job accessibility) and indirect (residential segregation, residential peri-urbanization, and employment peri-urbanization) spatial indicators. It also assesses the consequential effects in the labor market outcomes (employment participation, wages and earnings, and commuting distance and costs) of 75 households in Southville 8 peri-urban relocation site in Rodriguez, Rizal. The study relationally expands the conventional concept of spatial mismatch to the mis- and malalignment of residential welfare to essential public services. The one-way ANOVA results indicate a significant statistical difference between the overall perception of households, with varying housing-employment relationships, in their labor market outcomes (p=0.01930733). This illuminates the social, political, and socio-cultural dimensions of spatiality apart from its labor economics underpinning. The study illustrates the intricate relationship between spatial and social structures—how Southville 8 functions dialectically as a space of contestation. The narratives reveal the coexistence of capitalist production within normative systems and everyday grassroots adaptive strategies of households. Understanding the subaltern realities in the peripheries is crucial in the current drive of the Philippines to address its 6.5 million housing backlogs.