Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how Baguio City Public Market (Philippines) traders use different resistance tactics to thwart private redevelopment of this city market. Excluded from consultation, traders negotiate alternative trading spaces to assert their citizenship rights to diversify their livelihoods.

Paper long abstract:

As Global South countries 'modernize' and 'globalize,' governments increasingly embrace neoliberal visions of development that promote controlled and sanitized urban spaces. These visions privilege constructing modern retail outlets (e.g., shopping malls, supermarkets) while discouraging or even destroying what governments view as 'traditional remnants' of entrepreneurial trade such as marketplaces and informal stalls. These political decisions and the resultant urban designs dramatically disrupt the livelihoods of those who have long supplied urbanites with essential commodities such as fresh food. Rather than witnessing the replacement of such 'traditional' supply networks by those linked to supermarkets and bulk stores, my research in Baguio City, Philippines demonstrates that traders activate a finely-tuned urban market-scape to challenge government's framing of marketplace trade as 'pre-modern' and inefficient.'

To address these competing idelogies of development, this paper analyzes the proposed redevelopment of the Baguio City Public Market - the regional wholesale and retail hub for fresh produce and industrial goods. In 1995, the city government awarded the contract to redevelop the Public Market to a private Manila-based corporation (UNIWIDE). As UNIWIDE failed to consult the permanent marketers on their redevelopment plans, traders, anticipating steep rental hikes and the loss of their premises, launched a series of civil law suits and appeals that continue to thwart the city's urban renewal efforts. I argue that Baguio City's marketers innovatively use everyday and mainstream political resistance tactics to open alternative spaces of trade and negotiation thereby successfully advocating for their rights as cultural citizens to maintain and diversify their livelihoods.