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8. A Tale of Two Cities: The Pyro-Seismic Morphology of Nineteenth-Century Manila
- University of Wisconsin Press
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8 A Tale of Two Cities The Pyro-Seismic Morphology of Nineteenth-Century Manila G B The capital of the Spanish Philippines, colonial Manila, was two cities: a city of stone and wood largely but not exclusively inhabited by Spaniards, and a city of nipa palm and bamboo where the indigenous peoples of the archipelago mainly lived. In fact, this division was never quite as simple as this description may suggest and also changed over time. The population of the inner city gradually altered until indigenous servants and others outnumbered its Hispanic residents. Spaniards, too, and the other Europeans who came to reside in the islands during the nineteenth century increasingly began to abandon its shaded streets and dark grandeur for the lights and entertainments on the right bank of the Pasig River. The city of nipa palm and bamboo was never one city either as there was always a substantial foreign presence, the Japanese, who had mainly been absorbed into the general population by the end of the seventeenth century, and the Chinese, who even created their own culturally distinct enclave, the Parián. These two cities within a city represented not only the socioeconomic and ethnic realities of colonial life in the Philippines but also a particular cultural adaptation to the twin hazards of earthquake and fire that came to dominate notions of urban planning in the archipelago. The stone and wood city represented an 170 approach that attempted to manage hazard through legislating an appropriate architecture to accommodate these twin dangers, to express mastery through suitable construction techniques and materials. The nipa palm and bamboo city embodied an altogether different solution, constructing light, flexible structures whose periodic loss was allowed for and accepted. If the first represented a form of adaptive technology, the second was also a technological solution, a disposable one, evolved under conditions where the collapse of buildings was rarely fatal and fire was never a major threat until the scale of urban living made it so. Since Manila’s foundation in 1571, these two cities had coevolved together. By the nineteenth century, however, conditions had altered. The steep rise in Manila’s population together with the blurring of boundaries between the two sectors prompted a renewed attempt by colonial administrators to manage hazard through further architectural adaptation and stricter control over the denizens of the ephemeral city. While earthquake continued to remain a challenge to both, fire acted as a catalyst of social as well as physical change. As fire came to challenge the authority of the state and threaten the wealth of its most prominent residents, its management increasingly became a domain of colonial and even class contestation. A Tale of Two Cities By the time Spaniards established Manila, they were undoubtedly the world’s most proficient builders of new urban settlements along a classical Greco-Roman model.1 The latter envisaged a gridiron of straight streets intersecting one another at right angles and centered around a large central plaza where the principal governmental and religious buildings were located.2 In effect, though, the city that flourished on the banks of the Pasig River was two cities: a ciudad supposedly reserved for Spanish residents known appropriately as Intramuros (literally “within the walls”), and a number of indigenous communities (arrabales) located on the fringes of the urban area and including the Parián known as Extramuros (literally “without the walls”). Despite this social zoning, the gridiron pattern was strictly adhered to wherever practical in the Spanish city and the Chinese quarter though less rigorously enforced among indigenous districts.3 Manila grew rapidly from an indigenous settlement of perhaps two thousand people to become a cosmopolitan and multiethnic colonial capital of over forty thousand by the 1620s.4 Its prosperity was predicated on the city’s role as an entrepôt where the fine fabrics and crafts of China were exchanged for the silver of the New World.5 While the city was conceived and laid out according to A Tale of Two Cities 171 [18.208.172.3] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:29 GMT) cultural prescriptions that originated in another world and another time, how and with what materials it was built spoke to another set of dictates that were rooted in more local factors. The Manila that elicited fulsome praise from resident and visitor alike was a city of stone, at least, that is, within the walls, but the one that was founded in 1571 was built of wood.6 Timber...