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489 Manila’s Imperial Makeover Security, Health, and Symbolism daniel f. doeppers At the high tide of empire starting in the late nineteenth century, the grand, awe-inspiring colonial capital became central to the imperial enterprise as the site of its expatriate population, a symbol of its military power, an institutional center, and a locus of major port facilities. Even now, a full half century after the imperial age, these massive conurbations, no longer mere metropolises but now megacities, remain the most visible legacy of colonial rule. While modern cities faced myriad problems as they grew to unprecedented size and complexity across the globe, the diffusion of European urban forms to the tropics brought special problems of health, safety, and food security that seem, in retrospect, to reveal something of the character of the imperial state. How should we think about the task of the American invaders in taking over Manila, a city of perhaps three hundred thousand people? Any outside power taking over cities heretofore run by others faces certain problems inherent both in the situation and in the management of urban places. These may vary along several dimensions of culture and social organization, previous managerial practices and institutions, the amount of infrastructure and destruction, and so on, but they will also tend to have many common elements. As Veena Talwar Oldenberg has argued about the British imperial makeover of Indian cities, the chief problems facing Americans were security,public health,and metropolitan design.1 The first, and arguably the most fundamental, of these challenges was design, that is, the imposition of a modern urban structure on a historic city with inadequate infrastructure and a knot of streets and waterways without a unifying plan. Symbolic Forms and Metropolitan Models A dual problem addressed by most imperial rulers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to do with both the political symbolism of power and expatriate psychology in the sense of establishing urban spaces where the colonizers could feel comfortable. The more heroic dimension of this problem has to do with the establishment of symbolic architectural and landscape forms that give a plastic expression to the imperial presence, forms whose intent is to awe and impress, to create a distinctive “brand” signature. Manila,as a capital,began with Intramuros,an orderly,well-laid-out,sixteenthand seventeenth-century fortress city. Institutionally speaking and in political psychology, Manila’s Intramuros, literally, “inside the walls,” long retained its preeminence in Spanish colonial space. Even if some prominent Spaniards and affluent European merchants moved out to bucolic suburban locations, Intramuros remained the ultimate nineteenth-century institutional power center. Except for the palace of the governor-general, the buildings of government the American rulers inherited were there, as was the main cathedral. These walled city spaces can be thought of as symbolic forms. Practically minded, American administrators leaned toward filling in the moat around Intramuros as a noxious threat to public health. They could have carted off the massive walls as well. It was a question for a time. But Intramuros was densely packed with major churches, cloisters, and schools and a great collection of old stone masonry residential buildings. Leveling the walls would not have changed the congestion of narrow streets and packed structures. Fortunately , they hesitated. Enter the proconsul and future president, William Howard Taft, now secretary of war, in 1904 and his protégé, the eastern Brahmin W. Cameron Forbes. Young Forbes was appointed to the Philippine Commission with the portfolio for transportation and public works. What was on the imperial minds was the creation of a grand plan for a new hill station, as well as for a proper capital, one that presented well to both foreigners and local citizens—and an answer to the questions about the inherited Spanish architectural styles. Forbes had earlier met Daniel H. Burnham through family connections and backed his friend for the commission. Burnham was appointed to make an assessment and conceptual plan for Manila and a Baguio hill station. He was then perhaps the most famous American urban architect and planner after Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., who had declined this commission. Burnham was celebrated for his work on Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, including the Outer Drive, lakeside parks, and museum settings that are still critical parts of Chicago’s landscape, and he spent a whirlwind month on site in Manila at the end of 1904.2 He quickly advocated the retention of the city walls and the aesthetic use of...

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