Gillages

Tad Ermitaño concretizes design improv at the margins of society with his Muhon pieces for the Venice Architecture Biennale.

- Tad Ermitano

Gillage is a portmanteau of gilid (meaning “border” or “edge” in Filipino) and “village”. The word “village” in this case refers to the exclusive, gated communities that dot Manila. Gillages are the informal settlements that inevitably surround the gated communities. Landscape architect and historian Paulo Alcazaren points out that gillages arise in the peripheries of gated villages because these villages require an army of laborers. Since low-cost housing and public transportation are unavailable in most areas of Manila, those who are not live-in domestic workers make their homes in nearby informal settlements. This state of affairs means the gated villages effectively sustain and possibly even generate their antithesis. These gillages have a certain stability, not because their economic utility is recognized, but because they marshal enough votes to make politicians wary of angering the settlers unless there are benefits that clearly outweigh the political cost. Gillages are both economic and political assets. An ironic detail of this arrangement is many of the security guards the gated communities rely on to maintain their borders live in gillages—settlements often regarded by the village residents as dwelling places of criminals and undesirables.

Alcazaren also observed that this socioeconomic structure of excluding an underclass from a center wholly dependent on their labor is the same structure underlying the division of old Manila into Intramuros (within the walls of the old city) and Extramuros (outside the old city), and, I might add, the division of South Africa’s territories into Cities and Townships, when Apartheid was government policy.