Nurturing kapwa urbanism: The challenges of sustaining urban solidarity during and beyond COVID-19

RedentoB.Recio

This brief essay offers a provocation on what I call kapwa urbanism and the challenges that urban solidarity practices face during and beyond the currentCOVID-19pandemicinMetroManila.

Over a year into this global pandemic, international borders remain closed, vaccines have been unevenly distributed and things remain uncertain. In this very challenging period, the writer Rebecca Solnit (2020)remindsthat“Oneofourmaintasksnow–especiallythoseof us who are not sick, are not frontline workers, and are not dealing with other economic or housing difficulties – is to understand this moment, what it might require of us, and what it might make possible”.

Lastyear,Itookpartinanotherwebinarthattriedtomakesenseof the situation in Metro Manila at that time. In the Philippines, as elsewhere, the COVID-19 pandemic is more than a public health issue; it has become a socio-economic crisis. We witnessed how leaders in different cities and countries scrambled for sound approaches to navigate the onslaught of COVID-19. Some of them looked shocked as if the virus suddenly came out of nowhere. So, I would argue, there is also an element of leadership crisis. A manifestationofthisleadershipcrisiscanbeseeninincoherentstate strategiestocontaintheCOVID-19virus.

Thisrevealsandaggravatesalong-standingpre-COVID-19problemin the country, which is fundamentally linked with our fragile democratic institutions. Due in part to weak public institutions, leaders have resorted to what they know best. One of which is clientelism in the delivery of social assistance. In many communities, service delivery is riddled with patronage politics on the ground. People have also resorted to self-help practices – locally known as bayanihaninthePhilippinesorgotongroyonginIndonesia-todeal withtheimpactsofCOVID.Letmeframetheself-organisedinitiatives andsolidaritypracticesthroughIwhatcallkapwaurbanism.

Here, “The akoor self (ego) and the iba-sa-akin (others) are one and thesameinkapwapsychology:Hindiakoibasaakingkapwa(Iamno different from others)” (Enriquez 1978, p. 106). Kapwa somehow resonateswiththeAfricannotionofubuntu,whichisaboutsharedor commonhumanity.

The other important concept is the ethic of care. I draw from Fisher andTronto’s(1991,p.40)definitionofcareas"anactivitythatincludes everythingthatwedotomaintain,continue,andrepairour'world'so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web". From this definition, care is a process, and we need to rethink our account of human nature—that humans are interdependent rather than independent. Thus, to place the ethics ofkapwaand care at the center of human life and governance processes requires rethinking many of the assumptionsaboutsocialrealitiesandpoliticalrelations.Forinstance, asTronto(1995,p.142)argues,“Ratherthanseeingpeopleasrational actors pursuing their own goals and maximizing their interests, we must instead see people as constantly enmeshed in relationships of care”.

This is where the framing of kapwaas shared identity amplifies our connectedness and entanglements with fellow human beings (and otherspecies)whomighthaveunevenbutalsosharedvulnerabilitiesin times of crisis. By offering the notion of kapwaurbanism, I seek to highlighturbansolidaritypracticesthatarerootedincare,mutualaid, multipleformsofresistanceandeverydayusesofpublicspaceinMetro Manila.

Mynotionofkapwaurbanismdrawsontwostrandsofthought.Firstis the concept of kapwa, which means shared identity, and is the core concept of psycho-social relations in Filipino social psychology. The most popular manifestation of kapwa urbanism today is the Community Pantry Movement. The first Community Pantry was initiated by Ana Patricia Non, an entrepreneur who placed a small bamboocarttoencouragepeopletodonateandtakethingstheyneed fortheday(seeFigure3.1).

The principle is “Give according to your ability. Take according to your need”. This simple principle has inspired many Filipinos. As of May 6, less than two months since Patricia Non placed a bamboo cart on Maginhawa Street, there havebeenover6700communitypantriesinthePhilippines(Maghanoy,2021). TherehavebeenmanyinterpretationsofCommunityPantriesinthePhilippines andIwouldnotbefocusingonthem.Someacademicshaveframeditasbotha clearexpressionofFilipinobayanihan(solidarity)intimesofcrisisandaformof resistance against the inability of the government to provide enough support (Dionisioetal.,2021).

Even before community pantry became a phenomenon in the Philippines, grassroots organisations, community groups and NGOs had already been engagedinvariousformsofgrassrootssolidarity(Recio,Thai&Nguyen,2020). Insomeurbanpoorcommunities,residentshavecultivatedvacantlotstogrow vegetablesforcommunityconsumption.Somegroupshaveputupcommunity kitchenstohelpfeedfamilieswhorelyonhighlyprecariousinformalworklike wastepickingandstreetvending.

Another key element of kapwaurbanism is pakikibaka (solidarity in struggle) as confrontative value of kapwa. Even before the pandemic hit, public places and community spaces had been used to express resistance orcallonpublicofficialstoactoncertainissues.Figure2 below captures the demands by urban poor being displayedinapublicspacewithintheircommunity.Here, wecanseehowkapwaurbanismandcarearedeployed as a demand to make things right, to rectify state interventions that might be fundamentally flawed as an approach.

Keyelementofkapwaurbanismis pakikibaka(solidarityinstruggle).

ThelastelementofkapwaurbanismthatIwill discuss here pertains to the range of everyday uses of public space in Metro Manila. In an on-going research, which examines the governance and spatiality of informal street vending in three Asian metropolises, we used a 2 km by 20 km transect map to locate the presenceandintensityofstreetvendingInMetroManila. The transect map traverses four local governments (see Figure3below). We used google street view to identify andcapturetheactivities.

We also document other activities that appropriate public space in the areas within the transect map. We have identified six other appropriations, but I will just focus here on four of them – playing, seating, greening, and production (which could be related to economic production or house work) – see Figure 4 below. Arguably, these activities entail social interaction and care activities – things that nurture us as social beings and cultivate our relationship with fellow human beings orwithnature(inthecaseofgreeningorgardening).

To what extent do these activities shape the public space in Metro Manila? Greening is present in about a third of the accessible location;seatingisobservedin22%ofthespots.Productionandplay are present in about 18% of the transect . These numbers reveal at least two things: Metro Manila residents are very social; they are willingtoencroachonpublicspacetoundertaketheseactivities.This reveals the lack of state-provided common space and the ingenuity of urban residents to appropriate very limited public space. It is, therefore, important to understand how these everyday practices of kapwa urbanism could enrich the vitality of streetlife and social belonginginmegacitieslikeMetroManila.

Thisbringsmetothechallengestokapwaurbanism.Therearemany hurdles, but I will only discuss three things. First is the tendency to over-formalise/over-regulate things through highly centralised processes. The community pantry is just an example here. The government had initially attempted to regulate (even if their own system has been inefficient) the bottom-up initiatives across the archipelago.

In the end they backtracked due to strong public support for the community pantries. However, the government often resorts to over-regulation of many other aspects of public life in the city. As I alreadynoted,morethanformalisationofsociallife,itisvitalthatwe understand how these everyday practices of kapwaurbanism and informal care networks could promote human flourishing in global SouthcitieslikeMetroManila.

A second challenge concerns the highly punitive approach to this crisis. Some fellow scholars have contended that the state has treated the pandemic as a securityissuemorethanapublic health problem (Bekema, 2021; Hapal, 2021). This has undermined people’s mobility and self-organised initiatives to help each other. Even the organizers of Maginhawa community pantry felt threatened at some point when some police personnel associated the mutual aid initiatives the Communist Party of the Philippines, a typical red-taggingtacticonthepartof thegovernment.

Bekema,J.D.L.C.(2021).Pandemicsand the punitive regulation of the weak: experiences of COVID-19 survivors from urban poor communities in the Philippines.ThirdWorldQuarterly,1-17.

Dionisio,J.,Alamon,A.,Yee,D.,Palanca, K.A.J.,SanchezII,F.,Mizushima,S.M.,& Alvarez,J.J(2021).ContagionofMutual AidinthePhilippines:AnInitialAnalysis oftheViralCommunityPantryInitiative as Emergent Agency in Times of Covid-19. Retrieved from: http://philippinesociology.com/contagio n-of-mutual-aid-in-the-philippines/

Enriquez , V. G. ( 1978 ). Kapwa: A core concept in Filipino social psychology. Philippine Social Sciences and HumanitiesReview,42,100–108

Fisher,B.,andTronto,J.C.(1990).Toward afeministtheoryofcaring.InCirclesof care:Workandidentityinwomen'slives, ed. Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson. Albany: State University of New York Press.

The third issue is the tendency to rely on the usual growth-chasing economic paradigm. This will be more critical as governments introduce recovery strategies. In the Philippines, it is crucial to pay attention to the prospects for solidarity-based economic paradigm. Thevariousmutualaidinitiativeswehaveseenshowtheimportance ofexploresolidarity-orientedeconomicmodel.Inthissolidarity-based recovery path, kapwaurbanism can offer insights on how to move forward.

Hapal, K. (2021). The Philippines’ COVID-19 Response: Securitising the Pandemic and DiscipliningthePasaway.JournalofCurrent SoutheastAsianAffairs,1-21.

Solnit, R. (2016). Hope is an embrace of the unknown: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times.TheGuardian15

Maghanoy, C. C. (2021). Community pantries up to 6.7K in PH – DILG. The Manila Times. Retrieved from: https://www.manilatimes.net/2021/05/06/ne ws/community-pantries-up-to-6-7k-in-ph-dil g/870868

Recio,R.B.,Thai,H.,Nguyen,P.2020.Therole of solidarity economy in surviving a crisis: What governments can learn from street workers’ responses to the pandemic.Policy Forum. Retrieved from https://www.policyforum.net/the-role-of-a-s olidarity-economy-in-surviving-a-crisis/

Tronto,J.C.(1995).Careasabasisforradical politicaljudgments.Hypatia,10(2),141-149.