Politics and Place: Baguio Center Mall and the Negotiation of Space

Our study investigates how the entry of the global into the local and the engagements of the latter with the former materially reconfigures both. More generally, we seek to complicate existing accounts of how spaces become places, grounding our own in a specific moment in Baguio’s history of urban development and recent gentrification. Looking at Baguio Center Mall (BCM) and the displacements/changes it created in barangay Kagitingan, the site of its development, as a sign of globalization processes engulfing Baguio in the wake of the 1990 earthquake, we argue that the local is never fully effaced. Working with the typology of categorical distinctions elaborated by the architect and cultural studies scholar Kim Dovey in his work on “becoming-places” (public/private, day/night, legal/illegal, sacred / secular, local/global), we detail how the Kagitingan community accommodates the encroachments of exogenous forces by troubling the boundaries and dichotomies enforced by the regulatory authorities of late-Capital and what is now called neo-liberal governance. We conclude that in its engagement with global flows, the local is able to deploy particularities of place with remarkable creativity so as not to be overcome by such encroaching forces from without.