The Sinking City of Concealment: Indigenous Life and Smart Vulnerability in the Philippines’ Green Utopia

The Philippines’ capital, Manila, is sinking. In response, the government has begun constructing New Clark City, an alternative capital when Manila becomes uninhabitable due to climate-related catastrophe. However, this proposed infrastructural solution has produced dispossession. This paper examines the complexities of addressing climate change through large-scale infrastructure while navigating Indigenous vulnerabilities in the Philippines. Using the concept of smart vulnerability, it analyzes how infrastructure intended to mitigate climate risks for Manila simultaneously displaces Indigenous communities such as the Aeta communities, whose land is appropriated for New Clark City. Through its construction, New Clark City becomes the site of competing vulnerabilities, where efforts to safeguard the national capital city clash with the forced displacement of Indigenous people from their land. The essay traces the materialities and discursive foundations of this tension by examining how the state utilizes mobilizes narratives of collapse, scientific knowledge and sustainability to justify the project. Together, these processes create a hierarchy of vulnerability in which Indigenous dispossession is obscured under the imperative of climate adaptation. Through this analysis, the essay sheds light on the entanglement of infrastructure, life and climate emergency in the Philippines, revealing how responses to environmental crisis can reproduce existing inequalities even as they seek to mitigate future risk.