Argumentative Essay Writing:

I disagree with this project. While the congestion of Metro Manila is one of the biggest
problems the Philippines holds nowadays, with the city being top 1 of the most
congested cities in the world1, this solution still is a very flawed and not well thought out
plan. One of the main problems this plan presents is that it promotes the spread of
COVID-19 from Metro Manila, the epicenter of the disease in the Philippines 2, to cities
who holds low numbers of cases. A simple solution is to simply wait for the pandemic to
die down.

1. Answer the following questions: (5 pts. each)

A. What is a genuine open city as conceptualized by Neil Brenner?

A genuine open city as described by Neil Brenner is a city that is not only
accessible to all classes of people, from the poor all the way up to the rich,
instead of being only viable to those of the upper class, but also where the social
needs of its inhabitants is a higher priority than the gain of private groups.3

B. Cite an example that gentrification is actually happening today in Metro Manila or

in other highly urbanized cities.
One of the key characteristics of gentrification is the displacement of those in the
lower class on the lower side of the income spectrum, mainly caused by the ever-
increasing population count in Metro Manila therefore forcing the city to urbanize
more and more, leaving those in the lower class in the dust.

1
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-world-s-most-densely-populated-cities.html
2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Philippines#April_2021
3
Neil Brenner, “Open city or the right to the city?,” TOPOS: The International Review of Landscape Architecture
and Urban Design, 85, 2013, 42-45.
 C. To whom is the city for according to Anna Minton? Discuss.
Anna Minton wrote this blog in order to express her opinions and observations,
those of in agreement, on the concept of “the right to the city” which originates
from the book written by Henri Lefebvre titled “Le Droit a la Ville” which translates
as “The Right to the City” into English. The concept of “the right to the city”
states that the power over transforming and producing space is democratized in
order to negate the negative social and spatial effects brought upon by capitalism
over cities and spaces, therefore giving its inhabitants the power to self-manage,
or in other words, giving them “the right to the city.4”

4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_the_city