Category: Comment and op-ed

Empire as insular, unsophisticated, incoherent

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Commentary on Scott Kirsch’s American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire

At the 2025 AAG Meeting in Detroit, I was part of an author meets readers panel for Scott Kirsch’s American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire.

The panel was organized by Christian C. Lentz, Michael Hawkins, and Joseph Palis, and included commentary from Kristian Saguin, Mona Domosh, Don Mitchell, and myself.

A version of our comments was published in September 2025 for the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. What follows is my original unabridged commentary.

Let me begin by making a distinction between the violence and injustice of American imperialism on one hand, and its sophistication, coherence, and success on the other. Though at perpetual risk of erasure, the evidence for the former in the Philippines is plentiful. But this is not necessarily evidence of a total, nor monolithic, nor coherent project.

To resist the erasure of American imperialism, and to understand its ongoing legacies, it is important not to ascribe to it more power than it could actually muster. We could instead name its weaknesses and contradictions, through finer-grained close studies, and show just how vain, incomplete, and unsuccessful its schemes are. And what better way to do this than to study Great Men and their Grand Designs, at the height of their hubris?

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Measuring the Manila square meter

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

This essay originally appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition titled “Living Spaces: Hyperreal Estate and the Architecture of Dispossession“, curated by Alice Sarmiento. I wrote it in conversation with, and with thanks to, Alice Sarmiento, Andre Ortega, and Maria Khristine Alvarez.

Consider the average Manila billboard.

It is many times larger than the average Manila home. Perched above Manila’s hypertensive roads, it gets better breeze, sunlight, and sight lines than the average Manila home; its floodlights consume more power than several average Manila homes.

The visuals of the average Manila billboard are also larger than the average Manila life—especially when they peddle condominiums, those new average Manila homes for the 21st century. They feature models with impossibly white, impossibly smooth skins, living impossibly carefree lives of minutes-away convenience from the best that the city can offer, all under impossibly blue skies.

From a messaging point of view, the average Manila billboard needs to be larger than life. It must, after all, be heard above the jostle of shoulders, the knots in our backs, and the blare of last night’s death toll—all before we heave and lurch our way onto the next billboard.

It then needs to tell, within the limits set by 216 square meters,[1] convincing lies: small lies, about the life of grandeur possible within an eighteen square-meter unit,[2] about how the baked air takes your breath away, or about the mysterious dues and fees that await.

Fig. 1. About twelve 18m2 Manila studio units can fit within a 216m2 Manila billboard.

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Retelling the Philippines’ ‘turnaround story’

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Originally published as an Asia Research Brief with the York Centre for Asian Reseach, 3 July 2014. The argument outlined here was first developed in Cardenas, K. (2014) “Urban Property Development and the Creative Destruction of Filipino Capitalism”. In W. Bello and J. Chavez (eds.) State of Fragmentation: The Philippines in Transition. Bangkok: Focus on the Global South, and appears in a condensed form in Cardenas, K. (2014). “Cash-crop condominiums.” Philippine Daily Inquirer, 16 March 2014.

Long the exception to a region of dynamic export-oriented economies, recent years have seen the Philippine economy deliver unusually impressive numbers, receive successive votes of confidence from credit rating agencies, and emerge as an unusually bright spot in an otherwise gloomy global economy. In 2013, its GDP grew at a rate of 7.2 percent, second only in the region to China. Over the course of the Great Recession, it grew at a pace that compared favourably with its middle-income and Southeast Asian peers; its average growth over the same period was also at its fastest in its recent history.

The causes behind this growth have been firmly established: a reinvigorated mining sector, robust remittance inflows from overseas Filipinos and a rapidly-growing services offshoring industry. Its effects, however, remain only partially understood. What is so far apparent is that the growth has failed to address the high levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality that have been persistent features of Philippine underdevelopment. If the new wealth has so far failed to translate into the well-being of Filipinos, then where did it go? Continue reading “Retelling the Philippines’ ‘turnaround story’” →