Controlling Nature,

Disciplining Human Nature

Floods in Singapore and Metro Manila, 1945–1980s
Kah Seng Loh and Michael D. Pante

䊓
ABSTRACT
A history of urban floods underlines the state’s efforts to discipline people
as well as to control floodwaters. We focus on two big cities in Southeast
Asia—Singapore and Metro Manila—in the period from after World War
II until the 1980s. During this period, both cities traversed similar paths of
demographic and socioeconomic change that had an adverse impact on
the incidence of flooding. Official responses to floods in Singapore and
Manila, too, shared the common pursuit of two objectives. The first was to
tame nature by reducing the risk of flooding through drainage and other
technical measures, as implemented by a modern bureaucracy. The second
was to discipline human nature by eradicating “bad” attitudes and hab-
its deemed to contribute to flooding, while nurturing behavior considered
civic-minded and socially responsible. While Singapore’s technocratic re-
sponses were more effective overall than those in Metro Manila, the return
of floodwaters to Orchard Road in recent years has highlighted the short-
comings of high modernist responses to environmental hazards. This article
argues that in controlling floods—that is, when nature is deemed hazard-
ous—the state needs to accommodate sources of authority and expertise
other than its own.

KEYWORDS
disasters, floods, high modernism, Metro Manila, Singapore, urban history
䊔

A history of floods reveals not only the impact of human development

on the environment, but also the state’s efforts to discipline people
in addition to controlling floodwaters. In the period from after World
War II to the 1980s, two big cities in Southeast Asia—Singapore and
Metro Manila—experienced rapid population growth, in-migration,
urbanization, and economic development, changes that had an ad-
verse impact on the environment and that worsened the incidence of
flooding. As disaster scholars like Piers Blaikie and colleagues (1994)
and Mark Pelling (2003) have argued, these floods were not merely
natural phenomena; arguably, political, demographic, and socioeco-
nomic causes played a bigger role than the natural processes.
Nature and Culture 10(1), Spring 2015: 36–56 © Berghahn Books
doi:10.3167/nc.2015.100103
 CONTROLLING NATURE, DISCIPLINING HUMAN NATURE 䊔
This article extends the human element in floods beyond causes
to responses. In postwar Singapore and Metro Manila, state efforts
to control floods pursued two aims: to tame nature and to discipline
human nature. The first aim was to reduce the risk of flooding through
technical measures implemented by the bureaucracy. As Greg Bankoff
and Dorothea Hilhorst (2009) point out, the perception of floods as
extraordinary events to be tackled and resolved is a modern perspec-
tive that differs from customary views that floods are part of the nat-
ural or divine order of things and thus inevitable or preordained. The
second aim, less obvious, was to eradicate “bad” attitudes deemed
to contribute to flooding and to nurture socially responsible behav-
ior. These state efforts were, to quote James Scott (1998), “high mod-
ernist,” involving an ambitious scientific-rationalist attempt to master
human nature, not just nature. The high modernist framework raises
questions about the social costs of flood control and, more generally,
any form of control of the environment.

Singapore and Metro Manila

Our focus on high modernism renders Singapore and Metro Manila

comparable, notwithstanding political, economic, and social differ-
ences between the two cities. On one level, these considerable dif-
ferences illustrate how flood control worked in different contexts.
Postwar Singapore was a small British colony that became a sovereign
nation-state in 1965. By contrast, the city of Manila (and after 1975
Metro Manila) was bigger in size and population and was the capital
of an archipelagic nation-state that gained independence from Amer-
ican rule in 1946. In addition, there was an administrative difference:
while Singapore had a centralized government, excepting a brief pe-
riod of city government in the 1950s, Manila had its own mayor and
government separate from the national government. In 1975, dictator
President Ferdinand Marcos established Metro Manila as a juridical
entity by creating the Metro Manila Commission to administer the
metropolitan area, comprising the city of Manila and sixteen cities
and towns surrounding it, each with their own mayor and municipal
government. As the Philippines’ primate city, Metro Manila received
migrants from various provinces and was thus arguably a more dif-
ficult proposition for urban planning than Singapore (Hollnsteiner
1969: 157). However, it should be noted that Singapore also had a
large demographic hinterland, receiving migrants from China, India,

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䊓 KAH SENG LOH AND MICHAEL D. PANTE

and particularly Malaya, until immigration was curtailed after inde-

pendence (Loh 2013).
There were also political differences between postwar Singapore
and Metro Manila. Since 1959, a single political party, the People’s
Action Party (PAP), ruled Singapore. Because the PAP government im-
plemented, often successfully, robust developmental projects through
the centralized bureaucracy, Singapore is usually held to be a well-
organized city-state. By contrast, the Philippines, formally an American-
style democracy, is commonly seen as plagued by political instabil-
ity and administrative inefficiency. In the first two decades after the
war, neocolonial ties with the United States undermined the country’s
political and economic sovereignty, while a peasant-based uprising
was fought in provinces just outside the metropolitan area. Political
power, too, remained in the hands of powerful clans that comprised
the landowning oligarchy and whose rent seeking provided the state
with its chief means of economic redistribution (McCoy 1994: 10–19).
However, there was greater administrative centralization in the two
decades when Marcos ruled the Philippines, and although neocolo-
nial ties and rural unrest persisted, he succeeded in weakening the
oligarchs to some extent.
The outcomes of flood control in the two cities are not surpris-
ing; this article acknowledges that Singapore’s technical efforts were
more successful than Metro Manila’s. On another level, however, flood
control was a high modernist project, in which Singapore and Metro
Manila shared transurban similarities. Flood control emerges as a po-
litical process in both cities, expressing the dominant politics and tech-
nologies of the times, but also reinforcing such hegemonies. As Scott
(1998) notes, high modernism is a policy approach that transcends
ideological distinctions: it is that singular belief in the power of scien-
tific megaprojects to master both nature and human nature; it appeals
to policy makers of various ideological persuasions.
The high modernist comparability of Singapore and Metro Manila
becomes clearer in the relationship between informal settlers and the
state after the war. Informal settlers in both cities were blamed for floods
because of their practices of building congested housing in hazard-
ous areas and discarding waste into rivers; consequently, they were
also the primary social targets of the state’s flood control efforts. More
importantly, floods were a part of the greater perceived evil that in-
volved informal settlers: unplanned urban development. In postwar
Singapore, dense informal settlements emerged as rapid population
growth led families with multiple children to seek affordable housing

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outside the inner city. Singapore’s settlements also received migrants
from Malaya, some of whom were refugees from the British counter-
insurgency campaign being waged in the countryside against com-
munist guerillas. Similarly, Manila’s informal settlements, many of
which were established in the war-devastated inner city of Intramuros,
housed numerous young families, provincial migrants, and refugees
from the Huk rebellion. In both cities, informal settlers formed semi-
autonomous communities outside the power of the state and the law
(Pinches 1994; Loh 2013).
In the postwar period, informal settlers were considered to be a
social and political problem as much as the technical issue of housing
was. Western urban planners such as Charles Abrams (1965) and Mor-
ris Juppenlatz (1970) depicted unplanned urban growth as a threat to
social order and the sovereignty of the state. Informal settlers were held
to be inert and antimodern, contrary to the orderly city envisaged by the
experts (Singapore Housing and Development Board 1967; Alcazaren,
Ferrer, and Icamina 2011). The planners urged that the removal of in-
formal settlements had to be undertaken at the national level and based
on professional expertise (United Nations Mission of Experts 1951).
As in flood control, state efforts against informal settlements differed
in Singapore, where public housing was a great success, and Metro
Manila, where it was a dismal failure. In Manila, despite efforts at re-
settlement (such as the disastrous case of Sapang Palay in 1963), many
informal communities survived by forming patron-client relationships
with politicians. In Singapore, they were rehoused in public housing
flats and engineered into citizen-workers (Pinches 1994; Loh 2013).
Despite the different outcomes in Singapore and Metro Manila, it
is the high modernist nature of urban planning underpinning the con-
trol of both land use and floods that concerns us here. Flood control
was intertwined with the political contest between informal settlers
and the state over land use in the city. The state’s flood control efforts
attempted to determine how informal settlers should live—in what
sort of housing and where, how waste should be disposed, and what
to do during a flood. The efforts were part of a larger struggle over
how, and by whom, the city was to develop.

Human and Environmental Contexts

One geographer has called Singapore “a naturally flood-prone area”

(Gupta 1985). This is due to the island’s small drainage basins and

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䊓 KAH SENG LOH AND MICHAEL D. PANTE

low-lying land, 90 percent of which is below thirty meters above sea

level (ibid.). Singapore, like Manila, has an equatorial climate with
high humidity (over 80 percent on average). It has high average annual
rainfall of about twenty-four hundred millimeters and experiences
brief, intense rains in localized areas that may cause flash floods.
The period of the northeast monsoon between December and March
increases the likelihood of flooding, particularly during Singapore’s
wettest months, namely, November, December, and January. Further-
more, high tides may inundate coastal areas or cause floods by pre-
venting the runoff of stormwater into the sea (Ng 1997).
With a natural elevation significantly lower than sea level, Metro
Manila is likewise geographically susceptible to flooding (Ilago 2000:
76). The metropolis is situated on a “semi-alluvial floodplain formed
by sediment flow” from a network of rivers in the central portion of Lu-
zon Island (Bankoff 2003: 98). It is bisected into northern and south-
ern halves by the Pasig River, which is not a single river but a water
system connecting smaller rivers coming from adjacent provinces. The
Marikina River, an important feeder into the system, is the source of
the Pasig River’s floodwaters. The Pasig-Marikina river network also
branches out into inland estuaries (esteros) throughout the metropolis
(Tabios, Liongson, and Castro 2000: 17).
In both cities, however, economic and sociopolitical changes have
increased surface runoff and superseded the natural environment as a
cause of floods. Singapore and Metro Manila experienced high birth
and population growth rates after the war. Between 1947 and 1957,
Singapore’s population, buoyed by an annual growth rate of 4.3 per-
cent, increased from 940,000 to 1.4 million. In Metro Manila’s case,
rapid growth continued beyond the first two decades after the war. Be-
tween 1948 and 1970, the population of the metropolitan area more
than doubled from 1.5 to 3.9 million, posting an annual growth rate of
7.2 percent. In Singapore, however, population growth was checked
by a state-organized birth control program from the late 1960s, which
lowered the growth rate to 2.8 percent by 1970.
The two cities also embarked on major development programs
after the war. The Philippines implemented a policy of import sub-
stitution in agriculture and industry that was commonly adopted in
many developing countries. As the economic center of the Philip-
pines, Metro Manila was at the forefront of this industrialization pro-
gram from the 1950s to the early 1960s. The city had the requisite
transportation and communication facilities and a large pool of skilled
and unskilled labor. Beginning in 1962, however, the Philippine econ-

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omy weakened as the Diosdado Macapagal administration turned to
decontrol and devaluation, which continued into the Marcos era be-
tween 1965 and 1986. Under Marcos, a new, state-dominated form of
rent-seeking crony capitalism further weakened the economy (Caoili
1988: 59–61). Singapore briefly experimented with import substitu-
tion until it left Malaysia in 1965, whereupon it switched to a highly
successful strategy of export-led industrialization based on foreign
capital investment in the late 1960s (Rodan 1989).
The environmental consequences of the changes in Singapore
were drainage problems in areas of concentrated human residence and
development. This was the case between the late 1940s and 1960s,
when the city was largely unplanned, with most of the population
residing in shop house cubicles in the congested inner city or in in-
formal settlements at the urban fringes. Yet, human concentration re-
mained the norm under the PAP government. From the 1960s, the PAP
organized the development of Singapore according to a twenty-year
master plan, including the resettlement of people in public housing
estates at the periphery of the city and new towns in the outlying areas
of the island. The new towns were self-sufficient, densely developed
areas with public, social, and commercial amenities. The relocation of
people indicated a high modernist, state-planned approach to hous-
ing and economic development, as semiautonomous communities
were weaved into the fabric of the nation-state and the formal econ-
omy of industry (Loh 2013). Economic planning likewise precipitated
the building of industrial estates like the massive, state-planned Jurong
Industrial Estate, which targeted foreign investors, smaller industrial
estates in the Kallang basin, and light industry in the new towns.
In developed areas, much of the ground surface was paved over
by roads and other development and became impervious to storm-
water (Rahman 1985). It would seem that urban planning may make
floods less of a problem, but the occurrence of floods into the 1970s,
despite the intervention of state planning in the previous decades,
suggests that this was not the case. In some instances, planners had
not taken flooding properly into account, while in other instances,
their efforts had been inadequate. Construction activity, leading to the
clearing of vegetation, leveling of hills, and increased sedimentation
in rivers and drains, worsened the drainage problem (ibid.). In the
1970s, flooding occurred in eastern areas like Kaki Bukit, Kampong
Kembangan, and Pachitan Estate, where recent public housing devel-
opments overwhelmed the drainage capacity of the Siglap Canal (Yap
1985).

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䊓 KAH SENG LOH AND MICHAEL D. PANTE

Similarly, siltation of waterways like the rivers and esteros, which

served as the main transportation network in the early years of ur-
banization, occurred in Manila. Siltation led to water pollution and
further incidents of flooding, especially in low-lying areas, and greatly
reduced the drainage capacity of the esteros (Liongson 2000: 5). The
problem, already a source of concern for the American colonizers
during the early twentieth century (Pante 2011: 191–192), worsened
after World War II. In 1948 the mayor of Manila recalled that although
the rains of the early 1920s were heavier, the floods were less serious
because the canals were deeper and the esteros were wider then (Ma-
nila Times 1948a: 12). In the postwar years, unbridled development
in the uplands and the consequent deforestation of the watersheds
of Marikina and Montalban also caused significant erosion of topsoil
and further siltation of the Pasig-Marikina river system (Zoleta-Nantes
2000a: 43–44, 65–66).
By the 1950s, a new geography of flooding became apparent
in Manila. As in Singapore, the development of permanent housing
made of “strong materials” penetrated previously rural hilly areas to
the east of Manila, with the increase in paved surfaces reducing the
capacity of the surface to absorb rainwater (ibid.: 65–66). The con-
tinuous flow of migrants to Manila also exerted great pressure on its
waterways and increased the frequency and ferocity of floods not only
in the city of Manila but also in adjacent cities and municipalities
(Zoleta-Nantes 2000b: 38). The developments took a major toll not
just on the drainage system but also on the river-estero system. In ad-
dition, rapid urbanization also brought about problems such as ineffi-
cient solid waste disposal (frequently thrown into the river system) and
increased deforestation. Informal communities were the people most
affected by these developments, yet they were also frequently blamed
by local authorities for them (City of Manila 1955).
With these geographical changes, the low-lying areas of down-
town Manila became even more flood-prone. Just “a few hours of
moderately intense rainfall” would quickly submerge densely pop-
ulated districts like Tondo, San Nicolas, Santa Cruz, and Sampaloc
under several feet of water (Marikina Project Coordination Committee
1954: 22). The situation worsened in the 1960s: around 70 percent of
Manila was rendered vulnerable to floods ranging from 3.6 to 4.5 me-
ters deep (Bankoff 2003: 100). Geographically, too, flooding encom-
passed a larger area. From the 1950s to the 1970s, districts outside the
city of Manila also became flood-prone, including Navotas, Malabon,

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Caloocan, Pasay, San Juan, and even parts of Quezon City, the new
capital city (from 1948 to 1976).

A Planned Drainage System in Singapore

In postcolonial Singapore, flood control was chiefly organized by

state agencies like the Drainage Department and the Public Works
Department. The role played by nonstate actors was minor, reflecting
the heavy intervention of the state in daily life and the general weak-
ness of civil society and interest groups. The PAP government focused
on physical adjustments and technical expertise, to be executed by
an efficient centralized bureaucracy. In its drainage work, the govern-
ment’s aim was not merely to prevent floods, but also to facilitate de-
velopment in the catchment area and to maximize land use in a small
territory of seven hundred square kilometers. Planning took place at
three comprehensive levels: master planning for the city-state; local
drainage plans to accommodate specific land use; and on-site guide-
lines to prevent localized flooding.
The state sought to maintain, improve, and upgrade the drainage
system and prevent the obstruction of runoff. Among other measures,
the authorities built drains and diversion canals, widened and deep-
ened existing drains, erected tidal gates, and constructed water reten-
tion ponds (Singapore Public Utilities Board 2011). These measures
were supplemented by efforts to forecast the occurrence of storms,
enlarge the capacity of water storage reservoirs, and raise the height of
low-lying areas (Rahman 1985). The Drainage Department was tasked
with approving and organizing drainage works, ensuring adequate
surface drainage, and preventing floods. It also sought to regulate
public and private developers to build adequate drainage systems for
housing and industrial developments (Yap 1985). The legislative basis
of the department’s work was the 1976 Water Pollution Control and
Drainage Act, which forbade unauthorized blockage of public drains
and canals. Another state agency, the Public Works Department, was
responsible for implementing public schemes for drainage and flood
alleviation.
At the birth of the nation-state in the mid-1960s, technical con-
siderations were predominant when the Public Works Department
explored various options to alleviate flooding in Bukit Timah. As the
Bukit Timah Canal ran through a densely built area, the department

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䊓 KAH SENG LOH AND MICHAEL D. PANTE

could not simply enlarge the canal to increase its discharge capacity,
and diverting water into a nearby reservoir was deemed to be un-
economical. The department decided instead to build two secondary,
concrete-lined canals to divert water into the sea via the Ulu Pandan
and Kallang Rivers. It explained that the canals, with an internal diam-
eter of 13.5 feet and the largest canals ever attempted in Singapore,
would “convey the required amount of discharge through tunnels of
minimum size and with minimum loss of energy” (Singapore Public
Works Department 1967: 41).
The use of concrete—for both drainage canals and public hous-
ing—was a much desired mark of modernity in postcolonial Singa-
pore, in contrast to the “natural” banks of rivers and the “primitive”
wood and attap structures of kampong houses. Underlying the fixa-
tion with concrete was a preference for visual order: when it built an
outlet drain in Bukit Ho Swee Estate, the Public Works Department
announced how it “transformed a muddy and ill-defined creek into
a pleasant, easily maintained, well-defined canal” (Singapore Public
Works Department 1969: 42). The canal at Alexandra, which had wit-
nessed intense housing and light industry development by the state,
was also lined with concrete; the department declared, “Flooding is
no longer a menace” (Singapore Public Works Department 1967: 43).
Yet, these early efforts could not prevent a major flood in De-
cember 1969, which highlighted Singapore’s transition from a colony
to a nation-state. Five people died in the floods, called Singapore’s
worst in thirty-five years, which affected ten thousand people, par-
ticularly farmers in Bedok and Potong Pasir, and brought the city to a
standstill (Straits Times 1969: 1). The lead actor in the aftermath was
the state, specifically the Ministry of Social Affairs, the police, and
the military, which organized relief works, established law and order
in the flooded city, and cleaned up the debris (ibid.: 1). A clash was
revealed, however, between competing needs for development and
flood control when an official spokesperson stressed the high cost of
alleviation works for rare events that supposedly occurred only once
in thirty-five years (Campbell 1969: 10). The Housing and Develop-
ment Board denied that its land reclamation works for public housing,
which pushed the southeastern shoreline half a mile into the sea, had
any influence on the tides (ibid.). In response, the state increased the
drainage capacity in flood-prone areas, lining more canals with con-
crete and building diversion canals in Bukit Timah.
It did not take thirty-five years but less than a decade for disaster to
strike again, when serious floods inundated much of the island in De-

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 CONTROLLING NATURE, DISCIPLINING HUMAN NATURE 䊔
cember 1978 and killed seven people. Here, in contrast to the 1969
floods, flood control was to reinforce the development of postcolonial
Singapore. The Drainage Department undertook a more ambitious
response “to beat the big floods” (Yeo 1979: 1). From a mere S$2.3
million budget allocated to drainage works in 1972, the department
spent S$200 million to upgrade existing drains and canals and to build
new ones in 1979 and the early 1980s (Ng 1997). The agency carried
out alleviation works in public housing estates and new towns in Ang
Mo Kio, Toa Payoh, and Serangoon, and in remaining kampongs like
Potong Pasir. A two-kilometer stretch of the Siglap Canal was also wid-
ened to accommodate existing and future housing developments in
Kaki Bukit, Kampong Kembangan, and Frankel Estate (Yap 1986). The
state’s response was not limited to housing areas, either: at the import-
ant commercial district of Orchard Road, a 2.5-kilometer stretch of
the Stamford Canal from Nicoll Highway to the Mandarin Hotel was
deepened and widened, as well as a 1.2-kilometer tributary between
the Mandarin Hotel and Ming Court (Yap 1985). An open drain at Or-
chard Road was converted into a closed drain with a pedestrian mall
built over it, adding, the Drainage Department noted, to the visual
appeal of the area. The department hailed the floods in Orchard Road
as being “a thing of the past” (ibid.).
Flood control in Singapore aimed, however, not only at construct-
ing concrete-lined canals, but also at conferring citizenship upon the
residents of a modern city-state. In the 1969 floods, state-organized
evacuation was robustly implemented over the wishes of many resi-
dents to remain within their houses and safeguard their belongings; the
authorities admitted that although “most of the people [in the New-
ton Circus area] do not want to come out of their homes, but as the
water rises higher, they just don’t have a choice” (Straits Times 1969:
1). Two years earlier, the Drainage Department had announced the
disciplining of nature in the low-lying, densely built area of Geylang
by lining the Geylang River with concrete and building a tidal gate at
the mouth of the river. It then sought a further mastering of nature—
human nature this time—by prohibitive means. Placing the blame on
residents who wantonly discarded garbage into the river, leading to
“unsightly scenes, with rubbish floating on black water,” the author-
ities constructed gratings along outlet drains to prevent people from
doing this (Singapore Public Works Department 1967: 44).
Flood control had a great social impact in consolidating ongo-
ing developments and facilitating changes that transformed people’s
lives, particularly for informal settlers. Following the 1978 floods, the

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Drainage Department paid close attention to technical detail so that

its works would not disrupt commercial and social activities in shop-
ping complexes, schools, and public roads (Yap 1985). By contrast,
the resettlement of informal settlers to make way for flood control
works was a large-scale social dislocation that the bureaucrats ea-
gerly sanctioned. In the late 1960s, the Public Works Department en-
countered great difficulties in acquiring and clearing land occupied
by informal settlers.1 In Bukit Timah, informal settlers who objected
to resettlement were framed in official reports as an obstruction to the
necessary progress of the nation. In one case of eviction in 1968, the
Public Works Department was clearly on the side of development,
stating that “with massive machinery already at hand, the contractors
are confident of completing the job by 1970” (Singapore Public Works
Department 1968: 27).

Floods and the Expansion of the Philippine State

Compared to Singapore, the administration of postwar Metro Manila

was less effective in controlling floods through technical means. When
Typhoon Gertrude struck the city in September 1948, torrential rains
lasted for twenty-four hours, and 116.3 millimeters (4.58 inches) of
rain were recorded for that day. At least four-fifths of the metropolitan
area were flooded and brought to a standstill, while damage amounted
to several million pesos (Manila Times 1948b: 1, 1948c: 12). An ed-
itorial in Manila Times called Manila’s drainage system “hopelessly
antiquated” and described the response of the government, past and
present, as “more talk and as little action” (Manila Times 1948d: 4).
Unlike Singapore, where the administration was centralized after
1959, the city government of Manila attempted to deflect criticism by
blaming Malacañang for the 1948 floods. Manila mayor Manuel de la
Fuente argued that the national government should take the initiative
to deal with the floods, given the lack of funds at the local level. He
trumpeted two infrastructural plans for flood mitigation. One was a
proposed canal to divert water upstream to a point along Manila Bay
near the town of Las Piñas, while the other would clear all city canals
and esteros for more efficient drainage. However, the mayor warned
that, without financial assistance from the national government, these
projects would remain merely plans (Manila Times 1948a: 1, 12).
In the 1950s, Mayor Arsenio Lacson implemented flood mitigation
projects along similar modernist lines. During his term, he devoted

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 CONTROLLING NATURE, DISCIPLINING HUMAN NATURE 䊔
1.8 million pesos to the construction of the Blumentritt interceptor, a
drainage project designed to prevent floods in the Sampaloc district.
This project complemented another “gigantic project” that cost the
city government 800,000 pesos: the improvement of the Sampaloc
estero as a drainage facility (City of Manila 1958: 5–6). To these lo-
cal measures the national government belatedly responded. In 1952
Public Works and Communications undersecretary Vicente Orosa re-
activated the Flood Control Commission and proposed the drafting of
a master plan to drain the Greater Manila area (Hoskins 1952: 219).
However, despite all these attempts by both the national and local
governments, floods continued to be a serious problem in Manila in
the 1960s and the succeeding decades (Zoleta-Nantes 2000b: 43–44).
In 1972, the role of the national government in flood control
changed significantly when Marcos declared martial law in the Phil-
ippines. Months prior to this, in July 1972, a devastating flood had
hit Metro Manila, leaving more than 600 people dead and 370,647
homeless (Bankoff 2002: 74). Marcos was not more effective than his
predecessors in flood control; in fact, floods worsened as Marcos and
his first lady, Imelda, vacillated between gross neglect of flood victims
and opportunistic responses aimed at reaping political capital from
floods in the 1970s and 1980s (Warren 2013).
More than his predecessors, however, Marcos was able to expand
the administrative apparatus for flood control and conjure a personal
role in it. In August 1974, torrential rains hit Greater Manila and flooded
70 percent of the metropolitan area. The state flexed its muscles in
response. By the second day, around one thousand families were
evacuated to nearby public schools, with the navy providing rescue
assistance. At least seven evacuation and feeding centers were estab-
lished in the Greater Manila area (Parazo and Baluyot 1974: 1, 10).
Marcos called for a meeting of the national disaster control commit-
tee and, with his three children, conducted his own survey of flood
conditions in Manila and nearby areas aboard a navy amphibian. He
also ordered the release of two million pesos to the Department of
Social Welfare for relief aid and five million pesos from the Special
Highways Fund for contingencies.
Marcos’s contribution to flood control should be seen as part of
the political culture of the Philippines, which perceived flooding as
a “governance problem” that threatened the stability of the young
nation-state (Ilago 2000: 75). The postwar state was concerned with
maintaining stability in the midst of crises like floods. It nationalized
relief and social services, allowing it to play a leading and expanding

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role in disaster efforts, which amounted to an “usurpation of emer-

gency management by the state” relative to nongovernmental orga-
nizations (Bankoff and Hilhorst 2009: 689). This process was evident
in the evolution of the social welfare arm of the government after the
war. As early as 1947, the prewar Bureau of Public Welfare was reor-
ganized into the Social Welfare Commission, which was tasked with
enforcing laws on relief and other social services and overseeing the
operations of charitable and relief agencies (Jocano 1980: 103). The
state’s role in disaster relief increased in subsequent years due to the
Huk rebellion in the provinces. In 1951, President Quirino issued an
executive order that created the Social Welfare Administration (SWA).
The SWA’s Division of Public Assistance was responsible for providing
relief to victims of natural disasters. Relief efforts were admittedly con-
strained by a number of conditions, such as being given only when
Red Cross supplies and services were unavailable, when the period of
emergency had passed but the victims remained in a vulnerable state,
or when victims were not eligible for the usual forms of assistance.
With such restrictions, the SWA was often criticized for its inadequate
response to floods (ibid.: 125, 149).
Notwithstanding less effective outcomes, postwar governments in
the Philippines pursued a top-down, technocratic approach to floods,
as in Singapore. Arguably, such an approach was intended to efface
the structural deficiencies of a state incapable of addressing structural
inequalities that lay at the root of disasters. The 1952 master plan pre-
pared by the Bureau of Public Works for flood control in the Marikina
River area was distinctly based on technology and its supposed ca-
pacity to control nature: “Basically, the complete solution of the prob-
lem requires two major control issues—the improvement of the city’s
drainage system and the control of the flood waters of Pasig River”
(Marikina Project Coordination Committee 1954: 24).
Thus, when Marcos assumed the presidency, the process of cen-
tralization of political power under his regime extended to two mu-
tually dependent areas of flood control: the administrative structures
that generated and applied the technical knowledge of flood experts
and the implementation of capital-intensive flood control infrastruc-
ture. In 1968, Marcos elevated the SWA to a government depart-
ment and renamed it the Department of Social Welfare (DSW). Eight
years later, a presidential decree renamed the DSW the Department
of Social Services and Development (DSSD) (Jocano 1980). In 1970,
the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC), the first of its
kind in the country’s history, was established, again by presidential

48
 CONTROLLING NATURE, DISCIPLINING HUMAN NATURE 䊔
decree (Bankoff 2002: 85). Two years later, the Typhoon Moderation
and Flood Control Research and Development Council (TMFCRDC)
was created, reflecting the “policy of the state to adopt modern sci-
entific methods to moderate typhoons and prevent destructions by
floods, rains and strong winds” (Kintanar 1978: 2). In its program, the
TMFCRDC even included cloud-seeding operations to moderate the
strength of typhoons (ibid.: 5–6).
While the DSW, DSSD, and NDCC operated at the national level
under Marcos, a similar process to strengthen state structures occurred
at the metropolitan level. On 7 October 1972, the Metro Manila Flood
Control and Drainage Council was established (Bankoff 2003: 107).2
In the year after, the Pasig River Development Council was created
to oversee the implementation of a development program for the Pa-
sig River, which included flood control measures.3 By February 1974,
large-scale flood control projects in Metro Manila commenced, such
as the raising of the river walls along the Pasig River to accommodate
a water level of fourteen meters (Zoleta-Nantes 2000a: 70). In the
same year, the three-phase drainage and sewerage expansion program
for Greater Manila (outlined in the Presidential Proclamation 1157)
was started. The program entailed the construction of interceptors,
vortex stations, treatment plants, and outfall sewers to channel water
into Manila Bay. While the first phase covered the heavily urbanized
central areas of the metropolis, the last two were meant to include the
outlying towns. This megaproject, distinctly high modernist, was but-
tressed by other flood control measures such as the fixing of drainage
mains and the dredging of certain esteros (Bulletin Today 1974: 1).
These administrative and technical measures were similar to those in
Singapore in the 1970s and 1980s.
In Manila, as in Singapore, these high modernist flood control
measures also sought to master human nature in addition to mastering
nature. Philippine government officials blamed informal dwellers for
the floods and took action against them. As early as 1952, the Flood
Control Commission recommended the eviction of squatter settle-
ments living along the esteros and strict enforcement of antidumping
measures in these waterways (Hoskins 1952: 219). Similarly, in lead-
ing state efforts at flood control in Metro Manila, the Department of
Public Works and Highways (DPWH) emphasized not only infrastruc-
tural improvements (such as the installation of drainage and sewerage
systems), but also social discipline, such as shaping waste disposal
patterns and squatter clearance.4 This official perception of informal
settlers held true from the local to the national levels. For instance,

49
䊓 KAH SENG LOH AND MICHAEL D. PANTE

both the Manila city government and the National Economic and
Development Authority blamed urban floods on the encroachment
of esteros by undisciplined slum dwellers (Parazo and Baluyot 1974:
10).
Even academic expertise on the technical and governance dimen-
sions of flooding was often complicit in such social engineering. Though
recent academic literature on floods has begun to incorporate ideas of
community participation (Bankoff and Hilhorst 2009: 689), the domi-
nant framework still regards communities as both assets and liabilities,
aside from being potential (and more or less passive) beneficiaries. It
typically highlights two negative perspectives of informal settlers: their
building of invasive settlements along waterways and their discard-
ing of waste into the water (Ilago 2000: 79). One such study under-
lined the need to mobilize and discipline informal settlers at the level
of the barangay, the smallest administrative unit in the Philippines:
“[B]arangays should be an important part of any flood management
program, specifically in the aspect of solid waste management and the
monitoring of illegal structures that encroach on flood channels and
waterways” (ibid.: 83).
Over the last sixty years, Singapore has been more successful in
flood control than Metro Manila. The severe damage caused by Ty-
phoon Ondoy (Ketsana) in 2009 and Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in
2013 was largely due to the continuing failure of the Philippine ad-
ministration—at both national and municipal levels—to prepare for
catastrophic events. Singapore has also had a more stable government
and centralized administration, while Metro Manila has experienced
the diffusion of power to national and metropolitan levels, the shift
from a long period of dictatorship to a more democratic (but not nec-
essarily more efficient or transparent) government, and frequent, often
confusing changes to the number of public agencies tasked with flood
relief and control. At the same time, a high modernist outlook has per-
vaded attitudes of policy makers and administrators in both Singapore
and Metro Manila, leading to a great reliance on technical means to
address flooding issues. This has also forged a narrow view of the role
of people in flood control; commonly, informal settlers in both cities
have been held culpable for the floods, with their physical eviction
and engineering into socially responsible citizens seen to be essential
for the resolution of the problem.
Despite failures of flood control efforts in Metro Manila, a caveat
ought to be made in relation to the role of the barangay. While still
part of the metropolitan government, many barangay officials had in-

50
 CONTROLLING NATURE, DISCIPLINING HUMAN NATURE 䊔
timate knowledge of the locality and the community. Their interven-
tion was at times crucial for effective disaster management, such as
in October 1988, when town and barangay officials in Metro Manila
took the initiative to issue flood warnings to residents. Interpersonal
ties and communication between local officials and residents worked
better than the impersonal, top-down approach commonly under-
taken by national and provincial bureaucrats (Zoleta-Nantes 2000a:
72). Conversely, poor interaction between flood victims and baran-
gay officials often made the former cynical about the state’s ability
or willingness to assist them (ibid.: 73). To some extent, the role of
the barangay distinguished flood control in the Philippines from the
centralized system in Singapore, which did not have a layer of local
administration.

Conclusion

Since 2010, flash floods have periodically returned to Singapore’s Or-

chard Road, which had been flood-free for a generation. Although far
less devastating than in the Philippines, the floods came as a shock to
the PAP government and to Singaporeans. The Public Utilities Board
declared that flood-prone areas in Singapore had been reduced from
thirty-two hundred hectares in the 1970s to forty-nine hectares in
2012 (Singapore Public Utilities Board 2012). For all its technical ex-
pertise, however, the board had failed to anticipate a simple fact: that
Stamford Canal could no longer cope with the increased intensity of
rains and continuing urban development (Singapore Ministry of the
Environment and Water Resources 2012).
The board’s response was, again, technocratic, raising the level of
Orchard Road, installing flood barriers, and improving drainage. The
response was top-down—the board defined its role as the authority on
flooding and the source of information to the public (Singapore Public
Utilities Board 2011). Yet, a panel of experts on the Orchard Road
floods concluded that, in addition to technical measures, “[the Pub-
lic Utilities Board] should develop and implement a strategic public
outreach programme to educate and involve the general public pro-
actively in its drainage and flood management approaches.” The panel
suggested that shop owners along Orchard Road could install their
own flood barriers and provide information on vulnerable areas to the
authorities. It urged the state to “engage [the] public through active
participation in the planning and delivery” of flood control projects

51
䊓 KAH SENG LOH AND MICHAEL D. PANTE

(Singapore Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources 2012:

iii, 72).
The return of floodwaters to Orchard Road unravels high mod-
ernist flood control as a political process that creates unequal power
relations between the state and the people. It also highlights the intrin-
sic shortcomings of the process. Technocratic prowess aside, the high
modernist state needs to accommodate sources of expertise other than
its own. Despite the establishment of a generally effective drainage
system, Singapore’s experience, like Manila’s, shows the limitations of
flood control by technocratic means alone, particularly when taming
the environment has become adjunct to further urban development.
A more effective response would be to include citizens in flood
control efforts, especially when their views are at variance with tech-
nical and scientific-rationalist perspectives. In the Philippines, fol-
lowing a series of natural disasters in the 1980s, an NGO called the
Citizens Disaster Response Center (CDRC) was established in Sep-
tember 1984. The CDRC adopted a participatory framework that dif-
fered from the state’s top-down approach and technocratic solutions,
which have survived in postauthoritarian Philippines. Its premise was
that people are not just victims or culprits, but play an active, positive
role in combating floods. The community-based disaster manage-
ment framework attempts to combine both technical expertise and
people’s perspectives and resources to draw up hazard maps, form
flood warning and rescue teams, and coordinate evacuation efforts. It
has become increasingly important in the Philippines and elsewhere
(CDRC 1986: 9), and may be a good counterpoint to technical efforts
in Singapore.

䊓
Kah Seng Loh is assistant professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies,
Sogang University. His present research investigates the transnational and
social history of the making of modern Southeast Asia after World War II.
Loh is author or editor of six books, Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit
Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore (2013); Oral History
in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments (coedited, 2013); Controversial
History Education in Asian Contexts (coedited, 2013); The University So-
cialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity (co-
authored, 2012); The Makers and Keepers of Singapore History (coedited,
2010); and Making and Unmaking the Asylum: Leprosy and Modernity in
Singapore and Malaysia (2009). Address: Institute for East Asian Studies,
Sogang University, 35 Baekbeom-ro, Mapo-gu, Seoul 121-742, South Korea.
E-mail: lkshis@gmail.com

52
 CONTROLLING NATURE, DISCIPLINING HUMAN NATURE 䊔
Michael D. Pante is instructor in the Department of History, Ateneo de Ma-
nila University. He obtained his MA in history from the same university and
is currently a PhD candidate at Kyoto University. He is also associate editor
of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. His research
interests are urban history and transportation history. Address: Dept. of His-
tory, 2/F Leong Hall, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines.
E-mail: mpante@ateneo.edu
䊔

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Commission on Higher
Education-Philippine Higher Education Research Network (CHED-PHERNet).

Notes
1. See various items in the annual reports of the Singapore Public Works Depart-
ment from 1966 to 1970.
2. For the full text of this decree, see http://www.lawphil.net/statutes/presdecs/
pd1972/pd_18_1972.html (accessed 3 September 2013).
3. See http://philippinelaw.info/statutes/pd281.html (accessed 3 September 2013).
4. This was in accordance with Executive Order 24 (Zoleta-Nantes 2000a: 68).

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