When progress displaces

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Two public markets in the Visayas – one in Cebu City, the other in Iloilo City – are forcing Filipinos to confront an uncomfortable question: Who is urban development actually for?

In Cebu, the Carbon Public Market – historically described as the “heart that pumps financial lifeblood to poor Cebuanos” – is being transformed through a PHP 5.5 billion joint venture agreement between the city government and Megawide Construction Corporation.

In Iloilo, the Central Market and Terminal Market underwent a PHP 3 billion redevelopment under a 25-year lease agreement with SM Prime Holdings Inc.

Both projects promise modernization. Both have displaced thousands of vendors. And both raise the same core tension between aesthetic progress and economic justice.

A new discussion paper from the University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies frames what is happening in Cebu as “development as deception” – a term that should unsettle anyone who still believes that beautification and progress are the same thing.

THE CEBU CASE: PRIVATIZATION IN THE GUISE OF MODERNIZATION

Dan Ian Niño B. Jaducana’s UP CIDS Discussion Paper Series 2026-11, titled “Development as Deception: Aesthetics of Gentrification in the Carbon Public Market,” draws on focus group discussions and key informant interviews with members of Carbonhanong Alyansa alang sa Reporma ug Bahandianong Ogma sa mga Nanginabuhi (CARBON), an alliance of displaced market vendors and workers. The paper’s central argument is stark: the Carbon Market modernization is not development for the marginalized but privatization dressed up in the language of progress.

The JVA, which began with a groundbreaking ceremony on March 24, 2021, grants Megawide sweeping authority over the market’s operations – including control over entry and exit of goods, fund collection, and the power to set stall rates and entrance fees (Cordova, Manila Bulletin, 2021). At least 8,000 vendors stand to be affected (Sitchon, Rappler, 2022). New tenants reportedly pay PHP 40,000 to PHP 45,000 for stalls, while vendors who cannot afford those rates are relegated to marginal sections with fewer customers.

The toll fees imposed on producers illustrate how the arrangement ripples outward. Vendors interviewed for the UP CIDS paper cited entrance fees of PHP 100 per pig, PHP 50 per tray of eggs, and a jump from PHP 20 to PHP 320 per bañera of fish – costs that inevitably get passed on to consumers. Carbon’s trademark as a source of affordable goods for ordinary Cebuanos is being gutted.

What makes Jaducana’s paper particularly useful for editorial analysis is its deployment of the theoretical framework developed by Christoph Lindner and Gerard Sandoval (2021): the “aesthetics of gentrification.” The concept holds that displacement is justified – and made palatable to the public – through beautification. The attractive infrastructure becomes the disguise. The paper points to Pusô Village as a case in point: hyped as a tourist attraction, it obscures the fact that the vendors who once occupied the space were pushed out to make way for it.

The Cebu City government, rather than serving as a check on private interests, facilitated the arrangement. The Cebu City Market Code was amended in October 2023 to align with the JVA, effectively downgrading vendors from stakeholders and partners of the city government to tenants of a private corporation. A new zoning ordinance reclassified the market from “institutional” to “commercial” status, clearing the legal path for hotels and malls aimed at tourists transiting through the Cebu–Cordova Link Expressway (Sitchon, Rappler, 2025; Seblos, SunStar, 2025).

The vendors did not simply protest. Through CARBON, they commissioned an architect and developed an alternative PHP 757 million renovation plan – one that would modernize infrastructure without displacement, allowing sellers to remain in renovated stalls and integrating vendors into the aesthetics of spaces like Freedom Park rather than erasing them. They pledged to co-fund the plan through their cooperative alongside city funds. During mediation, both the city government and Megawide ignored the proposal.

Attorney Rex Fernandez, the lawyer who championed the vendors’ legal case, was shot dead on Aug. 26, 2021, after filing a complaint against the corporation (Lubiano, Rappler, 2021). The alliance has continued its resistance.

A new city administration under Mayor Nestor Archival has signaled a potential shift, with the mayor publicly stating his intention to renegotiate the JVA’s tariffs and ensure all vendors are included in the agreement (Sitchon, Rappler, 2025). Whether that materializes into structural change remains to be seen.

THE ILOILO CASE: HERITAGE, DISPLACEMENT, AND ENFORCEMENT

In Iloilo City, the redevelopment of the Central Market and Terminal Market under SM Prime Holdings followed a different structural path – a 25-year lease agreement rather than a joint venture – but produced strikingly parallel outcomes.

The Central Market, which opened on Jan. 15, 1912, is one of the oldest public markets in the Philippines. Its Art Deco façade, added in 1938, was designated part of a Cultural Tourism Heritage Zone by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines in 2013. When the PPP was awarded on Aug. 2, 2022, a key promise was that the façade would not be touched. By March 2024, it was demolished.

The legal question remains unresolved. Republic Act 10066 requires NHCP approval before heritage structures can be demolished. The city government cited a 2023 letter from then-NHCP Chair Rene Escalante stating the commission was “amenable” to the project – but that letter did not explicitly authorize demolition. No board resolution from 2022 to 2023 was publicly available confirming clearance. The NHCP’s eventual response, in October 2024, approved revised amendatory plans after the fact.

An administrative complaint filed before the Office of the Ombudsman Visayas on July 4, 2024, accused Mayor Jerry Treñas of grave misconduct and abuse of authority over the façade demolition. Treñas called the complaint “politically motivated.”

On the vendor side, SM occupies roughly 60 percent – approximately 9,000 square meters – of the renovated Terminal Market building. Vendors were allocated the remaining 40 percent, with only 400 “temporary” stalls available for 1,625 vendors. The city government pointed to expanded total vendor capacity across both markets, but critics noted these figures excluded bolanteros. – transient and ambulant vendors who had coexisted alongside the Terminal Market for generations.

A “goodwill” fee controversy erupted during consultations, with stall owners reporting payments of up to PHP 15,000 – without official receipts or clear accounting. The Local Economic Enterprise Office shot down the claims.

On Oct. 28, 2025, vendors, consumer groups, and progressive organizations staged a picket protest two days before the soft opening. Kabataan Partylist Rep. Renee Co called the PPP a “sham development.”

The sharpest edge of the Iloilo case, however, emerged in April 2026. Since the markets reopened, the city’s Local Economic Enterprise Office intensified enforcement of the Iloilo City Market and Slaughterhouse Code of 2009, banning the sale of fruits, vegetables, eggs, meat, and native delicacies outside public markets or within 100 meters of market premises  —  an ordinance that had not been strictly enforced for years. On the night of April 10, tensions erupted along Fuentes Street when a scuffle broke out between vendors and a combined team of LEEO personnel, the Anti-Squatting and Illegal Structure Unit, and the Iloilo City Police Office during a clearing operation. Goods were confiscated. Videos went viral. The word on social media was immediate: “anti-poor.”

The city government’s response added another layer of exclusion. The LEEO set aside around 200 stalls inside the Terminal Market for bolanteros, but priority for those stalls is given to residents and registered voters of Iloilo City (Castor, Rappler, 2026). The policy effectively marginalizes provincial vendors  —  farmers from towns like Cabatuan and San Rafael who haul their harvests into the city  —  by tying market access to voter registration. One vendor from Cabatuan told Rappler that the Market Day rotation assigned to the Terminal Market falls only on Tuesdays: “Are we going to eat only on Tuesdays?” The LEEO rolled out a rotating schedule across six public markets, but vendors said the system falls short  —  designated locations are already congested, and the limited selling windows do not match the perishability of their produce. The residency requirement transforms the palengke from a space of open commerce into a gated privilege, and it raises a fundamental question about who a public market is meant to serve: only those who vote in the city, or everyone who feeds it?

Former Senate President Franklin Drilon intervened on April 14, touring both markets and urging Ilonggos to observe laws and regulations, warning that failure to do so could undermine investor confidence. He said Ilonggos must prove to the company that they are worthy of its investment on a public-owned property.

The pushback was swift. Many pointed out that Drilon serves as an independent director of BDO Unibank Inc., an SM Group entity – raising what could be a conflict of interest in publicly endorsing an SM PPP project. Opposition and critics of the project argued that the redeveloped markets belong to the people, not to SM.

PARALLEL PATTERNS, SHARED BLIND SPOTS

The Cebu and Iloilo cases are not identical. The legal structures differ  —  joint venture versus lease agreement. The private partners differ. The scale of vendor resistance differs, with Cebu’s CARBON alliance mounting a far more sustained and organized campaign, including an alternative development plan, legal challenges, and continued advocacy despite violent reprisals.

But the structural logic is the same. In both cities, public markets that had served as lifelines for low-income producers and consumers were transferred, in whole or in part, to private corporations with profit-driven mandates. In both cities, the language of modernization and beautification was deployed to justify arrangements that reduced the space, agency, and economic security of small vendors. In both cities, policy instruments  —  ordinance amendments, zoning reclassifications, lease agreements  —  were shaped to serve the interests of the private partner.

And in both cities, the people who bore the cost of “progress” were those who could least afford it.

Jaducana’s paper, drawing on the theoretical work of Ruth Glass (1964) and Lindner and Sandoval (2021), names this pattern for what it is: gentrification. Not the gentrification of residential neighborhoods that dominates Western academic literature, but the gentrification of commercial public spaces  —  the conversion of markets built for the masses into sanitized commercial districts that cater to tourists, foreign investors, and the upper-middle class.

The Iloilo background material adds a dimension the Cebu paper does not fully explore: the enforcement mechanism. Cebu’s gentrification operates primarily through pricing – toll fees, rental rates, and shifting schedules that make the market economically unviable for small vendors. Iloilo’s operates through regulation – the sudden enforcement of a dormant ordinance that criminalizes the economic activity of bolanteros who had been part of the market ecosystem for decades, compounded by a residency-and-voter-registration requirement that converts market access into a civic gatekeeping exercise. Both achieve the same end: the displacement of the poor from spaces they had long considered their own.

THE REAL TEST

The question is not whether public markets should be improved. They should. The structures in both cities were aging. Sanitation and safety needed upgrading. No one disputes this.

The question is whether improvement requires privatization – and whether the people who depend on these markets for their livelihoods should have a voice in determining what “development” looks like.

In Cebu, the vendors answered that question with a concrete PHP 757 million alternative plan that would have modernized Carbon without displacement. The city government and Megawide did not even engage with it. In Iloilo, the city government deferred rental rate adjustments for two years under Executive Order No. 21 – but that deferral expires in 2026, and the 25-year lease stretches far beyond any single administration’s capacity to enforce vendor protections.

Regletto Aldrich Imbong’s work on community-driven development, cited in the UP CIDS paper, identifies three elements of genuine development intervention: empowerment, human agency, and public deliberation. By those measures, both projects fall short. The vendors in Carbon were not consulted before the JVA was signed. The bolanteros in Iloilo were not meaningfully accommodated before enforcement began. In both cases, development was something done to the poor, not with them.

Orlando Carvajal, the Cebuano columnist, wrote that development is “about developing facilities small people can use as pathways towards self-reliant progress.” By that standard, what is happening in both Cebu and Iloilo is not development. It is displacement with better lighting.

The Visayan public market – palengke, merkado, tindahan sang kadam-an – is more than just a commercial space. It is also a social institution where farmers from the provinces bring their harvests, where working-class families stretch their daily budgets, where the informal economy sustains millions of Filipinos who will never set foot in a mall. When we hand these spaces to corporations, we are not modernizing them but are converting them from public goods into private assets, and asking the poor to be grateful for the renovation.

That is the deception.

Sources:

Jaducana, Dan Ian Niño B. (2026). “Development as Deception: Aesthetics of Gentrification in the Carbon Public Market.” UP CIDS Discussion Paper Series 2026-11.

Cordova, Calvin. (2021). “Redevelopment Project of P5.5-B Carbon Market Set to Start.” Manila Bulletin.

Sitchon, John. (2022, 2025). Rappler reports on Carbon Market modernization and Cebu City Mayor-Elect Archival.

Seblos, John Paul. (2025). “Vendors: Defer Revision of Zoning Ordinance.” SunStar.

Lubiano, Art. (2021). “Human Rights Lawyer Shot Dead in Cebu City.” Rappler.

Castor, Rjay Zuriaga. (2026). “Iloilo Vendors Struggle to Survive as Crackdown Tightens in Markets.” Rappler.

Carvajal, Orlando P. (2021, 2022). SunStar columns and “Elite Democracy, Cebuano Politics, Carbon Market and Beyond.” Typographics.

Imbong, Regletto Aldrich. (2025). “Community-Driven Development (CDD) Within and Beyond the KALAHI-CIDSS.” UP CIDS.

Lindner, Christoph and Sandoval, Gerard F. (2021). “Aesthetics of Gentrification.” Amsterdam University Press.

Daily Guardian background research on Iloilo Central and Terminal Markets (2026).