Manila, Metro Manila, Mega Manila

For those of you not in the know, there are three stars on the flag of the Philippines: one for Luzon (dominated by the island of the same name and by Manila), one for the Visayas (which contains several major islands), and one for the southern Mindanao region.

This makes the regions equal in theory, but not in practice. By now, the island of Luzon contains almost 50 million of the nation's estimated population of 92 million. In contrast, there are 20 million-something in Mindandao and close to 20 million scattered throughout the Visayas.

Manila is the big megillah in this picture. Defining precisely what constitutes Manila can be a tiresome exercise, given that you have the City of Manila, the National Capital Region (less formally known as the Manila Metrpolitan Area or Metro Manila), Greater Manila, and the more-recent mega-definition, Mega Manila.

The City of Manila is like the City of London (a smallish place within a very large area that carries its name) and not like New York City, which is a collection of smaller boroughs.

Oh, wait. The City of Manila is not nearly as strange as the City of London, which has a resident population of 8,000 people and has existed since the time of the Romans--and what did the Romans ever do for England anyway?

The City of Manila contains the original city, almost 2 million people, and most of the cool old Spanish stuff, the big cathedral, and the country's presidential palace. It was named after a variety of mangrove tree. There are plenty of mangroves in the Philippines; it's hot there, you know.

Metro Manila is also quite precisely defined, and has an estimated population of about 11.5 million. So-called "Mega Manila" extends up, down, and out from the main metro area as much as 40 to 50 miles.

You can drive north, for example, through a corner of Bulacan province and into Pampanga province, through miles of flat rice fields, only to re-submerge into plenty of traffic and people once you reach the City of San Fernando and Angeles City. Another million or so people are found here, most of them doing hard, physical labor for a few dollars a day and/or waiting for remittances from relatives and friends.

Mega Manila might have 35 million people, in other words, roughly comparable to California in about one-eighth the space. Even so, having some fun with numbers, that equates to only 700 people per square kilometer. Compare this to almost 7,000 per square kilometer in San Francisco and other highly urbanized cities across the globe.

Even so, paraphrasing Wavy Gravy (and no, I wasn't at Woodstock and am not stuck in the 60s), "what Manila has in mind every morning is breakfast in bed for 35 million."

The Philippines and numerous other Asian countries have developed cultures that put much less of an emphasis on personal space than we twitchy Westerners. There is a concomitant much higher emphasis on group dynamics, eg, learning to blend into enormous clots of people and traffic, and not throwing a punch if someone sits on top of you in a jeepney.

Even so, there are severe logistical problems involved in housing, feeding, transporting--and finding work--for this many people in such a relatively small place.