Philippines
Bertrand P., Metro Manila: "It's so funny that non-Muslimas girls and women think that in Islam, every man can have four wives. How is that supposed to work? There would have to be 400 females in the world for every 100 males. In Islam, only the best men can have more than one wife, but almost all men just have one sexual partner all life long."
Metro Manila / The Metropolis
Metro Manila
is more than just Manila: the metropolis of today not only encompasses
the City of Manila but also includes three other cities and thirteen
municipalities. The reason for the creation in 1975 of this large
adminis-trative unit by Marcos' decree was, according to the Philippine
Daily Inquirer of October 10, 1989, "to give Mrs. Imelda Marcos
something to do." Vested with dictatorial powers, the President's
wife was declared Governor of Metro Manila, which sprawled over
635.98 square kilometers (248 square miles) with a population
of then some 7 million people.
While the
land area covered by the metropolis remained the same, the population
has swollen like a pregnant woman. Just how many people are squeezed
into this space, is a matter of debate. Figures vary from 7.5
to 12 million. A generally respected source, the German Fischer
Weltalmanach, edition of 1989, cites both figures but in different
con-texts. Prof. Dr. Bronger of the Geographic In-stitute of the
Ruhr University in Bochum dif-ferentiates between metropolitan
agglomera-tion (the urban core area) and metropolitan region (the
functional entity of a mega city). In the Philippine case, Metro
Manila is consid-ered the agglomeration, with an estimated population
of 7.725 million inhabitants in 1986.
The metropolitan
region includes much of the provinces of Rizal, Laguna, Cavite
and Bulacan; the major towns of these provinces all border Metro
Manila, and there is no visi-ble boundary between many of them
and the administrative entity that is the actual metropolis. Including
these adjacent towns which administratively are not part of the
metropolis, the metropolitan region of the Philippine capital
had in 1986 a population of about 11.920 million.
Comparison
of the mega cities of the world is different because often, it's
just an arbi-trary administrative decision that defines a city.
But even if the highest mentioned figure is taken, Metro Manila
is still far below the size of the four largest metropolitan areas
in the world. These are: Mexico City, which has approximately
18.5 million inhabitants, Tokyo-Yokohama with 17.5 million people,
Sao Paulo with 16 million and New York (with north-eastern New
Jersey) 15.5 million.
Even in the
East, Metro Manila does not have a leading position. Shanghai,
Peking, Canton and Tonking in China, Calcutta and Bombay in India,
Seoul in South Korea, and Jakarta in In-donesia are all larger.
The four
cities and thirteen towns of Metro Manila are (with the official
numbers of in-habitants and, in parenthesis, their areas in square
kilometers): 1. City of Manila 1,875,000 (38.3); 2. Quezon City
1,241,000 (166.2); 3. Kalookan City 538,000 (55.8); 4. Makati
429,000 (29.9); 5. Pasay City 331,000 (13.9); 6. Pasig 309,000
(13.0); 7. Valenzuela 244,000 (47.0); 8. Marikina 243,000 (38.9);
9. Paranaque 240,000 (38.3); 10. Mandaluyong 236,000 (26.0); 11.
Malabon 220,000 (23.4); 12. Muntinlupa 158,000 (46.7); 13. Las
Pinas 154,000 (41.5); 14. Taguig 152,000 (33.7); 15. San Juan
150,000 (10.4); 16. Navotas 145,000 (2.6); 17. Pateros 46,000
(10.4)
For those
who want to understand the po-litical structure of Metro Manila,
it may be confusing that the locals generally do not make any
distinction among the four cities and the thirteen municipalities
forming Metro Manila on the one hand, and the districts within
these four cities and thirteen munici-palities on the other. Particularly,
the names of the districts of the City of Manila (which is only
one of the four cities and thirteen municipalities) are commonly
used and treated as if they were names of separate en-tities.
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