Introduction

What kinds of places do contemporary mobilities of capital and labour create, and what kinds of place-specific capitalism do they enable? This chapter addresses these questions through an examination of the restructuring and rise of the largest Philippine-nationality conglomerates (PNCs) from 2001 to 2015, a period which saw the emergence of property development businesses as a core interest among these companies. It situates this development within two place- and periodspecific sets of labour and capital mobilities: the continued growth of the overseas Filipino workforce and their inbound remittances; and the emergence of a foreign direct investment (FDI)-driven, information technology-enabled business process offshoring industry in the country's major urban centres, and a concomitant strengthening of domestic rural–urban migration flows. While PNCs had played only minor and indirect roles in facilitating these two developments, they have been the primary beneficiaries of demand for residential, office, and retail property which these movements of labour and capital have created.

This chapter argues that meeting this demand was a matter of staying in place, in two senses of the term. First, the foremost advantage of PNCs over both foreign firms and smaller domestic firms was in the acquisition and development of newly privatized and brownfield tracts of urban land, which is restricted to juridical Philippine nationals—an advantage that also extends to the power, water, communications, and transportation infrastructure that undergird these developments. By diversifying into these sectors, PNCs thus became vertically integrated rentiers, able to capture substantial portions of capital flows through the built environment without any direct involvement in either the deployment of Filipino labour overseas or in the operation of business process outsourcing (BPO) firms. In its purest form, this is expressed as mixed-use development ‘townships’ that carry echoes of cash crop latifundism: the sources of demand are ultimately global, and the value is created through labour, but the basis of the key surpluses are rents on land and other inputs to production and reproduction.

Second, the place-based and place-specific opportunities presented by demand for urban property in the Philippines allowed PNCs to obviate the need to seek new markets for their former core interests elsewhere or to invest in new businesses that could plug into global production networks. With a few exceptions, the surpluses that were extracted from urban property have not been invested in value-adding, or job-generating, sectors.