The Extreme Problems of the World's Most Densely Populated City.

On August 2nd, 1968, a powerful tremor shook the largest island in the Philippines, Luzon.

What became known as the Casiguran earthquake had a powerful magnitude of 7.3, and a rating of nine (or “violent”) on the Mercalli intensity scale. Its epicentre was in a city of the same name, located in the northeast of Luzon, about 200 kilometres from the Philippines’ then-capital, Quezon City.

But the most disastrous consequences took place in Manila city proper—located about 10 kilometres southwest of Quezon and no less than 212 kilometres from the quake’s epicentre in Casiguran. The seismic force caused a high-rise building known as the Ruby Tower to collapse, burying hundreds of its occupants and resulting in the deaths of 268 people. These would constitute the overwhelming majority of the total death toll of the disaster—estimated to be around 271 people.

The reason for the building’s collapse was attributed to the design and quality of its construction. The Ruby Tower had been built at a cut-price cost of around 250,000 dollars, or around 2.5 million dollars today. It was built to house 600 to 1,000 people as well as various commercial enterprises. But the Ruby Tower had been built using shoddy materials, on unsound foundations close to Manila’s Pasig River mouth.

The quake became referred to by many as the Ruby Tower Earthquake, and laid bare the extreme vulnerability of structures located in Manila which had led—despite the best efforts of rescuers—to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of people.

Unfortunately, this is a risk which likely persists in the city.

Manila has since gone on to become—by some margin—the most densely populated city on earth. And the presence of such unsound structures? Well, they’ve not gone away.

The Many Manilas

Now, perhaps surprisingly, in spite of being the most densely populated city in the world, Manila isn’t really exceptional in terms of its actual population size.

At around 1.8 million inhabitants, the capital of the Philippines is about the same size as Warsaw, capital of Poland, or only marginally bigger than the US city of Phoenix. In fact, Manila isn’t even the most populous city found in the Philippines. That title remains with Quezon, located directly adjacent to Manila, and which has a little under 3 million inhabitants. Both cities are located in the capital city’s metropolitan area on Luzon, an area simply known as “Metro Manila”.

Metro Manila is a gargantuan patchwork of sixteen separate cities, all of them within a few kilometres of each other. Most of these have a population of around half a million people, and the collective population of the region is estimated to be around 15 million people.

And the large number of cities in Metro Manila, but which are not actually Manila, can lead to some confusion. For example, in 1975, Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier in the Philippines, in what remains regarded as one of the most famous boxing matches in history. But what was known as the “Thrilla in Manila” didn’t actually take place in Manila city—it was in Quezon City, at that time still the capital of the Philippines. Capital city status was passed back to Manila just one year later, in 1976.

But it is not the population count that is the chief cause for Manila being so densely packed.

It is its physical size.

The Many Manileños

Now, while Metro Manila is relatively spacious at about 619 square kilometres or 239 square miles, Manila city is simply tiny.

Its city boundaries occupy a space of about 42.5 square kilometres total—about one-quarter the land area of the Principality of Liechtenstein, which has a total population of about 40,000 people.

If you were to cross the entire city of Manila from north to south, you could do so in a little over two hours on foot. This contrasts Manila starkly with the city of Warsaw—with which, you will recall, it is roughly comparable in its number of residents. To cross Warsaw by foot would take no less than six hours walking. Meanwhile, to cross Phoenix—also comparable to Manila in population—would take as much as fifteen.

To put it in another way, Manila’s entire population of almost 2 million people is crammed into a parcel of land about two-thirds the size of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

What this leads to is population density in Manila of an eye-watering 45,000 people for every square kilometre, or 118,000 for every square mile. Manila has twice the population density of New York, and an average of about 200 people residing on every American football pitch-sized parcel of land. To account for this, the city is dotted with high-rise buildings, with no less than 215 structures in Manila having a height of 150 metres or more.

With that said, Manila’s skyscrapers pale in size with the megastructures of Chinese and American cities. The Metrobank Centre—the tallest building in Manila and the Philippines—does not even rank within the tallest hundred buildings on earth. Even so, the large number of high-rises does help to account for the steep population density… to some extent.

Manila’s area may be less than 43 square kilometres, but its urban area (the area of the city if counting the floorspace of built infrastructure) is somewhere in the region of 1,873 square kilometres—about three times that of Warsaw. If counting this area, Manila city’s density falls to a lower—but still extremely high—figure, of around 22,000 per square kilometre.

However, as one might predict, that urban area is by no means shared equally by its residents—known in the Philippines as Manileños. The vast majority of Manila’s impoverished populations are squashed into shantytowns on the city’s periphery. While the central, middle-class district of San Miguel—home to the Presidential palace—has a population density of 20,000 people per square kilometre, the northwestern district of Tondo has a density of around 75,000 people, or a total of 650,000 residents crammed into just 8.5 square kilometres of space.

The overcrowded districts are vulnerable to disease, pollution and related problems, and are also highly exposed to a wide array of natural disasters like the Ruby Tower quake—as we shall see a little later.

”City Beautiful” with Daniel Burnham

So how did this all come to be?

Modern-day Manila was founded in the 1500s by Spanish settlers as a city named ‘Intramuros’. People had—in fact—already lived at the mouth of the Pasig River for centuries before this, and a city of mostly Bruneian Muslim colonists named “Maynila” was founded there in the 13th century. The Bruneians were conquered and kicked out by the Spanish in 1571, although the walls of the old settlement were preserved as the margins of the new one, with the name of the Spanish city translating into English as ‘Between the Walls’.

The city reverted to the name ‘Manila’ three years later, and became capital of the Spanish East Indies in 1595. The old district of Intramuros remains one of Manila’s most prominent neighbourhoods to this day, as well as its university belt and home to multiple colonial style buildings.

Manila preserved its Capital Status beyond the Philippines’ independence in 1898, and through the turbulence of the Philippine-American War which began the following year. It lost this status in 1941 after Quezon City was established, but got it back in 1976, the year after Ali and Frazier did battle in Quezon’s Araneta Coliseum. Unusually, from 1903 the Philippines also had a Summer Capital—the city of Baguio, further north on Luzon Island. But this status, in practice, also put to an end in 1976.

In the wake of American colonisation after the Philippine-American War, and as Manila grew in both status and population, US architect Daniel Burnham (proponent of the so-called City Beautiful architectural movement) arrived to revolutionise the cityscape.

Burnham’s 1904 plans largely copied the physical features and layout of several European cities, and resulted in the creation of some eye-catching pieces of architecture and city designs in Manila. But much of his plans were laid to waste in 1945, when the United States and the Philippines—this time fighting together—won a ruinous battle to dislodge the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. The Battle of Manila devastated the city, and upended not only the Burnham Plan but practically the entirety of Intramuros and many of Manila’s historic buildings.

More tragically, the fighting flattened the homes of hundreds of thousands of Manila residents, and around 100,000 people were killed as retreating Japanese forces carried out a frenzied slaughter of the local population. In the time since, civil administrators have periodically attempted to restart the century-old plans for the city. But the steep rise of the population and the vanishing of available space has made this impractical.

Moreover, Burnham had crafted a plan for a city intended to be a maximum of 800,000 people, and his blueprints to accomplish even that were not fully realised in his lifetime. And at the time he began the project, Manila only had a population of some 200,000 people. That population has since climbed to almost 2 million, many of them arriving in the years and decades post-1945, and to a city long struggling to roll back the devastating effects of the war.

The need to build large structures capable of accommodating the growing population resulted in the hasty creation of buildings like the Ruby Tower, but also in the rapid rise in residents of districts like Tondo—which grew to over half a million people by 1990. With time, practically every last inch of ground came to be occupied. Even the former shipyard in Manila’s Port Area became a dense residential neighbourhood, after President Ferdinand Marcos resettled urban poor into the area in the late 1970s. Today, what is known as the Baseco Compound has a population of almost 70,000 people, residing on a patch of land roughly the same size as the Vatican City.

As Manila’s rapid growth continued unabated, the city, quite simply, ran out of space.

No Rest for the Dead

In 2010, The Guardian writer Jenny Kleeman stood dumbfounded as a Manila local prised open the coffin of a dead resident, and cleared away the man’s remains by hand in order to make room for someone else.

This morbid practice is born of necessity. So little is the available space in Manila that even gravesites in some of the city’s poorer districts can only be rented, not owned. Locals have been known to swap out the graves of the deceased in the event of the non-payment of rent by the dead person’s descendants.

The same Guardian article estimated that up to one-third of Manila’s population—which, in 2010, stood at a little over 1.6 million people—were now living in makeshift settlements on any precious piece of spare land available. The problem is unlikely to have gotten any better over time. The population is soaring, driven in part by high birth rates in a religious society, and by the large streams of migrants arriving from poor parts of the Philippine archipelago in search of work. Paradoxically, in this regard, Manila is a victim of its own success. The Philippines stands as one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia, racing forwards in the fields of tech, sustainable energy and—ironically—real estate. Metro Manila is considered an economic powerhouse in Asia, and Manila is a key part of this economic charge. The massive hike in residents of the region has led to an urban sprawl visible on satellite images, as the outlying settlements close to the capital have expanded outwards towards Quezon and the Luzon island hinterlands.

But in the tight Manila city confines, the problem has reached a tipping point. Given the extreme shortage of space, many of the new arrivals wind up residing in unregistered housing wherein disease and squalor are rife. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, and dengue fever are common ailments which claim thousands of lives a year in the city slums.

And if health problems weren’t enough, Manila just so happens to be prone to some of the most serious ravages posed by nature to any major city in the world. The entire region of Metro Manila lies close to the epicentres of what are ominously known as the Ring of Fire and the Pacific Typhoon Belt—sites of regular volcanic activity and tropical cyclones, respectively. Its hazardous geographical location makes the region prone to flooding, storms, landslides, mudslides, volcano eruptions, and drought.

In fact, natural disasters are so common to Metro Manila that they’re enumerated on their own dedicated Wikipedia page. And while earthquakes are rare, the Casiguran disaster showed not only that they can occur—but just what their consequences might be. Worse, Manila lies directly on a major seismic line known as the West Valley Fault which—like Cascadia and San Andreas—is statistically due for a major event.

If a Big One does strike, it is estimated that this would result in at least tens of thousands of deaths.

But while a major earthquake of such a scale has not shaken the region for several hundred years, what certainly have done are cyclones and typhoons, some of which have devastated parts of the city in the recent past. When Tropical Storm Ondoy struck in 2009, it unleashed a terrible fury that left at least 241 dead in Metro Manila and brought wanton devastation upon the shantytowns home to much of the population. Residents were forced to take cover wherever possible, and remarkably even the Malacañang Palace (residence of the President of the Philippines) was used to shelter locals.

But those most at risk by the storm’s blitz proved to be those residing in the precarious temporary homes dotting the landscape. And the presence of the shantytowns—as we shall see in the following section—even reduced the robustness of more reinforced parts of Manila against the storm.

The Weight of the “Pearl of the Orient”

Aside from rampant disease combined with risks of natural disaster in Manila’s overcrowded settlements, the severe demographic saturation has led to other problems affecting the population of Manila more widely.

One of those is congestion. Manila ranks as one of the worst cities in the world for hours lost to traffic, recording an average travel time of 27 minutes and 20 seconds, and an average of 105 hours lost to traffic per resident annually. Road transportation is compounded by the sheer volume of different types of vehicles used by commuters, ranging from cars, buses, and taxis to three-wheelers, motorcycles and various types of jeepneys and rickshaws—as well as unique horse-drawn carriages used in parts of the old town, known as kalesas. The cumulative effect of vehicles vying for space on the roads contributes to the steep transit time, as well as to pollution and highway deterioration. Rail transport exists, but largely connects Manila with the outlying cities of the metropolitan region. And most internal rail transit declined massively after World War II—including the famous Tranvía streetcar system, which was obliterated beyond salvage during the Japanese rampage in 1945.

Now admittedly, being the most densely populated city in the world would almost by default lead to steep congestion. Given the sheer amount of residents, it is a wonder that Manila does not occupy first place for traffic, let alone barely scraping the top 10 (according to traffic index aggregator TomTom). But Manila’s problems do not stop there.

Manila has an acute drainage problem. The absence of drainage has exacerbated periodic floods, leading to extended chaos during typhoons and other cyclical periods of severe weather. The failure to implement key parts of the Burnham plan has exacerbated the city’s drainage woes.

But another issue is that the sprawling shantytowns have extended even into existing floodways built to contain the threat of floodwaters. In the wake of Tropical Storm Ondoy, a report by disaster prevention researchers noted that buildings erected in the channels of the Manggahan Floodway—close to Manila city—had reduced their effectiveness during severe flooding. Moreover, while Manila sits at an average elevation of 9m, and up to 108m at its highest, the same report noted that illegal dwellings had sprung up in parts of the city lying effectively level with the Pasig River and Manila Bay, rendering them even more prone to the effects of sudden water level rises.

Schools are overburdened, and it is not unheard of for children in poor districts to attend classes in shifts. At Manila’s maternity hospitals, several mothers at a time regularly share available beds. And Manila City Jail is one of the most overcrowded in the world, in 2019 housing 6,300 inmates in a facility built for around 1,000. Much of the overpopulation was a result of President Rodrigo Duterte’s infamous drug crackdown, and the severe overcrowding meant that COVID-19 ravaged the facility when the pandemic began one year later.

‘Build! Build! Build!’

Manila continues to struggle beneath the weight of its population density, but that is not to say the state hasn’t made several stringent efforts to curb the problem.

In 2017, then-President Duterte began a massive infrastructure project intended to provide much-needed buildings to Metro Manila, as well as to encourage economic growth and reduce congestion and poverty. The creatively-named ‘Build! Build! Build!’

programme saw the construction of new expressways, bridges, and rail systems aimed at improving connectivity between the cities of the region, and easing transit chaos within them. The programme also established the Clark Freeport Zone, a business hub intended to draw industries and residents away from the capital, and to a new location in Pampanga, 57 kilometres north of Manila.

After Duterte left office in 2022, the programme was overtaken by the ‘Build Better More’ plan, introduced by new President Bongbong Marcos. The plan inherited 77 ongoing projects and greenlit a further 123—aimed at improving public transport, health, water resources, and agricultural projects (among others).

The government also intensified efforts to provide socialised housing and to relocate informal settlers away from temporary housing neighbourhoods, such as by way of the “4PH” programme, which aims to construct one million housing units per year across Metro Manila.

To facilitate such relocations, plans were unveiled—during the Duterte era—for the so-called “Project of the Century”: the construction of a 21km Metro Manila Subway line connecting the cities of Quezon, Valenzuela, Pasig, Taguig, Parañaque and Pasay. The subway is expected to be operational by 2029, and is partly funded—ironically—by loans from the Japanese government, and overseen by a Japanese consultant consortium.

Some of the government efforts are remarkable, given that many of the problems experienced by Manila were not necessarily the handiwork of the Philippines itself. Some are the product of a city designed during a bygone era by a colonial entity for a far smaller population. Others are the consequence of the cataclysmic devastation wrought by the Battle of Manila in 1945. And others still are the work of the cyclical natural disasters which periodically affect the region.

But the plans may not be enough.

The “Dead City” of the Future?

Despite all these regenerative efforts, the future of Manila is uncertain.

Around the time Duterte announced his “Build Build Build” programme, he also stated that the traffic and poverty of Manila may be impossible to overhaul, and infamously declared that the capital would become a (quote) “Dead City” within twenty-five years. Duterte added that the government should focus on state infrastructure and development projects elsewhere, and proceeded with the establishment of the Clark business hub and expansion of Clark International Airport, both of them in the city of Pampanga. Such a shift would hardly be unprecedented, as many of Manila’s elites left the city en masse following the devastation of 1945, and the entire government relocated to Quezon, which rapidly became the most populous city in the Philippines—only a matter of decades after its foundation.

But in spite of the ambitious building projects carried out by the Philippines to draw citizens away from the overwhelmed capital, there may be another problem: people simply do not want to leave. Given the sheer numbers of people living in Manila and in Metro Manila alike, combined with the accelerated rate of growth of the population, it is likely that even the best-case scenario of all projects being completed successfully would not provide the requisite conditions for residents to abandon normality for life elsewhere. Such a reality could be to leave destitution in one area, in return for poverty and unfamiliarity in another.

In Manila, plans continue to build whatever infrastructure are possible to offset the extreme problems of the world’s most densely-populated city. But these remain hampered by the lack of available space on which to build, and some are even opposed by urban conservationists due to the risk of tarnishing the historic legacy of Manila’s picturesque old buildings. One of the key additions to Manila city under the Build Build Build programme was the Binondo-Intramuros bridge, completed in 2022 as an important thoroughfare linking Intramuros with the north districts of Binondo and San Nicolas across the Pasig River. But the bridge was opposed by some heritage groups due to its stark contrast with Intramuros’s remaining Spanish colonial architecture, including the famous San Agustin church—one of very few to survive the devastation of the Battle of Manila in 1945.

As Manila’s problems grow, the Pearl of the Orient continues to grapple to contain them. Here’s hoping it will succeed in doing so.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the magnitude and intensity of the Casiguran earthquake?

The Casiguran earthquake had a magnitude of 7.3 and a rating of nine (or “violent”) on the Mercalli intensity scale.

What was the primary cause of the Ruby Tower collapse during the Casiguran earthquake?

The collapse of the Ruby Tower was attributed to the design and quality of its construction, including shoddy materials and unsound foundations close to Manila’s Pasig River mouth.

How many people died in the Ruby Tower collapse?

The collapse of the Ruby Tower resulted in the deaths of 268 people, which constituted the overwhelming majority of the total death toll of the disaster, estimated to be around 271 people.

What is the population density of Manila?

Manila has a population density of approximately 45,000 people per square kilometre, or 118,000 people per square mile.

How many high-rise buildings are there in Manila?

There are no less than 215 structures in Manila with a height of 150 metres or more.

What is the urban area of Manila?

The urban area of Manila, counting the floorspace of built infrastructure, is approximately 1,873 square kilometres.

What is the population of the Tondo district in Manila?

The northwestern district of Tondo in Manila has a population of around 650,000 residents crammed into just 8.5 square kilometres of space.

What is the ‘Build! Build! Build!’ program?

The ‘Build! Build! Build!’ program was a massive infrastructure project initiated by then-President Duterte in 2017 to provide much-needed buildings to Metro Manila, improve connectivity, and reduce congestion and poverty.

What is the ‘Project of the Century’ in Manila?

The ‘Project of the Century’ refers to the construction of a 21km Metro Manila Subway line connecting several cities in the region, expected to be operational by 2029.

What is the population of Metro Manila?

The collective population of Metro Manila is estimated to be around 15 million people.

Sources

• Original Places video: The Extreme Problems of the World’s Most Densely Populated City.
• https://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/04/sport/thrilla-in-manila-remembered/index.html
• https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/travel/destinations/traffic-nightmares-10-cities-with-the-worst-traffic-in-world/photostory/111166035.cms
• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/15/philippines-overpopulation-crisis
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• https://mb.com.ph/2018/08/02/looking-back-ruby-tower-disaster-casiguran-quake/
• https://www.citypopulation.de/en/philippines/manilacity/admin/133901__tondo/
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• https://dil-opac.bosai.go.jp/publication/nied_natural_disaster/pdf/45/45-04E.pdf
• https://www.distance.to/City-of-Manila,Capital-District,National-Capital-Region,PHL/Pampanga,Central-Luzon,PHL
• https://businessmirror.com.ph/2018/11/22/government-awards-p11-billion-subway-contract-to-japanese-group/
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• https://youtu.be/Go71zF_KxKU?si=Mh7xAqI2SZk64u2D&t=10
• Hero image source by Kej Andrés (Ryomaandres) / openverse, by-sa.