I GREW up on a quiet street in Mandaluyong City, in a compound filled with family, with bungalows for houses. Soon enough relatives started to migrate and sell their land. We have seen a beautiful bungalow demolished for a set of tiny townhouses. For a while we lived with a huge gaping hole in the lot in front of us, excavated for a condominium that didn’t happen.

Which is to say we lived with the noise and inconvenience of this kind of change called “land development.” And when the townhouses were being built, the only upside was that we could negotiate with family who had sold that land, and ask that there be rules for the construction, if only so we survived the years of noise and air pollution, and live through such a major disruption to residential living.