The Globe and Mail

All over the Third World, cities are ringed by ad-hoc settlements of migrants from the countryside who come looking for work but have to settle, at least temporarily, for a scavenger's life, squatting in dwellings thrown together from any junk they can find. Cebu, the second-biggest metropolitan area in the Philippines, is no exception. When Toronto architect Jeffery Stinson arrived in the city of 1.4 million people last year, he found that the area where citizens dump their garbage functions as “a sort of giant open-air recycling centre” in which people forage for what they need. Housing settlements there may look like they're falling down, he says, “but in fact they are being built very, very slowly, as materials become available.”