Manila - I visited the community of Vitas as part of my Urban Slums project. Vitas is a series of badly built and unmaintained tenement blocks that the government built for the scavengers that had to scrape a living on the famous Smokey Mountain, Manila's largest dump at time. It became a symbol ofthe gross poverty that existed under the Marcos dictatorship and the new government was keen to get rid of it. The people of Vitas live check by jowl in very cramped conditions in blocks that are basically falling down and they're the lucky one's. Other families have to build homes out of scrap wood and cardboard and live under the bridge at one end of the community. The government basically dumped them there in order to forget about them and remove the visual scare of Smokey Mountain.
