Baseco Compound, an artificial island in Manila, the Philippines, was built as the dockyard of the National Shipyard and Steel Corporation in the 1960s. It was a sizeable 30 (and now 48) hectare waterfront, and borders the Pasig River and Manila Bay after reclamation. From being the site of government facilities that repaired ships and retooled heavy and light machinery, the island was reclaimed through the years to become the Bataan Shipyard and Engineering Company’s (Baseco) dockyard. Owned by the kin of former First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos, Baseco was subsequently sequestered and nationalized by Corazon Aquino’s administration in the 1980s. The area was transformed into the resettlement site of many families that had been displaced by Ferdinand Marcos’ clearing operations in Metro Manila to give way to the construction of government projects. The newly arrived families erected their makeshift houses on a low-lying and unstable substrate that is a combination of river silt, sand, rubble from old buildings, dredged mud, garbage, and small white mollusks. During high tide, these houses would be flooded with seawater. Recently, the site has become the home of 60,000 urban poor and a pockmark of Metro Manila. This chapter looks at the transformation of the island as defined by anthropogenic forces (such as river flooding, high tide, land reclamation, garbage and many more), with information and insights drawn mainly from archival and library materials, contextual literature to artificial and river islands contributed by the second author, as well as from interviews undertaken by the lead author with a convenience sample of respondents during March 2023 and February 2024. It also examines the island’s role as a source of political, economic and environmental contestations, as well as of both despair and hope to inhabitants and local government units.