A few hundred meters from high-rise buildings and a gigantic shopping mall, slum communities sit precariously on stilts over trash and excrement-clogged rivers. Sewers double as dumpsites. With a bit of rain comes floodwater, literally eating up roads and thoroughfares. These images describe Metro Manila, and most cities in the Philippines, for that matter. It is as if they came into being by accident, without the guidance of national planning policies.
The country does not lack sound urban planning guidelines and measures, says Dr. Primitivo Cal, Dean of the UP School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP). Each city, municipality, or province is required by the Local Government Code to prepare a comprehensive land use plan (CLUP) and a comprehensive development plan (CDP), or what the law refers to as a comprehensive multi-sectoral development plan. An executive office, the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB), assists the local government units in land use planning, zoning administration, regulation of housing and real estate development projects, and in the adjudication and resolution of land use cases and complaints. Before construction even begins, say, for an industrial plant or residential subdivision, a plan showing how the land will be used must first be drawn and approved.
“But as in many cases, not just in urban planning, a wide gap exists between policy-making and actual implementation,” Cal laments.
Gap between paper and practice
“Realities start coming in once you implement programs or projects,” says Cal. One major constraint is funding. Budgetary limitations at the national and local levels greatly affect expenditure for development programs or projects. The cities obviously need more money.
In many countries, the financial assistance of urban areas from the national government has dwindled steadily. During the past decade, foreign aid also shifted its attention to rural issues, even as people moved to the cities. Some local government units can barely afford their own operational and overhead expenses. Limited resources have driven local government units to seek help from the private sector and donor communities in financing urban development projects. With urban areas producing half the world’s income, and governments nervous about restive urban populations, even multilateral assistance agencies such as the World Bank have begun to focus more on cities once again.
Cal also notes that the intricacies of the structure of government organizations, local politics, and individual behavior, as well as the presence of many market imperfections, should make planners more pragmatic about their expectations of concrete outcomes from plans or models. Transport Economist Dr. Hussein Lidasan, who also teaches at the SURP, echoes this view, adding that these institutional processes often result in gridlock and poor coordination among government agencies. In some cases, there are just so many agencies involved in the implementation that their functions and responsibilities often overlap.
“Even good laws do not guarantee a program’s effective and efficient implementation,” Cal observes. He believes this is an area that ideally should be left to the local authorities to address. “Unfortunately, not so many decision-makers have the political will to implement plans.”
Fortunately, despite these problems, there are a number of local governments who are moving in the right direction and are looked upon as models of effective urban rehabilitation. “Marikina is an example of political will in governance,” say Cal. “Not only is it encouraging non-motorized transport by creating bicycle lanes, it is also leading Metro Manila in terms of its cleanliness program and use of public space.” The country’s shoe-making capital, widely known for its innovative infrastructure facilities amidst funding constraints, was among the four cities featured at a roundtable on urban governance and infrastructure in the World Bank’s Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics last June.
Manila’s conservation efforts to restore its parks and heritage sites are also commendable. A few years ago, the city government began the rehabilitation of the Baywalk area—a two-kilometer stretch of pedestrian-friendly space beside Roxas Boulevard where one can enjoy a breathtaking view of the sunset.
In the Visayas, Metro Cebu is another example of how local projects can be implemented successfully. The city, conceptualized in the late ’70s according to Metro Manila’s geographical framework, was slated to become a commercial and financial hub in Southern Philippines. Metro Cebu’s development blueprint has been implemented, along with other contingent programs like the construction of another bridge linking Mactan and the mainland, the reclamation of certain areas in Mandaue, and the construction of more coastal roads to accommodate the increasing economic activities.
“In Mindanao, Davao provides another example, even though its experience leans more on the realm of public management,” says Cal. “But, of course, good management results in good planning and effective implementation.”
No perfect city
According to Cal, the experiences of major cities in the country show that there is always a tradeoff between development and environmental quality. Urban growth can have profound effects on surrounding areas, particularly in relation to land conversion, water abstraction, and discharges of wastewater and solid waste. Larger cities typically provide more specialized goods and services to the local market and surrounding areas, and function as a transportation and wholesale hub. With more capital, more financial service provision, and an educated labor force, these cities are seats of central administration for the larger area to which they belong. The migration of people from rural areas in search of better economic opportunities, however, pressures urban areas to absorb the growing population and economic activity. The fallout is pretty visible in the millions of new urbanites facing unemployment, decongestion, urban poverty, garbage, and pollution.
Ideally, a well-planned city is one where all the known indicators of a high quality of life can be found. Air and water are clean. Access to such facilities as an efficient transport system, education, and health services is provided. Basic services like electricity, telecommunication, water, and sewage and solid waste management systems are available and accessible.
“But I don’t think you can find such a city anywhere in the world,” Cal points out. There are cities that excel in certain aspects but fail in other areas. “It’s not perfect. That is why planning is regarded as a continuing activity—a dynamic pursuit that involves a lot of experiments.”
Sad to say, the situation in the Philippines is far from ideal. Part of the reason is the country’s level of economic development. “Urbanization occurs very rapidly but it seems we are not ready to address the needs of our growing urban communities.”
The Philippines is one of the fastest urbanizing countries, with more than half of its 84-million people living in urban areas. Urban poverty is a widespread phenomenon, reflecting the stark inequities in spatial and economic development. The UN-funded Philippine Urban Forum—a platform for information sharing, discussion, and coordination among intergovernmental institutions involved in shelter and urban governance—reports that even though the rate of urban poverty fell from 24 percent to about 18 percent between 1994 and 1997, it rose again to about 20 percent in 2000. This means that one out of five urban dwellers lives below the poverty line. The statistic is more depressing in Metro Manila, where half of 11 million inhabitants live in slum areas.
A global pattern
“Unfortunately, urbanization is inevitable,” Cal says. “It is really part of development.” In his book Planet of Slums, Mark Davis observes that cities all over the world have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently adding about a million babies and migrants each week. The poorest cities in the world like Dhaka in Bangladesh, Lagos in Nigeria, and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are each approximately 40 times larger today than they were half a century ago.
Furthermore, even the best-managed cities in the world’s most developed countries have trouble coping with population growth. Tokyo is overwhelmed by its own trash despite massive recycling and incineration programs. Ironically, Japanese meticulousness is adding to the problem, according to some critics. In a country where consumers insist on having virtually anything they buy wrapped, it may be very difficult to curb the discard rate. A 2005 report by Japan’s Ministry of Environment shows that for 2002 alone, the country generated 51.61 million tons of rubbish, or about 11,000 kilos of trash per person per day. Disposal sites are generally hard to find in densely-populated Japan, so it incinerates most—about 75 percent—of the solid waste it collects from households and industries. Illegal dumping has proliferated in recent years, prompting authorities to crack down on some companies that are secretly shipping toxic waste overseas.
In the US, on the other hand, urban residents must contend with deteriorating bridges and roads, racial tension and its corresponding violence, schools with gun battles erupting in the hallways, and subway stations doubling as public urinals. Even in strong financial centers like New York, unemployment can sometimes soar, as in 1985 when over half the city’s residents were unemployed. With sky-high prices, shelter remains a pressing problem in the central city. The UN Cyberschoolbus—the online education component of the United Nation’s Global Teaching and Learning Project, which promotes education on international issues—estimates that the current number of homeless in Manhattan alone runs as high as 90,000.
According to Cal, this phenomenon indicates the reality of dwindling agricultural areas. This has resulted in the shifting of pressure to promote and sustain growth to the urban areas. Nevertheless, he believes this should be anticipated and integrated into planning. “Through urban and regional planning, we try to slow down this exodus of people from rural to urban areas by promoting the idea that governance should not leave out the development of the countryside.”
Role of urban planners
This is where UP urban and regional planners come in. The School is not only at the forefront of giving expert advise to local government units, but it also fulfills its mandate of producing competent experts in the field. As planners they examine proposed local government facilities, such as roads and schools, to ensure that these facilities meet the changing demands placed upon them over time. They keep abreast of legal and political issues involved in zoning laws, building codes, national legislations, local ordinances, and environmental regulations, and make sure that these guidelines are followed. They also produce transportation and urban development studies and present their findings to national planning agencies and the general public.
Cal concedes that the present number of registered planners may not be able to accommodate requests from all the local government units in grave need of their expertise. The country has about 1,600 towns and cities. This number is compounded by the conversion of a significant number of municipalities into cities in recent years. In 2000 alone, for instance, 16 new cities were created. During the first half of 2001, 15 more municipalities were converted to cities, bringing the total number of Philippine cities to 115. And yet, the country only has about 600 registered planners, majority of whom are based in Metro Manila. “Clearly, you can see the deficiency in terms of available professionals,” says Cal. “Even if we assign just one planner for each city or municipality, we will not be able to cover all of them.”
The population threshold to become a city is 150,000. However, if one defines an urban area as a locality with a population exceeding 50,000, there will be more than 200 urban areas in the Philippines in a few years time. In fact, the World Bank already predicts that there may be as many as 600 urban areas by 2020.
Competent planners and visionary local government leaders may still not be all that it takes to make urban plans work. For Lidasan, the responsibility for making cities livable rests ultimately on the people. “Aside from coming up with sustainable plans and effective implementation and enforcement policies, there is also a need to educate the people and reorient their values so they become responsible citizens.” Lidasan believes that a change in collective psyche can produce a tremendous impact on people’s physical surroundings. Through education, the collective psyche must acquire the necessary values in order for individuals to do the right things without having to be conscious of them.
“Of course, this would probably take a generation to accomplish,” Lidasan says. “But the sooner we begin the better.”
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