AUTHOR: David DATE: 12/08/2005 02:15:00 PM ----- BODY:

Metro Manila in the year 2004 is a pit. There is not much to recommend it to visitors and hardly enough to recommend it to the people that have no choice but to live here. Sure, back during World War II Manila was the second most heavily bombed out and destroyed city (Warsaw was the first) but to use that as an excuse is the biggest cop out of our nation’s leaders. When my parents were growing up and straight through to the time they started their own family Manila was a great place to be. There were all the expected niceties of a capital – master planned urban development, parks, grand buildings, boulevards, clean streets – and even a clean harbor with a beach. Today, the master plan is nonexistent, the parks have been cut back, cemented over, and turned into malls or karaoke bars; the buildings, what’s left of the ones that haven’t been bulldozed, are in advanced stages of decay and abandonment; the boulevards have been encroached on by buildings, mass transit systems, and squatters; the harbor is a polluted mess and the former waterfront is now about two kilometers inland because of reckless reclamation. I just came back from a trip to Chicago and my reaction on walking around was that the Windy City is the city that Manila should have been. Both cities front large bodies of water, both were master planned by Daniel Burnham, and yet today Chicago is this vibrant, clean, and wonderful city while Manila has firmly entrenched itself as a third-world city. The worst thing about modern Metro Manila is the huge opportunity to create a truly remarkable city that’s been wasted. Take a look at this map: Metro Manila is bordered on the west by what many consider to be the finest natural deep water harbor in the world. On the east by Laguna de Bay, the largest fresh water lake in South East Asia. On the north by the Sierra Madre mountains and the languid, fertile groves of Bulacan, and on the south again by farmland and the higher fruit and vegetable haven of the Tagaytay ridge in Cavite. This, to me, sounds like the ideal area for what could have been a magnificent metropolis. Imagine if the waterfronts (one salt water, one fresh) had been developed properly with causeways, beach front properties, and a real orientation towards aquatic sports. We have all the ingredients for our own version of a Miami South Beach, a Venice California, or even a Sydney waterfront. The view from the mountains over the city and these two bodies of water is heart breaking. Metro Manila is composed of seventeen (17!) cities, each with their own mayors, vice mayors, councilors, hangers-on, and intrigues. There is a government agency that is supposed to coordinate matters such as traffic, police, flood control, and development but this so-called Metro Manila Development Agency (MMDA) is just about as politically affected as any other government office. Responsibility for the construction and maintenance of our roads and highways is split, indelicately, between the MMDA, the local government units (i.e. the cities themselves), the Philippine National Construction Corporation (PNCC), and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH). Guess what happens when a highway owned by the PNCC has an off-ramp manned by the MMDA intersecting with a major thoroughfare maintained by the city, with vendors and stores “managed” by the Philippine National Police (PNP). One accident here and you have four different government agencies washing their hands of any responsibility and the vehicle owners scratching their heads and gritting their teeth in frustration over the inability of anyone to fix these kinds of problems. Believe it or not this intersection actually exists and this scenario is not make believe.

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