The ghost of master plans past
Boo! It’s Halloween. Shopping malls and gated villages are filled with plastic skeletons, witches and pumpkins. It is also just over a month since Ondoy/Pepeng left our shores, making us pay dearly for sins we have committed against our environment. It is sad that many choose to embrace the retail-driven frenzy of a foreign fantasy rather than focus on the still ongoing tragedy of those whose lives have been displaced or destroyed.
Our incredibly short collective attention span is clearly seen in the media’s near-abandonment of the grave issues of inadequate disaster relief, incomplete infrastructure, and inutile governance exposed by the twin disasters. Or maybe it is just media’s restlessness to find something new to jump on — like the Marina (Mar-Korina) wedding, who’s running with who for 2010, or the Pacquiao-Cotto fight.
Just last Monday, I found myself one of barely a handful of journalists covering the second forum on Ondoy/Pepeng organized by the Philippine Institute of Environmental Planners and the Ateneo School of Governance. The affair was held at the UP School of Urban and Regional Planning and although media coverage declined, the attendance of planners and representatives of other scientific disciplines had increased twofold.
Over a hundred of the country’s top environmental planners, engineers, architects, landscape architects, geologists, geographers, earth scientists, and social scientists were in attendance. Key resource persons included, among others, former DPWH Undersecretary Teodoro “TE” Encarnacion and famed engineer Fiorello “Toto” Estuar, also former secretary of the DPWH.
A Haunted Past Of Plans
The forum was called “Rising from the Depths: Haunted by Programs and Projects Past.” It started with a presentation by planner Anna Maria Gonzales based on material collated by PIEP’s president EP Liza Marie Pulumbarit-Elum. Gonzales briefed the audience on the several master plans for metro Manila’s urban planning, transport, and flood control, including the now oft-mentioned MMetroplan (really a transport plan with a flood control component that included the unbuilt Panañaque spillway), the Metro Ring Development Project and the Manila Bay Metropolitan Region Strategic Plan of 1978.
All the presented plans were rational in their foundations, goals, and objectives. All were formulated during the martial law era. All had an impact on mitigating the perennial problem of flooding in the metropolis. All have never been fully implemented.
The reality is that we have had many good plans made by competent planners. We have also sought overseas funding for these and their implementation (that always comes embedded with foreign professional consultants even if unnecessary because of the abilities of our own). But politics or political upheavals get in the way and these plans are then shelved and forgotten.
The three plans of the ’70s were, however, not the first to address the metropolis’ perennial flood problems. The book Metropolitan Manila and the Magnitude of its Problems, printed in 1976, notes that plans to address the problem surfaced during the colonial Japanese occupation and post-independence eras (1910, 1943 and 1952, to be exact). These three were also not implemented fully. In 1912 the American government changed its policy regarding the “Philippine Islands,” which scuttled many programs. In 1944 we were liberated and the studies from the 1943 plan were lost in the battle. In 1952 we seemed to have started on the ever-accelerating descent into graft and corruption in government.
The problem of Manila’s flood-proneness is, of course, older. Spanish-era Manila was already plagued by regular floods, but it became a real problem only as the city expanded in the post-Suez Canal-opening era, starting in1869, which led to a boom in international commerce that included Manila as a key hub of trade. The book Manila 1571-1898: The Western Orient cites plans prepared by the Spanish Corps of Engineers in 1870 after the municipal council clamored for “assistance in the cleaning, repairing and channeling of the river creeks (esteros) in Manila.” Plans and programs were expanded twice more in the next 20 years, including breakwaters and jetties into Manila Bay (which would serve to improve flow in the Pasig). The Philippine revolution, however, put all these plans on hold.
The six plans outlined above were not the only master plans for Manila. I have written previously about the famed Burnham Plan of 1905, the revision of that plan in 1930, the Frost-Arellano Plan for Quezon City, and the 1947, 1949 and 1956 reworking of that plan for the capital of the Philippines, along with its metropolitan area. All of these had been prepared with basic infrastructure in mind, including drainage. All these plans were good and rational for their times and adjusted to accommodate expanding populations and changing conditions.
Politics and real estate speculation shot down any chance of the government to consolidate enough land or generate and sustain funding and interest in long-term goals. Planners and other technical consultants were relegated to helpless bystanders as shortsightedness, stupidity, greed and corruption drowned out any chance for a properly implemented plan.
14 Failures, A15th Try
So there were 14 plans in the last 150 years and now we embark on our 15th try. This leads us back to the forum at UP, where questions were raised on a new direction as well as the viability of the recommendations of the ’70s plans, specifically the Parañaque spillway.
Engineer Estuar explained the engineering of it and the likelihood that the spillway, if built, would contribute less than a 10 percent solution to flooding. He impressed upon the audience that clearing the existing clogged drainage systems (which implies clearing the waterways of informal settlers) would help more and also be faster. A new spillway of the size and length proposed could take up to five years and cost billions. Clearing clogged drains can be done with less money and in the next six months before the next onslaught of typhoons (not that the season has ended).
Other heavy engineering interventions like a ring dike around the Laguna de Bai and dredging the Pasig River were also mentioned as necessary components of any plan. Mention was made, too, of the need to alter engineering assumptions for drain sizes; aiming for 100- and 500-year flood frequencies rather than the current 25- to 30-year floods used by the DPWH.
Symptoms, Causes, Cures & Contexts
The forum raised more important issues other than mitigation. The discourse acknowledged that focusing on just flood control is attacking the symptoms and not the cause of the recurring dilemma. The rape of the Sierra Madre mountains, uncontrolled urbanization and suburbanization (both of which increase storm water runoff) and a dysfunctional (some say practically non-existent) solid waste management regime has led to increased flood levels and storm surges that even a Singaporean or Malaysian type of flood control system would not be able to handle.
The two forums, along with the exchanges within other NGO and professional groups, all lead to other, much larger contexts that planning needs to be situated in — that of population management and governance.
Our population growth rate is still off the charts and, in light of yearly disasters, mismanaged government and dwindling resources, is not sustainable without sacrificing even the most basic levels of quality of life. We cannot educate, feed or house our teeming, economically disadvantaged millions, half of whom live in hazard zones in cities and the other half in hazard zones along the coast or precarious upland slopes.
Clearing Manggahan and our waterways is not a simple matter of evacuation and forced relocation to suburban fringes (thereby contributing to even more environmental degradation). Unacknowledged by government, we have thousands of hectares of idle government lands within almost all of our cities. National agencies and our armed forces retain much of these, which should be reconsolidated and given to social housing rather than privatized off to the highest bidder. Budget deficits cannot be addressed by quick fixes but rather by a radical reduction in government graft, corruption and inefficiency. But that’s a problem even the best urban planners cannot solve.
Vacuous Territories & Empty Governance
Planning cannot be done in a vacuum, nor can its efficacy be ensured if first its boundaries are not rational. In light of climate change and goals of sustainability, traditional political territorial lines lose their meaning and contribute to disaster. Governance should be based on managing resources and administering a region based on geo-morphological physical delimitations.
The lay of the land and the natural processes, elements and areas that are influenced or produced by it — like watersheds, flood basins, alluvial plains, escarpments and fault lines, waterways and estuaries — should now define where and how we should best “plant” and plan our communities, towns, cities and metropolises.
This new, environmentally sensitive tack does not go against decentralization and the logic of empowering smaller communities and LGUs. The last month has proven that they are the best situated to most quickly address disaster management and relief. But planning is only able to be of help if done within a larger scope set by nature — whose processes respect no abstract boundary set by man.
The proposed Disaster Risk Reduction Management Committee is a good idea. What is needed, however, is an even more forward-looking and inclusive process, along with a reconfigured political structure to go with it. This should replace, not overlap with, current Regional and Provincial Development and all manner of coordination councils.
We should really have supra-eco-regional governance (SERGO) units that look at the confluence of population and urban growth, social equity, natural processes, green infrastructure, resource management and sustainable development.
Sergo for it!
One area that begs for such a SERGO framework is Metropolitan Manila and its surroundings. The rational move is to govern the metropolis like a province, but with boundaries reworked to logically cover areas affected by all of the environmental considerations above—not just for political considerations. We should do reverse gerrymandering and redraw governance maps or suffer the disabling clunkiness of working within tra-political boundaries.
The old boundaries in Metro Manila only really worked in the 19th century when there were less than 200,000 people in the city. Today’s reality of 12 million, unmitigated and overwhelming urban sprawl, and continuous risk from natural and manmade calamities leave us no choice but to consider radical change.
If Cha-cha is raised as an issue next year, it should be for new charters for SERGO conurbations for metropolises like Manila, Cebu, Davao and Baguio. SERGO regions for the rest of the country should also be established. The Cordilleras and the Sierra Madres are no-brainers to redraw into SERGOs.
Speaking of no-brainers, politicians must now listen, learn and respect the advice of Filipino environmental planners, architects, urban designers and landscape architects — those involved with design of the built environment. Planning is also a multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral process with input required from engineers, environmental scientists, social scientists, private enterprise, POs, NGOs, even media. Good advice not taken is as good as no advice at all.
Be Scared; Be Really, Really Scared
Planning today should not be a personality-centered endeavor. It cannot be, since factors to be considered are far too complex and nuanced. No one man, however honed (here or abroad) in certain aspects of physical planning, can ever do the job alone or espouse long-term solutions, nor can the present (form and regime of) government, opaque as it is, ever be trusted to bring us any closer to redemption from floods than the 14 times tried before.
Even short-term solutions like pontoons and sandbags can be dangerous to put forward as palliatives. Remember that the jeepney was born of the necessity for transport in our post-war trauma of the late ’40s. They have belligerently become embedded in all our misshapen towns and cities; a stopgap measure made permanent due to the government’s apathy to the needs of a continually suffering and all-too-accommodating public.
Despite Halloween, the coming boxing bout, and Christmas, I would like to think that the public’s patience has all but worn out. Future master plans for Metro Manila can be produced even without government (in its present incarnation). We have, after all, survived in spite of government, rather than with its support, all these years. My worry, though, is that government will get in the way. Far too many billions of dollars and euros in foreign aid are coming in. With government and politicians, their motto is “We can resist everything but temptation.”
The least we can do now is not to tempt faith any further and continue the search for solutions, continue the discourse in academe, in chat groups, on Twitter and Facebook, continue to help those still in dire straits, continue to look for alternative leaders, forms of government and avenues for communal action.
We must continue even when there are those in government who would have us forget the sins of the past, those in private enterprise who would exploit disaster to sell “flood-free” overpriced homes, vegetables, rice, candles and hoarded goods. We must continue even if Pacquiao wins his next bout — who really cares? — unless he uses his sizeable winnings to construct a spillway.
The scary part of this Halloween then is what will happen in the next few months. Will any real action be taken? Any real steps to immediate, medium- and long-term solutions? Any real acknowledgement of responsibility (not necessarily blame)? Any real hope? If nothing happens, then we will surely be haunted, not only by the ghosts of planners and unrealized master plans of the past, but also by the thousands of innocents who have perished in our yearly tragedies. May God have mercy on their souls and grant us the wisdom finally to see the light.
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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.
