The River Revisited

MANILA, Philippines – With all the traffic, crowds, garbage and pollution strangling Metro Manila, it sounds like an illusion – or a joke – for Filipinos today to learn that the nation’s capital was once known around the world as the “Paris of the Orient.”

Manila could’ve been the Venice of the East had the city development plan of a celebrated American architect become reality.

In September 1904, U.S. Governor General William Howard Taft tapped Chicago architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham – of Baguio’s Burnham Park fame – to draft a city development plan for Manila, which then had a population of 200,000. America was then trying its hand as a colonial power, and the Philippines was a newly acquired empire.

“The problem before the Chicago architect is to plan a new city which will conflict as little as possible with the present arrangement,” reported the New York Times on Burnham’s new appointment on Sept. 18, 1904.

Burnham saw Manila’s development potential in a way that no Philippine government official has to this day.

Looking at the big picture, Burnham envisioned a future capital teeming with millions but its road network and sectors planned in a way to enable the city to “breathe.” A key element in his plan was the romantic Manila Bay to the west and rustic Laguna de Bay to the east. In the middle ran the Pasig River, from which branched a secondary river as well as several estuaries.

But Burnham died in 1912 and so did his vision for Manila. World War II came and went, and it’s as if the nation’s capital never recovered from the rubble since 1945.

Today, Manila Bay, the Pasig, its estuaries are all black and dead, while Laguna de Bay is a labyrinth of fish pens. Is there even hope for revival?

The 1,320-kilometer River Rhine was called “the open sewer of Europe” as late as the 1970s. But determined action by private industry, particularly chemical companies on the Rhine, led to a 90-percent drop in pollution levels, resurrecting the river by the 1990s.

The 11-km Singapore River was also badly polluted with sewage, domestic refuse, industrial waste, and animal and farm waste when former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew began a clean-up of all rivers in the city-state in 1977. Six rivers including the Kallang, the Whampoa and Rochor were cleaned in ten years by relocating hawkers, farms, fruit and vegetable wholesalers, and lighters; dredging refuse; resettling squatters; improving the riverbanks; and returning aquatic life.

There is hope for the Pasig River, after all. The renewed attempt to clean it up under the Kapit Bisig Para sa Ilog Pasig (KBPIP) program is co-managed by ABS-CBN Foundation’s Bantay Kalikasan and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources for the Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission (PRRC).

The 27-km Pasig winds through Metro Manila and connects Laguna de Bay to Manila Bay by way of the Napindan Channel, one of the four major tributaries; the others are the San Juan River, Pateros-Taguig River and Marikina River. In all, a total of 47 tributaries, esteros and creeks feed into the river.

KBPIP, which will build on the accomplishments of the Clean and Green Foundation, Inc., was launched in February 2009. It aims to catalyze PRRC’s efforts to achieve Class C status for the Pasig River in seven years. Class C standard river water is capable of sustaining aquatic life, is suitable for secondary contact sports and, after treatment, may be used for industrial processes.

Gina Lopez, managing director of ABS-CBN Foundation, says the key to a humane and livable city remains to be changing the way people look at the river. “We should use the media to awaken the consciousness and the reverence that people should have for the Pasig River. We have identified clean river zones (CRZs) among communities near the river’s tributaries or canals; each zone will target zero toxic waste input, good solid waste management and good wastewater treatment. Each CRZ will be clean, green and beautiful easements and when people see that it’s good, I think it will snowball,” she says.

This resonates with the philosophy of Singapore’s Lee when he began his country’s river clean-up: “It should be a way of life to keep the river clean, to keep every culet, rivulet, free from unnecessary pollution.”

Because 65 percent of Pasig River pollutants is liquid household waste and another five percent is solid waste, relocating informal settlers is essential both to reduce pollution loads at the source, and to create a minimum three-meter easement around the river. Already, KBPIP has relocated 150 families from the Estero de Paco in Manila and another 57 families from under the Mindanao Avenue Bridge in Quezon City to new homes in Montalban, Rizal and in Calauan, Laguna.

But relocation is not fool-proof as many families choose to return to the metropolis in search of better job opportunities and livelihood. Hence, the Calauan resettlement site, administered by ABS-CBN Foundation, is implementing integrated programs to enable new settlers to earn a living and provide for their own needs.

The Department of Education is putting in educational TV infrastructure and teacher training and educational facilities. Gawad Kalinga and Habitat for Humanity are being tapped for housing units. Bantay Bata is doing the nutrition and feeding program and the parenting program to address both the survival and the advocacy issues. ABS-CBN Bayan Foundation is building skills for livelihood programs and facilitating microfinance loans for sari-sari stores, sewing machines, and agri-businesses.

The new communities will themselves be models for environmental sustainability with centralized sewage treatment, roadside planting and solid waste management facilities, and governed by compassion, harmony, integrity, responsibility and the bayanihan spirit.

With over 4,000 families targeted for relocation, KBPIP seems to have just taken baby steps with its initial batch of settlers. But as the CRZs are cleared and the water quality improves, the team hopes to get more cooperation from a transformed populace.

Lopez may not be an architect like the revered city planner Burnham, but her vision for the Pasig is just as clear. The river certainly needs people who can see beyond 80 years of abuse and neglect. In fact, Lopez often quotes Burnham’s 1904 vision of Manila in her presentations for KBPIP: “Possessing the bay of Naples, the winding river of Paris, and the canals of Venice, Manila has before it an opportunity to create a unified city equal to the greatest of the Western World with the unparalleled and priceless addition of a tropical setting.”

KBPIP is now taking a chance to make the vision real.