Teaching a man to fish

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."  This is an old Chinese proverb that points out the importance of building capacities for the future.  It talks about other things, too, about investing on things that build on themselves and prioritizing that which that counts and will continue over that which is fleeting and will only benefit the present.  The usual use of the saying relates to human endeavor, but actually we can associate this with city development, too, and how it develops in the future.

To a certain extent, city planning is still a new discipline, although its basic principles date back to ancient times when certain groups of people stopped their nomadic wandering and finally established settlements in fixed places.  The timing of this event in the historic timeline coincided with the discovery (or is it invention) of agriculture.  The moment man knew that he could till the soil for food; he stopped wandering and hunting for animals.  Civilizations began.

The challenge was always, and still is until now, how to balance the needs of the present and the future.  Those who live for the present (we describe as hand-to-mouth existence) only looks at what we can produce for today and consume it.  It is very possible that this is because of a lot of limitations beyond our control but oftentimes this is also a conscious decision because of one's individual belief.  On the other hand, many people set aside things for the future so that life won't be as hard when we get there.  This is the basis of modern planning - establishing a future environment of a better life.

The question is often asked - how much resources should we consume now and how much do we set aside for the future.  There is a school of thought among those who live for the present, that each generation should take care of itself - many people do believe that that which will not affect me because this will happen after I die, is of no consequence to decision-making.  In the case of climate change issue, many people actually protest any kind of investment in trying to prevent climate change.  "Let the future generation take care of itself."

On a much shorter timeframe, decisions in managing a local government unit, whether a province, a city, or a municipality also face the same dilemma.  Problems in LGU management will never disappear, and local chief executives have to face the questions on a daily basis - which problem will I solve first, the present or the future?  We often joked, when I was still working with the City Government of Cebu that this is the real difference between the job of the City Administrator and the City Planning Officer - the former takes care of the problems of the present, the latter, those of the future.

This is further complicated by the fact that people very seldom differentiate the settlement and the organization managing it - the city from the city government; the province from the provincial government.  In general we talk of economic development for the city or province, and fiscal management of the city government or provincial government.  Unfortunately, fiscal management is rarely given any importance - very few local chief executives actually know what it is, and rarer are the ones who really practice it.