Thursday, February 21, 2008 Planners take up residents' happiness, awareness of dev't plans in UP forum
ARE you happy living in Cebu City or in Metro Cebu?
As an urban planner posed this question to participants in a forum yesterday, he said that urban planning is not just about the shape of the city or how fast a motorist can drive but how happy the people are who live there.
The people, after all, said Cebu City Development Officer Paul Villarete, are the decision-makers in development and shape collectively what kind of future they want.
Villarete, along with former Department of Transportation and Communications Secretary Jesus B. Garcia, chairman of the Sun.Star Publishing Inc. board, served as reactors in a forum at the University of the Philippines (UP), dubbed as “Urban Planning: Dovetailing National Mandate, Super Regions and Local Government Planning.”
Basics
“Over the past 40 years, Cebu has grown to become an international city. Both good and bad things are here. We have traffic congestion and garbage problems, too. What we can do is go back to the basics of urban planning, which are allocating land, identifying socio-economic problems and providing alternatives for decision-makers,” said Villarete.
He told reporters City Hall receives almost half of its business permit applications from the Talamban area so the residents there can expect traffic congestion.
“We are tempering it. Development should not be too much or too little. I’m worried about fast developing areas or runaway development because it invites a lot of problems. This is why we are involving as many stakeholders as possible and making the people understand the consequences,” he said.
According to the speaker, Dr. Marideth Bravo of UP Diliman’s School of Urban and Regional Planning, the planning stakeholders— including the people—see the need for a more efficient and sustainable urban growth pattern.
Cities as catalysts
This growth pattern was taken up by Garcia in his reaction, as he said that urban planning must realize the variant universal principles of growth, with respect to the given situation.
“Making Cebu as the tourism hub in Central Visayas doesn’t make sense to me. In order to do that, we need to have prior tourism industries and other minor conditioning facilities. We need to look at industries that need help and help them improve from there. After all, regions grow out of existing cities,” said Garcia.
Bravo said there is also a need to refocus on setting a framework for urban growth that encourages “livable, environmentally sound, and economically viable communities” as well as to professionalize the planning function in the local government units (LGU).
Villarete admitted there are “dysfunctions in urban planning” that should be corrected like the existence of numerous planning agencies of the government and the failure to communicate plans to the people.
LGUs face the challenge of enhancing job creation because one cannot divorce planning from “mainstreaming socio-economic problems,” Villarete and Bravo agreed. (NRC)
