A CITY – or town – is made for people, not for cars. The line is from Dr. Enrique Penalosa who, as one-term mayor of Bogota, rejected a multi-million dollar plan to build a road for cars because of its choking impact on the urban space of Colombia’s capital.
Throughout history, he said, there were more people killed by cars than by wild animals.
A parody is in order. A city or town is made for people, not for malls. Not for business-driven infrastructure that threatens the holding capacities of a small community being defaced and changed forever by the continuing urban sprawl.
On his return to his native Dublin, Irish traveler and writer Pete St. John lamented about “the gray, unyielding concrete that makes a city of my town” in that haunting folksong “Rare Old Times”.
Then city councilor Edilberto Tenefrancia, who provided moral and intellectual compass to Baguio’s legislature, saw the point in another perspective. That was when a study was presented showing Baguio’s ranking had slid down in terms of the ease of opening and doing business among medium-sized cities in the country.
Manila (or any other urban center) is where you work (and do business); Baguio is (still) where you live,” he told his community’s sector representatives in a consoling rejoinder to the presentation of his city’s dismal rating in the business survey.
The plus factors for quality business used in the study included access to airports and seaports and other infrastructure support which Baguio, because of its mountainous terrain and limited land capacity, can impossibly provide.
Baguio, together with La Trinidad, Benguet’s capital town, can now compare with Metro-Manila in terms of traffic un-flow and snag (as Manny Villar is now neck-and neck with Noynoy Aquino in voters’ preference for the Presidency). Yet none among the cities that beat us in that business access study can and will ever come close to our conducive climate up here.
Whatever they say about us losing the scent of pine, Baguio will always be 10 degrees cooler than down there. That’s why the rich are moving up here, they who blame us for cutting pine but whose own demand for a piece of temperate Baguio also triggered the loss of pine, say, at Camp John Hay, which is now the enclave of the elite from down there.
There was not much we could do about double standards, about our forests destroyed for housing subdivisions and big commercial ventures as the environmental compliance certificates were approved by the powers down there.
Yet what our protestations failed to stop is no longer the issue. It is water under the bridge. Of issue now and tomorrow is the need for us to take stock of what remains of Baguio’s natural lure, and recent developments about urban development just provides that opportunity to do so.
Recently and suddenly, we have the public voicing opposition to the infrastructure development of the Athletic Bowl at Burnham Park by a Korean outfit. Over in La Trinidad, residents now protest a move by town officials to hand over a lot for a mall project by Jarco, the same firm which leased Baguio’s “burned area” for its Centermall.
The City Council listened and canceled the Athletic Bowl project, even as city councilor Richard Carino called on those opposing the Korean investment project to provide alternatives. It also looks like La Trinidad officials might heed Benguet Governor Nestor Fongwan’s advice to forego with the deal with Jarco, with town residents saying they themselves can invest in putting up a mall - if their community really needs it.
As our officials pointed out, the two project proposals are not done deals and still would have a long way to go. What they approved were the general concepts, with the specifics for development still to be fleshed out, in full public consultation, so that they would be fully understood so the right or correct public sentiment, decision and conclusion could and should be had.
That’s it. Those exchanges of opinion – even of diatribes – may yet serve to bring us to the right track, for more dialogues towards strengthening the sense of community we thought we no longer have, until these outside investment project proposals came about. We now have the opportunity to transform controversy into a rallying point to draw us all together to build and rebuild our community from our own perspective.
There will be other issues, as there are now, about things we otherwise ignore. They include the plan to level that mini-forest beside the Baguio Convention Center for a commercial-condotel ironically dubbed “Baguio Air Residences.” Still, as we and visitors agree, Baguio now needs more than ever what remains of its trees and open spaces than it does more business concrete that leaves us with hardly elbow room.
The image, based on the recent public discussions on the athletic oval and mall projects, is that of a toy we abandoned in our yard, not realizing its value until somebody hastily picks it up for his or her own use and development. Or, as business enterprise would have it, its own contribution to our community’s economic development within the context of corporate social responsibility.
Makapasangit. I don’t have the aggressive push of business enterprise, but the way we neglect what we have - our own potential for developing our own resources. It’s a message businessman and Baguio boy Michael del Rosario may be trying to point out with his slogan for Sunshine Supermart – “Laking Baguio”. Home-grown.
On a regional scale, the Cordillera remains one of the nation’s poorest despite being a major resource base for national development. Its mineral wealth, forest and water resources spurred the progress of Metro-Manila and other parts of the country, including the farmlands of Regions 1, 2 and even 3.
Yet the resource base is left with an empty bag, with some its villages still without electric power and its leadership still begging the release of its share from the exploitation of its resources, be it the mines, the rivers or, in Baguio, Camp John Hay.
Aside from begging, we might as well develop what remains of our own for our own.
The way has been shown to us by Kalinga, which is serious in developing its own mini-hydro to generate power and empower its villages and communities. Ifugao has just inaugurated another one in Kiangan. Both will be owned and operated by the two poor towns, as the Asin hydros the visionary American mayor of Baguio Eusebius Halsema built in the early 1920s are still owned by the city.
In the same token that Hungduan town in Ifugao earlier accessed a grant from Japan for its own micro-mini hydro that now allows my cousins to smoothen their woodcarvings, knives and blacksmith products at low energy cost they pay to their cooperative.
Back to Baguio, to my old refrain. This city is where our children will live in. Unless, of course, we prepare them to leave with the fraying of the cultural fabric that used to bind us as one community, one neighborhood – the sense of fair play that is (or was) the mark of a Baguio girl or boy.
It’s time to think Baguio this Valentine’s Day and onwards to its bicentennial.
(e-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments).