A PANDEMIC, disaster risk and climate change-adaptive, progressive, inclusive and sustainable smart city concept is now into a serious discussion among Bacolod City’s senior executive assistants and development planners led by no less than city Mayor Evelio "Bing’"Leonardia.
I find it timely and fitting to have this subject placed in one of the top priorities of the city leadership in view of the restricted physical movements and interactions of people, the downslide of the local economy, and the exacerbation of the economic hardship of the people, all caused by the covid19 pandemic.
From my own field visits, geo-scanning, and analysis of some of our top metro cities and those in Southeast Asia, Europe and north America I have visited in the span of three decades, one thing I find interesting is the way they plan the utilization, conservation and development of their resources and lands; manage population growth; put up efficient systems of managing and delivery of water, energy and other public utilities; ease of transacting business with the government; urban structures designs; and connectivity of people, structures and systems.
The most important parts are the embedding of the employment and social security programs within the structures and systems of government services, where everybody has access, and where no one is left behind.
Of course, nobody can claim perfection or at the least have the best smart urban system. Most admitted they are in continuing experiments. Yet one thing they have achieved this far is they have lessened the burden and irony of urban life amid its various amenities.
Indeed, the Smart City concept is something all urban and development planners must continuously develop to its advanced stages.
For now, it is fair enough to assay that Smart City is the higher version of a highly urbanized city where lands and basic resources are utilized effectively using advanced connectivity technologies but without undermining food security, diminishing labor requirements, much less destruction of the environment, nor threatening the needs of next generations.
In the case of Bacolod City, it would be challenging to define the concept of Smart City in the specific characteristics of Bacolod as HUC and as the center of trade and commerce, public utilities, culture, politics and social movements in the province and island, surrounded by underdeveloped towns and cities and vast monocrop sugar-based economy dominated by traditional big landed-merchant elites and feudal dynasties.
Bacolod as HUC is not only serving the needs of its more than half million population but still growing at an average annual growth rate of 2.6%-3%. It is also absorbing and managing the growing pressures of businesses and services for the entire province and part of the region and entire island.
Ever more burdensome for Bacolod is the need to put up support infrastructures and systems for provincial transportation and traffic, communication, banking and other public utility services, and its forced absorption of the migration of growing army of unemployed and surplus labor from underdeveloped provincial towns and cities hosting backward agro industrial farms, mining operations, and depleting agro forest reserves.
Internally, more than 40% of its population is now residing in the urban section of the city, and it is likewise growing; this demands higher efficiency and effectiveness of its service infrastructures and systems.
The city leadership of Mayor Bing Leonardia is fully aware of the key challenges facing its HUC as a result of its years of painstaking planning, development and management. Mayor Bing knows that it cannot be contented with what they have achieved.
It is resolved to scale up to a level where every Bacolodnon does not only enjoy the irony of modernity and amenities of a highly urbanized city, but work, live and pray with ease, safety and dignity.
For all this it can only point to the road towards a Smart City as its direction. This is the reason why most Bacolodnon cry for the continuity of the leadership of Mayor Bing and team instead of changing of the guards who have yet to prove their mettle and kettle of agenda.