THE 1977 MMETRO PLAN, the World Bank-funded “Metro Manila Transport, Land Use and Development Planning Project,” identified areas in the national capital region that were, or ought to have been, “unsuitable for new urban expansion.” In general, three areas were found vulnerable to flooding. Architect Felino Palafox Jr., in his presentation at last week’s Inquirer Briefing, summed it up in this wise: first, “the flat, coastal areas to the north” of the national capital region; second, “the Marikina valley, to the east;” and third, “the western shores of Laguna de Bay.”
It is no coincidence that, by and large, these same areas sustained the most damage in the flooding caused by Storm “Ondoy.” (Much of Navotas, however, proved to be a happy exception—about which the full story has yet to be written.)
A side-by-side comparison of the MMETRO PLAN’s map of “unsuitable” areas and the famous Google situation map of the Ondoy flood shows that the list of worst-hit areas could not have been completely unexpected.
But if even the best-laid plans cannot prevent catastrophic damage and the loss of hundreds of lives, why even bother to prepare them?
At the same forum, the chief planner for Metro Manila in the 1970s and 1980s, architect Nathaniel von Einsiedel, spoke candidly about the limits that planners face. He defined three external limits: “very high population growth rates,” which exert increasing pressure on both infrastructure and services; “jurisdictional and institutional fragmentation,” resulting in “political, administrative boundaries” that “do not jibe with ecosystems;” and “competing and changing priorities,” born of the fundamental difference between terms of office and planning cycles.
These external limits can be summed up in one word: politics. Even the best plans need to be translated into political reality. Von Einsiedel spoke of three internal limits as well—but we think they can be reduced, similarly, to the political. He warned against the tendency of some planners to indulge in “wishful thinking” and “utopian thinking,” not in thinking through what the community in question requires; he scored the propensity of some planners to avoid “primary, routine, most pressing and difficult issues, such as poverty and crime”; not least, he zeroed in on the “detachment from politics and [the] needs of operating/functional departments” that often proves fatal to the best plans. As we said, these limits are eminently political—that is, a function of politics—too.
And yet, we cannot disregard the obvious: the floods spawned by Ondoy and Typhoon “Pepeng” have created an audience, almost a constituency, for planners. There is a longing, not only to understand exactly what happened (and how the long-expected was not predicted), but also to rebuild with a purpose, to move beyond what we were used to in the past.
This need can be met by the profession of environmental planning that Von Einsiedel represents—and by idealistic, even controversial architects like Palafox. In 1905, the now-famous Daniel Burnham created a plan for Manila and its immediate environs that was based partly on Paris and partly on Venice. Ambitious, but if it had been carried out, who knows? The point is, he drew his plan according to a principle we should make our own: “Make no little plans.”
If the politicians insist on reducing the plan to their own size, planners must not simply bow to the powerful, in the vain rationalization that, after all, even the most brilliant plans must conform to political reality. Planners have the responsibility to cry foul when laws, not only of the republic but of science itself, are violated. They cannot, post-Ondoy, avoid that duty by saying, “But we only make recommendations.”
On the other hand, architects and planners must inspire a demoralized population, offering them, not a vision, but a way forward. At a time of great stress, a people ready to try dramatic measures need to be shown a sense of possibility.
To go back, then, to our first question: Why bother to prepare plans at all? Because we cannot afford not to.
