Urban Planning in the Philippines: Causes, Effects and Solutions

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Urban Planning in Metro Manila: Its Causes, Effects and Solutions

1. The Bane of Filipino’s Existence

One of Metro Manila’s defining factors is not its housing of multinational corporations, its vast shopping centers or its ever-growing residential buildings — it’s the traffic that people notice first, and the traffic that they will remember. In fact, traffic is so terrible that it takes an average of two hours to travel twenty kilometers in Metro Manila, from Quezon City to Pasay (Palma, Go, Poe, 2015). The ordinary Filipino can spend up to four hours on the road per day, a significant amount when put into perspective: a third of their waking hours are wasted on doing virtually nothing.

        It is no surprise, therefore, that Metro Manila was dubbed “Worst Traffic on Earth” and “9th Worst Place to Drive” by Waze, the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app (Tan, 2015). For foreigners, these titles would cause some degree of shock and questions on how it came to be this way. Sadly, Filipinos are almost desensitized to the problem. Because their livelihood depends on crossing Metro Manila at least twice every day, they have no choice but to get used to the traffic. When compiling all the hours spent bumper-to-bumper with loud, honking vehicles, it is understandable why Filipinos would stop asking “why?” to begin shouting “when.”

        Regardless of the passivity towards this everyday phenomenon, all Filipinos wish to end traffic, none more so than the poor who spend a total of 20% of their earnings on transportation, a larger percentage than what they spend on rice (15%) and education (3.37%) altogether (Man, 2015). Like most equations, however, there is a process needed to find the answer. Before one can begin looking for solutions to the problem, he must first understand it: its definition, beginnings, causes, and effects. Only when these are all grasped can he check the box adjacent to the word “solved,” and only then can he begin making a physical change on other people’s lives.

It is through my personal experience as a student who passes through EDSA five days a week that this topic came along. I began to wonder why it was this way: was the Philippines always so traffic? If not, what happened? I wished to learn the basics of the reason why I wake up at 5AM every day to get to school on time. Maybe once this information is absorbed, I’ll be able to spread the word and do something to fix the problem.

        Before anything else, one must understand the basics. If the problem is traffic in Metro Manila, then the goal must be to find the cause of this traffic in order to fix it. In the case of the Philippines, the cause can be stated in three simple words: poor urban planning. Urban planning is the process concerned with the development of land, particularly the infrastructure passing in and out of urban areas. In the Philippines, these areas are the cities of Metro Manila, particularly Manila, Makati, Mandaluyong, Pasig, and Pasay (It’s More Fun in the Philippines, n.d.).

The reason why this paper focuses on Metro Manila is because the aforementioned cities are considered the most congested and traffic-prone in the entire nation, particularly because they house many businesses, malls, schools and residences (Man, 2015). Even morning news shows consistently give an update on the EDSA traffic, because this is where over 500,000 vehicles pass through daily (Too many vehicles: Overcrowded EDSA a traffic nightmare,” 2015).

1. Many Proposals, No Solutions

This topic has interested scholars for years. The study of former UA&P student, Christine Dulay, focused on finding the most efficient way to plan the city of Las Piñas in her thesis “A Multicriteria Solution to Land Use Allocation in the Land Use Plan of District Two of Las Piñas” (2003). She mentioned how the best way to urbanize the city is by decreasing industrial space. This means that the government should focus less on offering companies office space and more on other factors such as increasing public domain (for example, investing in parks and similar modes of recreation). However, while the decision-maker spends less money with this case, he also does not gain any return benefit, so he has the choice to decrease residential and community space instead. As for the solution to poor urban planning, she concluded that properly allocating the remaining land in Metro Manila is the best choice available. This means that by decreasing industrial space, there would be more options to modernize Metro Manila, thus cleaning up the cities and, at the very least, improving the overall atmosphere.

Meanwhile, a graduate of Linkoping University, Lars Christian Roth, concluded in his thesis “An Economic Approach to Urban Development and Transportation in Metro Manila” (2002) that the solution to poor urban planning was in controlling and managing transport demand. The inability of citizens to move around because of congestion created by private vehicles and problematic public transport is what causes traffic and a messy land use plan. By limiting the number of people on the road, there would be more space to move around, lessening the time one consumes travelling. As a result, there would be an increase in the land that companies could use to cultivate the surroundings of Metro Manila, thus taking the right direction in proper urban management.

These theses offer different solutions to poor urban planning in the Philippines, but they are alike in one way: they both agree on the cause of this phenomenon.

1. Poor Urban Planning: A History in Textbooks, A History in the Making

1. Causes of Poor Urban Planning

This is where the first main point comes in. The causes of poor urban planning in the Philippines are (a) the original land use plan by Burnham in 1905 was largely ignored, (b) city governments failed to keep up with the population growth after World War II, and (c) the current government continued to favor the wrong vision of urban planning.

The first cause is probably what many designers consider the most regretful. Had the Philippines continued implementing the land use plan of Burnham, the country would be neater and more organized today.

An American architect and urban designer, Daniel H. Burnham was assigned by his friend, Commissioner W. Cameron Forbes, to create a development plan for Manila in the year 1904. Burnham’s vision included placing major government centers (eg. capitol and department buildings) around Luneta Park for easy public service access; positioning its neighbor, Intramus, as the center for recreation and culture to include plazas, boulevards and even nine parks; and opening a space along the river (north of both Intramuros and Luneta Park) for luxury hotels and resorts. Besides setting all the important landmarks in one area, Burnham also envisioned waterways as the main source of transportation, an inspiration derived from the City of Venice. As for land vehicles, he modeled long roads to lead from one end of the city to the other where the public buildings were held. These “arteries” were methodologically arranged so that no matter where a person was located, he could easily get from one place to another (“Daniel H. Burnham: Plans for the Philippines,” 2010).