By Chelsey Keith P. Ignacio, Special Features and Content Senior Writer

Many people go to the cities to discover the opportunities they widely present. Currently, over half of the global population lives in cities, according to the United Nations. This is expected to expand to two-thirds of the population by 2050.

How can the cities in the Philippines accommodate such growth? Rapid urbanization, when unplanned, could create issues affecting the people and the surroundings. Realizing the issues in existing cities and the work to do to develop better cities for people to live in were explored during the BusinessWorld Insights forum about “Smart Cities and Mobility: Building More Sustainable Cities and Transportation” on Jan. 25.

Projecting that the Filipino population would reach 150 million by 2050, Felino A. Palafox, Jr., Principal Architect — Urban Planner of Palafox Architecture Group, Inc., has been promoting for the planning and development of a hundred new cities by then. Or else, he saw that the existing cities would be as bad, if not worse, than the present Metro Manila.

In the Philippines, Metro Manila is known for encompassing opportunities in its various cities. But the capital region is also infamous for the wrongs in its urban planning.

“In the 70s, Metro Manila was a model, a reference, for good metropolitan planning. Today, many scholars from Harvard, Yale, and European universities, they come to our office and interview me, ‘Metro Manila, what went wrong?'” Mr. Palafox shared.

Mr. Palafox pointed out the imbalance in the country. For example, Makati City’s central business district (CBD) is surrounded by gated communities, but “there is no housing for the human capital,” he said.

“The employees of Makati, on the average, spent about five to six hours commuting because [they] are priced out of the housing stock.”

He also mentioned that the Makati CBD’s daytime population is 11 times more than its nighttime population due to the human capital lacking of socialized housing.

“There’s so much imbalance in our country, urban, regional, and national development, and the primacy of Metro Manila,” he further emphasized.

He also said later on that “we cannot address the problems of Metro Manila unless we distribute more cities outside Metro Manila.”

Mr. Palafox noted issues such as the lack of public parks or democratic spaces for all income classes as well, hence a lot of people go to malls. He later mentioned also that Metro Manila lacks open spaces.

“Open spaces are the lungs of the city. That’s why Metro Manila, [when] compared to the human being, needs lung transfer because of the lack of open spaces, a heart bypass because roads are congested, and a heart transplant because major activity centers like CBDs are all constrained, and so on,” he said.

Another issue pinpointed by Mr. Palafox was the lack of being visionary.

Sharing his experience from working in Dubai in United Arab Emirates, he said that the rulers of modern Dubai possess “visionary leadership, strong political will, a good appreciation of good urban planning and good design, architecture, engineering, and very competent. They always keep on improving.”

“In our country, it’s mostly short-term and opportunistic. There seems to be lacking long-term and visionary,” he said.

He also noted that a lot of the urban planning decisions made by local governments are political decisions.

Educating policy makers

Policy makers must be educated about the cities, stressed Erika Fille T. Legara, Aboitiz chair in Data Science and associate professor at the Asian Institute of Management.

Properly understanding cities, according to Ms. Legara, stipulates a complex systems perspective, given cities are complex systems. For instance, Metro Manila cannot be fully understood and managed by isolating individual cities that comprise the region.

“We have to look at it as a whole. Everything is linked, everything is interconnected and interdependent,” she said. “So, to develop sound policies, for example, for improving well-being and the quality of life of commuters and citizens, we must start thinking in systems and consider this interconnectedness, the different components, and factors.”

Ms. Legara also considered the “natural tendencies” of the people and the cities.

“Sure, we can be engineered. But the engineering and management must be well-thought-out considering these tendencies [or] human behavior. Why, for example, do people want to move to cities? Because people want to be where the action is, where the economic activities are, where the opportunities are, and where there is a dynamic and active lifestyle,” she said.

These dynamics, active lifestyle, and opportunities should also be there when considering decentralization, not just building housing, she later added.

Making cities smarter should also not just be the goal, said Ms. Legara, but to make them more livable. That is, by making the amenities, centered on well-being and quality of life, more accessible to the people. Yet, getting there might need cities to be smarter, but that should not be the end.

“These plans and implementation must be all-inclusive. [In] Metro Manila, inequality is really terrible. And this is something that we also need to address, and the government must start to think this way, too,” Ms. Legara said.

She also mentioned the need for political will to put plans in place. “Because even if you have the right data, the science and technology, all of these approaches, the plans, if there’s no political will to implement these plans, that would be a big problem,” she said.

For the ordinary citizens’ part, meanwhile, Ms. Legara believed that it is important that they should let the government know that they demand things.

“We have to call their attention because usually our policymakers — not all, but many of them — don’t really use public transport so they don’t know what people go through on a daily basis. It would be good if we can tell them, let them know that ‘Hey, we need this,'” she said.

“[That is] critical, for us to know that we can actually come to them, approach them, let them know of what we’re going through and hopefully they listen,” she added.

Private sector’s role

The private sector also has a role in helping address cities’ problems and work together with the government in this endeavor. This was highlighted by Steven T. Tan, president of SM Supermalls.

“Big corporations [or] institutions like us, I think we have that responsibility to act on these pressing issues. And we work very closely with whether it’s the local government or the national government,” he said.

He added that the private sector could not disregard and say that this is only the government’s problem. “It’s everyone’s problem. It’s everyone’s concern. We have to really work hand in hand.”

“It is [in cities] that we are doing business, and it’s just right for big businesses like ours to also help [with] other concerns of the cities,” Mr. Tan said. For SM Supermalls’ part, for instance, they also consider other things to uplift people’s lives when they build a mall.

“When we put up a mall, we also put up residentials, we create jobs,” he shared, adding that 70% of their tenants are micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, which help the provinces where their malls are located.

“At SM Supermalls, we believe that sustainable property development is the key. We make every effort to future-proof our country through the practice of disaster resilience that addresses the increasing demand for urban areas and the threat of climate change,” said Mr. Tan.

He shared that SM Supermalls has launched several free E-Vehicle Charging Stations. The SM electric bus services also began rolling out, which allowed commuters to go from SM Fairview in Quezon City to SM Megamall in Mandaluyong City and vice versa. More destinations would be rolled out in the coming months, according to Mr. Tan.

“Our commitment to building smarter, sustainable cities and transportation has become stronger than ever. I believe that by initiating sustainability programs that will improve the way we live, we can add value to the lives of every single Filipino mall-goers and increase our chances of achieving a sustainable nation. However, this is not just SM Supermalls’ battle alone. It is ours,” he said.