from Raffles Hotel, to Chijmes, to Tan Qwee Lan @ Bugis
Friday, 30 November 2007
Michelle's All Black mad-hatters celebration at the National Museum
thanks to Aldo's photo-direction :)
Monday, 26 November 2007
Balestier West Walk-Through.avi
This is a fly-by of the Urban Design Studio project I worked on the last sem... Basically, its a plaza on the western end of Balestier Road, this plaza acts as a magnet of activity and node/crystallization point for both the transient and local communities within the Balestier district...
The Story of Urbanism in Metro Manila: From Intramuros to City Beautiful and back
I. Manila – the seat of colonial power
The bustling Philippine capital of Manila has come a long way from its roots as a Spanish trading fort. It has broken out of its own medieval walls to become the sprawling metropolis it is today. Like any colonial capital city, the story of Manila is the story of its masters, who have steered development and growth into the current pattern that “Manilenyos” and visitors now live and cope with on a daily basis.
What makes Manila even more similar with its neighbouring Asian cities is that, like the rest of the country, it has been a recipient of almost all forms and patterns of urbanism as imposed by its various masters – with each iteration creating unintended consequences and effects on the local context. As mandated by King Phillip II’s Leyes de Indias or Laws of the Indies, all of the Philippines’ Spanish Colonial settlements were planned around the basic pattern of a plaza with cardinal and secondary diagonal streets radiating from the central common space.F[1]F This method of settlement planning drew lots of influence from Alberti and Vitruvius’ treatises on Urban Form. Not merely standing as a set of rules/guidelines describing an ideal settlement, the Laws of the Indies also talks about the need to create defensible enclosures and walls to keep out the “uncivilized” new world that the colonists aimed to “modernise.”F[2]
| Figure 1 - The Walled City of Manila: Early American Period |
The exclusionary urbanism of the Laws of the Indies manifested itself well in the colonial crown of Manila, wherein the Spanish and political powerbase was kept within Intramuros – which literally means within the walls; and the Chinese, Muslim and “Tagalog” (or Taga-Ilog, vernacular for “people of the river”) natives and traders kept Extramuros – outside the walls, and across the banks of the Pasig River to form the “Parian” district which was in essence, the local word for a priest’s congregational area; a subtle reminder defining the civilised urbanity of Intramuros, and the “unwashed” and uncivilised impression of the long-established trading settlements along the river. These districts eventually came to form Manila’s Chinatown of Binondo and Muslim quarter of Quiapo.
By 1898, after a protracted local revolutionary war and within the context of larger global conflict brought about by the Spanish-American war, the Spanish eventually conceded the Philippines to the United States of America through a mock battle in Manila Bay – a moot encounter considering the fact that the Americans wanted to maintain the semblance of an honourable victory after the underlying negotiation/trade of all of Spain’s colonial holdings for the sum of 20 million dollars as agreed by the two powers in the Treaty of Paris. When the Americans did make landfall from their token flotilla, they stumbled upon a capital burning with the fires of nationalism brought about by the long struggle for independence from Spain. Seeing the demise of the Spanish, and unaware of the larger plot underlying current events, local Filipino revolutionaries saw the opportunity of proclaiming the Philippines’ independence from Spain. An event lost in history, except in the local context, because the rest of the world saw the unfolding events for what they really were: a colonial handover, from Spain to America.
The Americans, although late-bloomers in the global game of colonization, saw themselves not as new masters, but as benevolent liberators out to spread American democracy and freedom to the oppressed world. Seeing the Spanish downtown built within the fortress of Intramuros and the sprawling and underdeveloped proto-urban settlements around its walls across the Pasig River, The American colonial government wanted to differentiate themselves from the “backward” colonial masters from the old-world by again “civilizing” the city of Manila by building a better, inclusive and grand capital befitting an American colony (equating a beautiful city of neoclassical monuments and grand vistas with social order, urbanity and civilisation is an immensely shallow way of reading a city) – in the tradition of their own capital city, Washington D.C., and its European counterparts – Paris, Rome, etc. The man tasked to undertake this plan was Daniel Burnham, who was the progenitor of the City Beautiful plan in its first iteration – the White City of the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, which became the model for succeeding cities such as Chicago, San Francisco and Washington D.C.F[4]F
II. Burnham’s Plan – Vision, Implementation and Aftermath
A. Luneta / Rizal Park - Micro
| Figure 2 - A copy of the original drawn plan of the Burnham Plan of Manila showing the proposed National Mall, the expanded port area, the bay-side boulevard and the various axis radiating from the national mall, with one of the main axes terminating at what is to become the site of Quezon City and the University of the Philippines. Foretelling the plan’s own suburban obsolescence. |
| Figure 3 - Satellite Photo of Rizal Park and Intramuros |
Today, Rizal Park stands as testament to Burnham’s vision, and the trials and tribulations of a nation. It has since been expanded to Manila Bay through reclamation and now, the mall’s bayside axis terminates into Quirino Grandstand while the axis is now edged weakly by just a handful of the proposed government buildings, which in an interesting twist of Disneyfication of history, have all become tourism or historically related: The Manila Planetarium, National Library, National Archives, National Historical Institute, The Department of Tourism (former Agriculture Building) and the National Museum (former Finance Building.) Alongside this token government presence on the mall stands reminders of the Philippines’ American colonial period: The United States Embassy Complex, along with its vast crowds of visa applicants, and the Manila Hotel, once considered the city’s place to see and be seen, is but a shell of its former glorious self, mismanaged to the point of being a three-star option for those who couldn’t get a room in the city’s newer hotels in the CBD. Other buildings flanking the complex include the Army-Navy and Elks Club, which stand as unutilised reminders of the Old-Boys Club that the American officers and citizens established in their colony. The proposed Capitol Building never materialised because of lack of funding and the outbreak of the Second World War, with its site converted into a touristy map-cum-fountain representing the Philippines.
Rizal Park remains to be a popular tourist attraction, serving as a quick photo-op stop for the city tours that shuttle visitors through the raucous city into its malls before leaving for the Philippines’ more picturesque and relatively stress-free countryside. It remains to be one of the last remaining free and non-commoditised public spaces in the metropolis, serving as a back-drop for many prayer rallies which sometimes end up as political rallies (the church and state never got fully separated from each other in the Philippines). The park also serves as a popular cost-effective, non-consumerist weekend destination for families and couples.
| Figure 4 - Map of Manila: Showing Radial-Concentric Pattern in the old core |
B. Radial/ Concentric Plan - Macro
The Burnham plan then calls for a series of roads to radiate from the national mall, with each road creating a grand vista to and from the government centre. The first of the important series of roads is the bay-side boulevard running south of the mall towards Manila’s southern suburbs. Formerly known as Dewey Boulevard, the picturesque Roxas Boulevard serves as the Metropolis’ edge. This road is known by planners as C-1 or Circumferential-1 which doesn’t behave as a ring road, but actually bisects the metropolis and its phantom twin city on the bay. Other circumferential ring roads followed in succession, running north to south around the core and creating an interlocking grid from which the city and its surrounding suburbs grew. (C-2 is Taft Avenue, C-3 became Quirino Avenue and Governor Forbes, C-4 became EDSA – more on EDSA in succeeding sections, and C-5/C-6 becoming toll roads linking the city’s fringes.)
Radial roads followed 2 important radials anchored by a progression of vistas. One main vista ran diagonally south of the mall, branching off toward the Paco Central Railway station which served as the gateway to the rail services to the north and south regions of the capital. The other main axis to the north of the mall, ran towards the grand Post Office Building, which was situated near the mouth of the Pasig River for ease of mail-ship access. (just like Singapore’s Fullerton Building) and branches off to Binondo (Chinatown) the former Muslim quarter of Quiapo and on to Quezon City (to be expounded in succeeding sections). Although many historians and nostalgic planners argue that the Burnham Plan of Manila was never fully implemented, the fact that the metropolis’ underlying order follows the same directions set forth by Burnham, shows that at least in the some aspects such as roads and circulation, the Burnham plan is alive and relevant to the city today. The fact that the Americans weren’t around long enough to carry it out completely, did not stop local planners and traffic engineers from expounding on the radial-concentric grid by building new roads and expressways linking the metropolis. In fact, you could follow a highway’s kilometre markers backward from the provinces, say Batangas, south of Manila, and it will lead you back to the Zero-kilometre marker in front of Rizal’s statue at Rizal Park.
| Figure 5 - Map of Greater Metro Manila showing existing Concentric Road Pattern |
C.
| Figure 7 - Destruction of the Walls of Intramuros : WW2 |
| Figure 6 - The flattened interior of the walled city of Intramuros |
III. The Continuum of Suburbanisation and the Search for a New Centrality: Quezon City and Makati
A. Quezon City: City Beautiful ver. 2.0
Learning from Burnham’s City Beautiful Plan, local Filipino planners set out to do a larger, grander version in Quezon City. The plan centres around the creation of a grand elliptical rotunda from which radiating avenues would branch out and connect to the original radial and concentric roads (such as EDSA/C-4, C-5 and Espana-Quezon Boulevard/R-7) planned for Manila. Quezon City was at that time, evidently the best area to put up the new capital because of its vast tracts of virgin grassland, its high elevation, the presence of the La Mesa watershed. Its position to the north of Manila also anchored it as an urban gateway to the agricultural heartlands to the north.
| Figure 9 - Satellite Map of Quezon City Elliptical Road |
| Figure 8 - Quezon Monument |
The new city was then to be the new capital, with it serving as the home base for various government institutions : Agriculture, Agrarian Reform, Batasang Pambansa (House of Representatives), Bureau of Internal Revenue, Social Security System, Court of Appeals and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Quezon City is also home to major educational institutions such as the University of the Philippines main campus and Ateneo de Manila University (a Jesuit university, modelling itself as the Philippines’ Ivy League) Also located around the elliptical rotunda were a series of key hospitals which locals fondly call “Dinuguan Avenue” after a dish made of innards and blood – the hospitals include the Lung Centre, Heart Centre and Kidney Centre. Quezon City also became the start of the country’s thrust into public housing, with vast tracts of land surrounding the central area of Diliman converted into landed housing projects. These areas were called “the Projects” district, giving rise to the colloquial moniker given to angsty, working-class teenagers of the from the baby-boom generation: the “jeproks.” Parallel to this, several middle and upper class gated (to keep the jeproks out) communities started appearing further in the outskirts of Quezon City, with names such as White Plains, Ayala Heights, Valle Verde, La Vista, Greenmeadows, White Plains and Corinthian Gardens, which all throw-back to famous Californian suburbs that boomed after the war. All of this helped to create a relatively viable and thriving capital city for the Philippines. Quezon City became testament to the Philippine government’s physical planning, becoming a sign of its glory days and post-war economic boom.
B.
| Figure 10 - Cubao, Quezon City's commercial hub, along EDSA/C-4 |
C. Makati: The Privatization of the City
Ayala Compania, the Philippines’ oldest business house, was devastated after the war. Confronted with near zero economy and virtually no infrastructure to rebuild on, it was forced to look for new ways to rebuild its company from its former headquarters along Escolta near the Pasig River and Port Area; which, before the war, was Manila’s booming financial district, home to banks, trading houses and upscale shops.
| Figure 11 - Dona Mercedes with Col. McMicking |
| Figure 12 Satellite Overview of the Makati CBD - Ayala Developed sections/villages and roads (EDSA/C-4:red, Buendia/C-3:blue, Ayala Ave: lime green , Paseo de Roxas: Yellow, Makati Ave: Maroon and R-3/South Superhighway: Orange) |
First to rise was the community of Forbes Park, which became the choice relocation address for Manila’s elite who wanted to distance themselves from the decay of Manila and the middle-class projects of Quezon City. Riding the waves of suburban migration and demand, Ayala successively opened additional gated villages with similar development themes – large single family plots, club/community facilities and secure gates as selling points.F[9]F All this set a very stark contrast to the fine-grain, almost organic, grid settlements occurring in Makati’s old districts, a stark contrast that remains today and resembles Intramuros’ walled exclusionary urbanism.
| Figure 13 Makati CBD and Surrounding Gated Communities - with the intersection in the foreground (EDSA and Ayala) behaving like the CBD enclave's main gate |
Ayala used a combination of incentives (discounts for immediate construction) and financing plans (through their bank) to encourage settlement and purchase. As the development’s success became more and more apparent, businesses started to take hold and move in from Manila and Quezon City, eventually leading Ayala to convert their last two planned villages into office block developments, effectively creating the Philippines’ first modern, contemporary central-business district... with the area’s swampy areas belying what served as the foundations of the city’s skyscrapers – non-absorbent bedrock.
It took the Makati CBD 50 years of conscious planned effort to become what it is today: the country’s nerve centre for business, society and culture; attracting not only money but also foreign expats, artists and the country’s elite as well – and with it, further enhancing the Ayala family’s already high status in society and business to that of almost becoming the Philippines’ secular royal family – and some sources do directly link them to the Duchess of Alba in Spain.F[10]F
What’s interesting to note is, despite the further rise of the Ayalas in Philippine society, they have never engaged in politics, and have remained to be cautious and passive observers in the political scene. This phenomenon further mirrors the eventual move of true economic and urban power from the hands of government, to that of business and the private sector. But then, one argue against it by saying, power never shifted in the first place, with it still being deeply entrenched in the old Spanish and American colonial bulwarks – merely transformed and streamlined into one of the Philippines’ largest publicly listed conglomerates: Ayala Corporation – who as further indication of the privatised nature of the Philippines’ CBD, still hold and control the deeds/restrictions to all of the roads, parks and open spaces in Makati.
D. Makati: The Hobbled Centre
Makati, despite the patina of age and success, is also not without its share of critics. Modelled like any other CBD, Makati was virtually dead at night, with majority of its working population (coming from the bedroom towns and suburbs in the region) commuting to it every morning and leaving it in a rush in the afternoon. The Philippines’ intermittent boom-bust business cycle has also considerably hobbled Makati’s growth, often leaving it in a virtual complete vacancy for previous stretches of political upheaval and economic recession. Even the CBD’s surrounding gated communities have not been spared of this kind of blight, as skyrocketing land values and living costs eventually cycle the communities from being composed largely by families, to becoming a speculator’s/landlord’s paradise of high-rent/high-price accommodations for Manila’s discerning expat community.
Although Makati has – through the injection of the 24 hour, Business-Process Outsourcing Industry and Ayala Land’s redevelopment of key projects and sites- reinvigorated itself as a booming, round-the-clock city; prospects for further growth and development, are much more limited because of how the city’s surrounding single-family gated communities were developed. On the CBD’s outskirts, strong, rigid and influential Village Associations hold control over any development within their gates... similar to New Urbanist notions of community associations, these powerful groups nostalgically limit construction and growth to that of the same typologies propagated 50 years ago – a throwback to times (that even Ayala acknowledges) wherein foresight did not go deeper than one generation, never anticipating the growth of the CBD to what it is today. This echoes the reasons for President Quezon’s move away from Manila’s fine grain toward Quezon City – new development and new money cannot take hold in areas held in stasis due to the micro-ownership of parcels (Manila), but in Makati’s case, relatively large yet underperforming tracts of land are held in stasis due to this continuing romantic notion of preserving the post-war suburban gated community. Even in the more public and un-gated “business villages” of Legazpi and Salcedo, last developed by the Ayalas as office and residential apartment lots, the original residential road networks have hobbled the density and capacity of the area. Because these office areas were planned originally as single family residences, they have reached their saturation point with all the 8-12 storey mid-rise blocks (for some parts even higher) completely built out and jammed with pedestrians, cars and passersby. This is even made worse with the established road circulation pattern, which echoes that of suburban residential blocks, wherein the spiral of exclusion marches towards the public realm from culdesac, to local road, to main road, feeding into the major access. This creates a phenomenon of chokepoints holding back a looping procession of cars leading out during rush hour – and because the emphasis for these areas has always been security, they were often confined to one entrance and exit access point, something, inherently at odds with the multiple parallel routes offered by conventional grid patterns in other CBDs.
| Figure 14 Makati's central location - one of the key factors leading to its success in establishing a centrality to the city |
E.
| Figure 15 - Overview Map of Metro Manila, with downtown manila to the west, ringed by EDSA which connects Quezon City to the North and Makati just south of the river, and stringed by Cubao and Ortigas areas; with EDSA (red line) terminating in the bay reclamation area south of Manila, and C-5 (Yellow Line) |
The Ayalas’ Makati development model became a shining example to other developers in the region. Family-developers such as the Ortigases, Aranetas, Sys, Tans, Lopezes, Gokongweis, Tys and even the Ayalas themselves have kickstarted similar developments - with the family names not necessarily exclusive to the landholding Spanish old- rich, but now also including the enterprising Chinese Filipino businessmen; gated suburbs and mini-business districts have sprung up along the entire length of what was originally planned to be a ring road (C-4/EDSA), effectively, a new backbone springing out from the atrophying corpse of the City Beautiful, the city’s circumferential fringe ring road as the new main street, multiplied by a factor of 10.
Succeeding high-end exclusive residential and commercial developments such as Bonifacio, Ortigas, Rockwell, nearby Eastwood, the redeveloped Cubao, booming Pioneer, and EDSA’s terminus points in the north (Trinoma) and south (Reclamation area/Mall of Asia) have reinforced this linear spine of urbanisation – effectively turning the Metro Manila region into a circumferential/linear city of exclusive, yet critical node points - far from the original Burnham plan of an aesthetic and urbane city beautiful; an ironic, if not apt, twist on history – the return to the walled enclave of Intramuros as a model, with today’s urban elite making use of exclusionary urbanism in the form of high prices, land values, parking fees and the prohibition of public transport access into their “cities” which have become nothing more than a loop of residential condominiums surrounding a high-end shopping mall –Public Space as a Commodity. Even the efforts of a few of the metropolis’ idealistic practicing urban planners to take down gates, remove restrictions and create more open/public developments are all for nought in the face of deeper and sometimes more effective exclusionary methods than physical barriers.
C-4/EDSA as the metropolitan spine, itself has evolved to be a means of exclusion. As Ong points out: the privatisation of pedestrian public realms such as plazas and streets into malls “has also reflected itself in the privatisation and commercialisation of the City’s spine; with a strictly enforced/fined thin yellow line – the bus lane separating private cars and SUVs from the rest of the bus-riding, smoke-inhaling, commuting populace – a form of urban apartheid”F[11]F taking place in the midst of the unique giant towering urban typology of signage towers selling anything from fancy underpants promoted by impossibly good-looking Filipino mestizas and chinitas; to liposuction (also promoted by the same mixed colonial progeny) ... to fit in the fancy, expensive underpants.
IV. Analysis / Conclusion: Post-Mortem of Unintended consequences
The fact that Daniel Burnham’s City Beautiful Plan has evolved into something totally unlike the original intention is testament to the fluid nature of cities, able to regenerate even despite a deathblow to its historic heart/core. The City Beautiful is alive in Metro Manila yet its dysfunctional result is proof of the model’s failure to anticipate and consider a myriad of other factors: socio-economic, cultural, land-ownership and sustainable growth were all seconded to the primary governing notion of neo-classical civic beauty set by Burnham. Beauty alone is not the only thing that will drive a city plan. Of course much of the blame could be attributed to the planners, architects, engineers and politicians tasked with implementing the Burnham Plan, where ideally, they could have been enablers empowering the plan to evolve and take a better life of its own; in reality, they have been hampered for a host of other reasons: lack of training, privatisation of finance, lack of private-public collaboration, war, political bickering, etc.
Of course, one may argue that it is precisely this same city-beautiful radial plan that has allowed these new centres to grow: providing the concentric fringe roads which enable the former privately-held farmland and haciendas ringing the downtown city to become cities themselves... but this only reinforces the earlier point made about how the Plan failed to consider these socio-economic and ownership realities, failing to engage them into partnership for implementation. And like any plan, if it never bothers to talk about how get things done amongst its stakeholders, the plan is in danger of remaining exactly that: a beautiful set of drawings about a utopian city never to be.
Indeed, Metropolitan Manila has run the gamut of Urbanism moves and strategies, and has ridden the waves of market forces and changes – what else is Metro Manila to be? What are its prospects for the future? Do we nostalgically try to bring back the core through inner-city redevelopment and slum clearance? Do we do what urbanists/preservationists Paolo Alcazaren and Augusto Villalon proposeF[12]F - to relocate Makati’s financial district into the former port area just as other bay/harbour side cities have? Succeeding downtown Manila mayors have tried to rejuvenate the core, with the last iteration- Mayor Lito Atienza (a former Architecture undergrad from the University of Santo Tomas) churning out several successfully limited redevelopment projects but because of the vast contextual factors underlying these bold moves, each venture was eventually received as either just another political gimmick, or at best window-dressing and clean up for the blighted city. They simply cannot cohesively integrate nor compete with the predominant private sector corridor of EDSA.
Or do we adapt a more Koolhaasian stance, and accept these realities are part and parcel of Metro Manila’s distinct evolving urbanism? I for one feel, that instead of writing about what could have been, and complaining about how things are now, maybe it’s better to take these realities and integrate them in the planning framework and mindset, because like it or not, we cannot turn back time, and too much nostalgia is just as bad a dose of hyperreality as a trip to Disneyland or Citywalk. Instead of griping about how the city has come to be, why not come to terms with it and make use of these factors as enablers?
Makati as a privatised city is testament to how profit-centred yet responsible and magnanimous private sector entities could be used to further the cause of cities. The resiliency of Metro Manila in withstanding the ravages of war and crisis is testament to the continuing and evolving hardiness of urban conditions despite their appalling lack of services and infrastructure. Other cities such as Lagos have relatively fared well with considerably less support and even greater challenges facing them.
The current paradigm of exclusionary privatised sub-centres along a development corridor, if by any indication of history, will probably not be its terminal state, because the city as we know will continue to evolve and unfold. Current and broadening city discourse in Manila is starting to consider the possibilities of the evolution of the city into a Ulocally-enabled, private-sector inclusive and centrally-coordinated multi-nodal urban structure, wherein each local government attempts to carve out a coopetitive niche amongst its neighboursU, by harnessing its context and empowering its business community to further build onto a metropolis that is not merely mono-centrically modelled around the old core, but distributed amongst its key nodes.
For me, the challenge of Metro Manila is exciting, and I, like my contemporaries, look forward to hopefully taking part in our own little way in writing our city’s unfolding story. Let’s see where Manila’s next chapters take us.
[1] UAlarcon, Norma; U“Philippine Architecture During Pre-Spanish and Spanish Periods”; UST Press, Manila, Philippines, 2001
[2] En.wikipedia.org/laws_of_the_indies
[3] En.wikipedia.org/manila
[4] UGoodno, James B.; U“Burnham's Manila: a century later, the master planner's City Beautiful ideas still have meaning.” From Planning, Dec 1, 2004
[5] En.wikipedia.org/manila
[6] UEuropa, Prudencio;U “MLQ’s Quezon City: The Filipino Metropolis”; from The Filipino Reporter, Aug 24, 2005
[8] “McMicking, Mercedes Zobel” from page Z-99 of San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, 8 January, 2006
[9] UGuevarra, NatividadU; “Makati: An overview and a path towards a planned community”, MIT Press 1968
[10] URoxas, Mikee;U “Philippine Billionaire Family: Zobel de Ayala” from HUwww.geneology.comUH, Sept. 7, 2003
[11] UOng, Mark Denis Tan;U “EDSA: De/volution through Revolution”, from report submitted to MAUD, Oct 31,2004
[12] UAlcazaren, PaoloU; “Citysense” from Philippine Star Modern Living Section, Nov 17,2007
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