Earth planner - Architect Felino Palafox Jr. (Manila Bulletin)
Earth planner
Architect Felino Palafox, Jr.
October 17, 2009, 8:49am
THE MMetroplan is to Felino Palafox Jr. as the ark is to Noah.
Through the plan and the ark, respectively, both forewarned their people of destruction to come their way if they didn’t mend their ways.
Unfortunately, both were not heeded - and we all know what happened thereafter.
“It was not an act of God. The devastation caused by Typhoon Ondoy could have been averted if humans only listened,’’ firmly believes world-renowned Filipino architect Palafox.
Palafox, of course, completely knows what he was talking about. More than 30 years ago, in 1977, he came out with the Metro Manila Transport, Land Use and Development Planning project, a World Bank-funded report that aimed to protect Metro Manila from further flooding. In this report, recommendations were made for transportation, land use, zoning, and flood control, particularly in the eastern part of the metropolis, specifically in – you guessed it – Marikina, Cainta and Pasig.
The proposal, Palafox says, was to build developments in the city in the south, or northeast direction rather than west or eastward reclamations.
But instead of adopting the plan, the government at that time copied the wrong models, i.e. Los Angeles which was not even designed for pedestrians but for automobiles. On top of that, there were poor garbage disposal, and deforestation caused by illegal and legal logging to give way to the rise of subdivisions in all the wrong places.
Palafox says he came out not to fix the blame – and no, he is not running for any elective position.
“This crisis is an opportunity to learn lessons or unlearn the mistakes of the past and maybe revive those good proposals and bring them to the 21st century,” stresses Palafox who shared the same report with 32 other countries. Ironically, while most of these countries adopted the plan, the Philippines did not.
