Felino Palafox Jr. is one of a handful of present-day Filipino architects whose work I admire and follow. The founder of the firm bearing his name, Palafox designed Rockwell Center and has performed design and urban planning work on engagements with Middle Eastern and other foreign real-estate developers.
I like, and take note of, Palafox’s views on urban planning and metropolitan structuring. If there’s anyone in today’s Philippine architectural profession who deserves the title environmental architect, it is Felino Palafox Jr.
Palafox recently made a presentation before a real estate group titled “Philippines @ 500, Manila Megalopolis 2021 and Beyond: A Vision Plan Toward Safe, Smarter, Sustainable Cities of the Future.” The figure 500 relates to the forthcoming 500th anniversary of the founding of Manila, in 2021, by the Spanish colonizers.
Palafox began his paper by categorizing the world’s cities as green, liveable, smart, sustainable and resilient. The world’s top ten cities possessed these qualities. Metro Manila, which is composed of Manila, 15 other cities and one municipality, is not among the top ten cities, according to Palafox.
Metro Manila may even be among the world’s worst ten cities, Palafox quipped. He then proceeded to explain why this was so and how things could be turned around in the days ahead.
For starters, Metro Manila’s component localities are surrounded by gated communities and there is little affordable housing for employees. Gated communities should be in the suburbs. He told his audience: “If you have practical, pragmatic thinking like the progressive cities of the world, go to the suburbs [and] if you are in the middle of a city, make it a multi-family unit.”
Palafox said that future urbanism should be of the vertical kind. Building tall infrastructure was more sustainable because tourism, garbage collection and mixed-use residency for shopping and dining would revolve around one point only. “With the urban sprawl that we have, there will be [far more] kilometers of roads, sewerage, drainage and electricity, among other things,” he said.
Palafox cited his firm’s design for Makati City’s Rockwell Center. “If you live in Rockwell, everything is within four hundred meters away.” Metro Manilans did not like to walk, he said.
The environmental architect said that he has been pushing DENR (Department of Environment and Natural Resources) in the direction of green urbanism. With green urbanism, the allotment of roads would be one-third for pedestrians and bicycles, one-third for trees and landscaping and one-third for vehicles. “Those who have less in wheels should have more in roads,” Palafox said, paraphrasing the late president Ramon Magsaysay.
“Look at EDSA,” Palafox said. “Nothing for people, nothing for landscaping.” EDSA has 300,000 vehicles a day, [so] we should have three million trees along EDSA to recover the carbon monoxide of each car.”
As for the skyways that are being installed in Metro Manila, Palafox said that when he asked an urbanist friend what he thought of the new installations, his friend gave this answer: “It’s like cheating on your diet by just loosening your belt.”
The man behind Rockwell Center concluded his presentation by saying that the best cities in the world that he had visited had a common formula for success. The formula was “(v)isionary leadership, strong political will, good urban planning, design and architecture and good governance.”
A tall order, but one that the government of this country must seek to heed if the mistakes of Metro Manila’s past development are to be avoided as the Manila heads toward its 500th anniversary and the years beyond.
E-mail: [email protected]