The Philippines at 500 and beyond: Towards a Cebu Megalopolis

METROPOLITAN Cebu, along with the Pampanga Megalopolis, One Negros Island, and Davao Gulf Megalopolis, among others, are the future of the Philippines. Metro Manila is already decaying, and it has too expensive and too complicated to reverse the many urban ills, most especially - deeply rooted in land use, and spatial and physical development.

There is hope for Manila, but it is bleak as the time is prolonged. For now, the future are these emerging metropolises and not Metro Manila.

Metro Manila, despite having an average national economic share of 34 percent of the national income, major activity centers and nearby regions, is experiencing critical planning, resiliency, and sustainability problems. Incidence - uity, and environmental degradation is high, as well as the uneven care in adjacent provinces. Slowly, cities in the Visayas and Mindanao are repeating the mistakes of Metro Manila, and this is something that we need to prevent through immediate action, short-, medium-, and long-term planning.

Metropolitan Cebu is not like Metro Manila. I do have to caution that some areas of Cebu are slowly Manila, especially in major arterial roads and major activity centers like the Cebu Business Park, Mactan airport transport link, and other central business districts. Let us plan Cebu and the other cities and regions of our country that are worthy of human dignity across present and future generations.

Six types of infrastructure

After visiting more than 2,000 cities in 74 countries, I observed that there are at least six types of infrastructure for the world-class and more successful cities such as Paris, London, New York, Dubai, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Singapore. These are: progressive, hard, soft, institutional, green/sustainable, and the latest is digital infrastructure. For a Metropolitan Cebu, as well as the other emerging metropolitan areas, to succeed, they will need all of these kinds infrastructures.

Progressive infrastructure consists in the development of international airports, seaports, universities, hospitals, and tourism facilities. Singapore, Dubai, and South Korea have been very successful in developing all of these. It increases the capacity to accommodate more tourists, entice more talent because of very good education and job opportunities, and attract more elderly who are looking to retire because of good healthcare. Back in the 1970s before I was invited and hired by the rulers of Dubai, to plan and in less than 15 years, the number of paved roads was close to zero, and the airport was nowhere close to the then Manila International Airport. I didn’t know anything about the country, and even in one of my uncle’s books, the name of the country was misspelled. But in the 1970s, the ruler asked us to carve a garden city out of the desert, build the biggest seaport and harbor, and now they are building the biggest airport in the world.

Hard infrastructure are the roads, highways, transportation corridors, urban- rural link, regional linkages, urban logistics connectivity, and farm to market roads. Soft