The Never Ending Plans of Manila

Last December of 2008, I had the opportunity to study abroad in Manila, Philippines. Prior to our trip we had a few preparatory classes to learn of the history and culture of the Philippines. I also learned of Daniel Burnham and the connection between Chicago and Manila. He was a prestigious architect who designed the city plans for Chicago and Manila, as well as other cities. A recurring theme on his plans was the use of open spaces that he had designed for everyone in the city to enjoy. In Chicago and in Manila, I have been able to experience the benefits of the cities’ open spaces. There are however distinct differences that make each experience quite unique from each other. The sights that we see in Manila are far different from those that we see in Chicago. One of the factors that mark the differences is the degree of urban poverty experienced in Manila. The city on the Pacific that Burnham planned is crippled by poor economic development, deficient social facilities and poor physical planning (Marcelo 2008).

I took a walk on Jose Rizal Boulevard along the water. I wanted to experience what Daniel Burnham had envisioned for Manila’s water front. It was a warm and humid day, typical around this time in Manila. The air was thick, polluted and difficult to breath. The water in the bay had a brownish, murky color and it gave off an unpleasant odor. There were vendors and children begging for money. Between the bushes in and other shaded areas, there were individuals and families sleeping, hiding from the sun. We continued our walk along the bay, when suddenly the vendors and the swarm of begging children thinned as soon as we reached a building with tall white walls that blocked our view of the bay. The tall white walls enclose the grounds of the U.S. Embassy, which stands tall and grand in the middle of the boulevard.

As I continue my walk in Manila, I think of how different the scenery is from that of Chicago. In the windy city, there are no begging children and there are not any families living under any shaded areas. With this I’m not implying that there aren not any poor individuals roaming the city parks, there are. The difference is the degree of poverty, we do not see entire families living in the parks, or swarms of children begging for money or food. Instead, we have families enjoying the facilities that the city has to offer, well-manicured lawns, a glistening water front, impressive architecture, and a metal bean. And unlike in Manila, where the U.S. Embassy stands in the middle of Manila’s water front, the general consulate of the Philippines stands on Michigan Avenue, unguarded and surrounded by retail shops and fast food restaurants. I continued to walk, and pondered on the differences and similarities that both cities have and think if Burnham ever envisioned the disparities between the two cities that he planned.

In the beginning of the 1900’s, Burnham was invited to manila to design a plan that would alleviate the city from the problems that stemmed from industrialization and the large influx of rural settlers who were looking for a better opportunity in the city. Burnham was inspired by the urban improvements that had taken place in Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Barcelona and Madrid. According to Mr. Paolo Alcazaren, an important Filipino architect and write for the Philstar.com, Manila is still dealing with the same problems as it did back when Burnham first visited the city; crowded tenements, pollution, traffic, and squatters (Marcelo 2008). After Burnham’s plan for Manila, many more followed, in total there have been 12 plans designed for Manila and none of them has been fully realized. The reasons for what one could perceive as the causes for Burnham’s plan to fail, as well as the many other plans that followed after, were not due to their quality, but to the changes in governance, economic shortages and war (Marcelo 2008).

Burnham’s plan of Manila did not fail. His plan never failed because it was never carried out to its entirety. Any future city plan for Manila has to address the social problems that this city has been facing for over a century. A new sewage system must be built, because a deficient sewage creates health hazards to its citizens, mainly the poor. Traffic has to be re-routed in order to alleviate the dense traffic and the strong fuel emissions polluting the city. Housing with access to transportation must be made available, this is especially necessary to help the many families that live in the relocated areas, like Cabuyao, Laguna. More importantly, as Mr. Alcazaren has previously suggested, the next plan for Manila must be carried out in its entirety in order to work.

Photograph, courtesy of Mar P. Bustamante, 2008

Burnham, Vincent, and the Suburbanization of Poverty

A century ago, Daniel Burnham, in collaboration with Edward Bennett, designed his great Plan of Chicago, a proposal that, though only partially realized, is responsible for many of the most aesthetically pleasing elements of the Chicago that we know today, such as the open lakefront. Manila, a city that Burnham also helped to design, has several common features, particularly with its open waterfront along Roxas Boulevard. Burnham’s concern for social well-being in urban design—his consultation with the great social reformer Jane Addams suggests that his interests went beyond mere aesthetics—coalesce with the life’s work of St. Vincent DePaul, who, several centuries before Burnham’s time, was focused on urban poverty reduction in Paris.

At the turn of the 21st century, though, cities like Chicago and Manila are beginning to more closely resemble a pattern that has already existed in Paris and many other cities: urban poverty is being gradually engulfed by suburban poverty. In Paris, the highest concentrations of poverty are found in the suburbs, especially in the governmentally-subsidized habitation à loyer modéré, while the city center is the picturesque locale known to tourists. In Chicago, save perhaps for a distinct inner core, the “inner city” has been the dwelling place of the poor, while those with financial means (particularly Caucasians with means) fled to the suburbs decades ago, to live what they thought of as comfortable lives away from people of other ethnicities and, presumably, from poverty and its accompanying social challenges.

In recent years, though, the trend seems to be reversing itself: as recent college graduates and young professionals have flocked back to the city, once-poor neighborhoods have been changed (either “gentrified” or “revitalized,” depending upon your perspective) from places of urban poverty to places of wealth. With that demographic inversion has come displacement, since the presence of these wealthier newcomers forces living costs up and thus forces poorer, long-time residents out—often to the suburbs. As much as gentrification is discussed (see a few interesting articles from the New York Times and The Chicago Tribune), the conversation among the socially conscious usually lingers on how to stop the phenomenon or how, if it were possible, to do “gentrification with justice.” In the meantime, there is too little attention to the present reality of the suburbanization of poverty.

I live and work in the suburbs, in DuPage County, among the wealthiest counties in the country. And yet, increasingly, DuPage County is also home to many people—about 45,000, up 115% in the past fifteen years—living beneath the poverty line, many of whom have moved out of the city. Others among DuPage County’s working poor are newly arriving immigrants; historically, immigrants began their lives in the United States in urban neighborhoods, but more and more are arriving directly to the suburbs—both because there is work available there and because the cost of living in many of the urban neighborhoods where immigrants once resided has escalated as a result of gentrification. During the 1990s, the suburban immigrant population grew by 377,000, a 91.9% increase. As of 2005, 62.5% of the immigrants living in the Chicago metropolitan area live in the suburbs, more than in the city itself. The challenge is that the social service infrastructure has not kept pace with the demographic shift: in 2005, for example, there were about twenty non-profit organizations recognized by the Board of Immigration Appeals to provide low-cost immigration legal services to the City of Chicago’s 590,000 foreign-born individuals; meanwhile, the 370,000 foreign-born individuals in the collar counties of DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Will, and McHenry counties were served by just two BIA-recognized agencies.

On a recent visit to the Philippines, I observed a similar phenomenon in Manila. In order to make space for the renovation of the National Railway, tens of thousands of squatter families have been (obligatorily) “relocated” by the Filipino National Housing Authority from their dwellings along the railroad tracks of Makati and other central urban areas to suburban communities far from the city center. The city of Manila is now free of these railroad squatters, whom some considered an unsightly blight upon the city, but tens of thousands of families have been displaced to suburban communities like Cabuyao, Laguna and Marilao, Bulacan, which have neither the employment capacity nor the health or education infrastructures to meet their needs.

Whether for better or worse, gentrification is happening—sometimes as a result of the invisible hand of market forces and in some cases (in Chicago, as well as in Manila) with the complicit intentions of city governments. As gentrification occurs, and many of the urban poor are displaced outward, we need to consider how to best serve, care for, and empower the suburban poor, even as we challenge the structures that lead to their displacement. As poverty increasingly becomes a suburban phenomenon, we need a new generation of suburban planners who can combine Daniel Burnham’s genius for planning with a Vincentian concern for the poor.

(Photo of the suburban poor south of Manila in Southville, Cabuyao is by Mar P. Bustamante, a very talented Filipino photographer).

Meet Daniel H. Burnham

Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846 – 1912) was an American architect and urban planner. He directed the works for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1892 and designed several famous buildings in Chicago, New York City and Washington D.C. He is well-known and criticized for his neoclassical architectural style inspired by classic Greek and Roman constructions. His greatest contribution is, however, in urban planning which produced with Edward H. Bennett the ambitious 1909 Plan of Chicago, the results of previous urban planning projects in Cleveland, San Francisco, Washington, DC and Manila and Baguio in the Philippines. Burnham learned many lessons in the previous works, including the importance of promoting the vision through inspired and charismatic leadership and the persistent and collaborative works of key players in the private and public sector. The 1905 Plan for Manila included the layout of the city with the railroad system with the Paco Train Station, the shore road known today as Roxas Boulevard, the Philippines General Hospital, the Philippines Normal School, the Army and Navy Club and the Manila Hotel. The later reconstruction of the parks on the central area of Manila, including the Luneta's Broadwalk were all inspired by Burnham's original plan to make the city a beautiful and functional city. Like for the Chicago plan, where Burnham envisioned the city's publicly accessible lakefront, the Manila plan identified the Manila Bay and the parks surrounding Intramuros as sensitive areas and landscapes to be protected.

Daniel H. Burnham was clearly a visionary leader. His attributed quote "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized" speaks of his human spirit and charismatic leadership. In spite his youth's failure to be admitted at Yale and Harvard University or in attempting a career in public life, Daniel H. Burnham found his talents in collaborations with colleagues for the emerging Chicago School of Architects and American skyscrapers. His connections and ability to steer consensus on his architectural projects and urban plans make of him an influential leader and the preeminent architect in America at the turn of the twentieth century. In spite the many critiques he received from the later Chicago school of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright recognized Burnham for his "masterful use of the methods and men of his time" and as an "enthusiastic promoter" with a "powerful personality." His parents' Swedenborgian Church of New Jerusalem shaped Daniel's values of service to humanity.

Read the 1993 reprint of Daniel Hudson Burnham and Edward Herbert Bennett's Plan of Chicago (Princeton Architectural Press, 1993). To know more about Burnham read his biography by Thomas S. Hines' Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (University of Chicago Press, 1979).