Sunday, October 04, 2015
7:48 AM |
The Trust of Public Spaces
I was reading this
fascinating article in
The Atlantic Monthly where writer Selena Hoy muses over a cultural observation: that Japanese kids—often as young as six years old—are such a common sight on Japanese mass transit, and posits that “even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves, [and the] reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.”
Hoy continues: “It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats. They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight. A popular television show called
Hajimete no Otsukai, or
My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.”
I think this still bears some resemblance to small town life in the Philippines. I can still remember my own childhood in Dumaguete where I was sent to do various errands (mostly having to do with buying stuff from the local sari-sari store) by my parents and a whole barracks full of elder brothers—five of them, in fact. But I think it is a slowly disappearing part of family culture among Filipinos, with our increasing urbanization and the plethora of maids we have around to do our bidding.
I think of the bigger cities we have in the Philippines, something comparable to Tokyo, and I admit to a kind of unease. Because to be honest, I’ve always felt safer in Tokyo in a way I can never feel safe in Manila, for example. I’ve lived in Tokyo in my early 20s and this barest fact about life in that Japanese city has always been apparent to me. Even with the problem of language (and the fact that Tokyo is a megalopolis), I know I can go from point A to point B without too much trouble. In Manila, even when I take a taxi, my guard is up, waaaay up, it is quite stressful—and I can only conclude with this question: Will I ever feel safe navigating around my own country’s capital? The answer seems to be, given the realities. What’s up with that?
Hoy explains why the opposite seems to be the fact of life in Japan: “Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that [Japanese] children have pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess, since they’ll have to clean it up themselves. This ethic extends to public space more broadly (one reason Japanese streets are generally so clean). A child out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency.”
Perhaps that’s what’s lacking with Filipinos
in the Philippines [and I make that as a clear distinction, because we’re totally different creatures abroad]:
we don’t take responsibility for our shared public spaces. And there are many instances of this neglect.
We use our sidewalks as garbage bins. (There are no actual garbage bins, for one thing.) We don’t make it a point to keep to the right in public escalators, to give space for those who may be in a hurry. We barely line up for anything, preferring to cluster around and using
palakasan as key to facilitate things. We leave the tables in the restaurants we frequent with remains of meals that resemble a sty. We snarl our traffic with devil-may-care driving selfishness. And we make excuses for these by justifying to ourselves that others are not following rules—so why should we?
There are even bigger instances of our misuse of public spaces. We build ugly infrastructure and buildings without any thought to whether the immediate community needs it. (That overpass near Silliman High School is a glaring example). Or whether it blends well with the environment. (That strange rectangular contraption cum billboard along the Rizal Boulevard near the
tempurahan which is apparently meant to invite the framing of photos of passing tourists—as if it’s a perfectly good idea for anyone to want to do that). We also consistently elect public officials who sleepwalk over issues of the public good (like public transit).
And lastly, we treat our public parks and monuments like afterthoughts. We have been luckier in this respect in Dumaguete—but elsewhere, it has been a glaring problem. The artist Paulo Alcarazen once posted on Facebook a series of photos of the monument along Roxas Boulevard in Manila dedicated to our OFWs. Each photo in a set of three was taken within a few years of each other. Taken all at once, the series presents a sad study in devolution and heartbreak: the monument over time becomes surrounded by suspicious development, with the greenery that initially surrounded it over time becoming an ugly sea of concrete. And the statues comprising the monument themselves have become compromised. The original monument consisted of five figures in bronze—a mother, an elder daughter, a younger son, and their dog in a gesture of excited welcome to a returning OFW father. But over the years, some of the figures have totally disappeared (perhaps shanghaied by bakal boys), and what has remained of the monument now is just the figures of the mother and the daughter, both sans limbs.
There is a famous explication about public safety that is popularly called the “broken windows theory.” It is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of urban disorder and vandalism as markers for crime and anti-social behavior. In that theory, a hypothetical community where the buildings have perpetually neglected broken windows is said to invite a rise in criminality and anti-social behavior in that community.
And we have so many “broken windows” in Dumaguete.
The trash on our streets.
The chaos of our traffic.
The devaluation of our public parks.
The uneven sidewalks running along our city streets.
And we keep complaining why our city is no longer the “city of gentle people” of yore? Why there are unsolved killings in our midst? Why our youths turn to drugs? Why there is a pervasive lack of public love for our local heritage?
Responsibility for public spaces and public safety.
Everything connects.
Labels: art and culture, cleanliness, culture, issues, life, magazines, manila, public safety, sculpture, tokyo, urban planning
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
4:11 AM |
What We Could Have Become
What we have in Dumaguete is so much potential for greatness. What is utterly lacking is vision -- the ability to think beyond the boundaries of a small city, to dream big things for ourselves, while still being able to preserve a way of life that does most of us here great service: Dumaguete's charm, for one thing ... its quaintness, its intimacy of place.
But a small place does not necessarily have to be a "small" place, if you get the drift. Dumaguete can become so much, yes, but it is still bogged down in the very Filipino disease which the late National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin used to call a "heritage of smallness."
In that incisive essay (a favorite literary text for many collegiate Philippine literature classes), Joaquin wrote that Filipinos -- but, for our purposes, specifically Dumaguetenos -- "think small." Our ways consist of insignificant gestures, our perspective is narrow, our dreams are self-defeating in their utter lack of grand ambition. Which may be why we are trapped in the tyranny of having an
isang kahig, isang tuka life.
Joaquin wrote:
This is a country, perhaps the only one in the world, where people buy and sell one stick of cigarette, half a head of garlic, a dab of pomade, part of the contents of a can or bottle, one single egg, one single banana... So much effort by so many for so little. Like all those children risking neck and limb in the traffic to sell one stick of cigarette at a time. Or those grown-up men hunting the sidewalks all day to sell a puppy or a lantern or a pair of socks. The amount of effort they spend seems out of all proportion to the returns...
The Filipino who travels abroad gets to thinking that his is the hardest working country in the world. By six or seven in the morning we are already up on our way to work, shops and markets are open; the wheels of industry are already agrind. Abroad, especially in the West, if you go out at seven in the morning you're in a dead-town. Everybody's still in bed; everything's still closed up. Activity doesn't begin till nine or ten -- and ceases promptly at five p.m. By six, the business sections are dead towns again. The entire cities go to sleep on weekends. They have a shorter working day, a shorter working week. Yet they pile up more mileage than we who work all day and all week.
Is the disparity to our disparagement?
We work more but make less. Why? Because we act on such a pygmy scale. Abroad they would think you mad if you went in a store and tried to buy just one stick of cigarette. They don’t operate on the scale. The difference is greater than between having and not having; the difference is in the way of thinking. They are accustomed to thinking dynamically. We have the habit, whatever our individual resources, of thinking poor, of thinking petty.
I want to illustrate.
I remember the battle for the old Dumaguete City Master Plan, which was hatched by the previous administration (and promptly trashed by the new mayor when he came to office -- more for political reasons than for the plan's lack of merit). The Plan was drafted into a firm blueprint by acclaimed (and now retired) U.S.-based architect Manuel Almagro (he who helped restore the Statue of Liberty for its Bicentennial in the 1980s). It called for a massive re-imagination of the city. I used to ask the previous mayor, in my previous capacity as editor-in-chief of
NegrosNews, what his business model was for the city. "All thriving cities have a business model," I told him. He smiled and said, "A University Town model, of course." And proceeded to unveil what he meant.
Part of the Plan called for strict implementation of zoning guidelines (still non-existent, or at least inconsistent in our present context), and for even distribution of the traffic of people, of commerce, and of institutions, from the downtown area to outlying areas. "It's wrong to have half the city still be in the boondocks," he said. "Still basically agricultural when it shouldn't be. All that empty land going to waste..."
The Plan was an ambitious blueprint for the future of the city. Without doubt it entailed sacrifices and battles -- clearly a headache in the short run, but sound in the long run. A small part of its complex revisioning was to create a paseo in place of what is now Perdices Street -- our city's Main Street, the commercial artery that services everybody. The paseo in the Plan called for a beautiful brick walk traversing the street with benches and trees, and a clock-tower at both ends -- which meant siphoning Perdices Street off its traffic of snarling vehicles ... and which also meant that for anyone to shop in the center of town, one had to walk to both ends of the strip to finally get a ride.
"A shopping promenade!" I exclaimed. I had seen such complexes in my travels abroad. The best one for me was in Kichijoji, in Japan, and I was happy that Dumaguete could hatch such a plan equivalent to its finally entering the modern world.
Of course, that notion made so many people -- especially those in the political opposition -- cry foul. They said things like, "What? Me walk along Perdices Street? What if I have bags full of groceries after shopping in Lee Super Plaza? I have to walk all that way before I can get a pedicab?" And so on and so forth -- all comments stinging, particularly now, with such ignorance and lack of foresight.
Later on, I realized that perhaps it was virtually impossible for these people to see the beauty of the design. If they were well-traveled (which they were clearly not -- perfectly explaining their extremely insular philosophy), they would have understood that such cosmopolitan design is increasingly the one being adopted by so many of the world's best cities. Manila, under Mayor Lito Atienza, is doing that right now, with some modifications -- and in the process reviving old and long-abandoned commercial centers like Tomas Morato. This is so in Tokyo, in Singapore, in Shanghai, in many of Europe's best commercial centers, and in many American cities as well. There is now an increasing trend to "mall-ify" city neighborhoods -- to create promenades out of traffic-choked streets, to trend-ify the facades of shops, to make people relax in the middle of a stressful urban landscape.
This was the wave of the future. Almost in our grasp. Killed by stupid politics.
So today, the plan for the Lo-oc Marina and Boardwalk is no more, among other disappointments.
Perdices Street still remains ugly Perdices Street -- with all the requisite nightmares of unplanned urbanity. The fact that traffic through the street now goes one-way has, in fact, paradoxically made it a nightmarish version of the Master Plan's paseo: most people going the opposite way still has to walk the street's entire length before they can actually get a ride home. I live in Tubod, for example. To get a ride from downtown, I still have to walk -- grocery bags and all -- to the corner of Silliman Avenue to flag any available cab. In fact, to make sure I can actually get a cab, I walk all the way to Openas. That's walking halfway, to get to the destination.
Those people who cried and brayed and hawwed, have no vision whatsoever. And many of them are still in the City Council. Many of them we have elected to office again and again. We can rest assure we will forever remain mediocre.
Our tragedy springs from the fact that despite so much potential, and despite the singular visions of quite a few individuals, we maintain to rest in our sense of vapid complacency, of not having any initiative.
Labels: dumaguete, issues, politics, urban planning
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, November 30, 2006
7:41 PM |
Wanted: A Visionary
"Quo vadis?"
-- John 16:5
Trust me, in the long run, workshops certainly do not constitute a workable leadership style.
Of course, there are many ways to lead a people, not all of them always successful. The truism goes that there never is any one formula for great leadership -- that what would work for a Margaret Thatcher or a Ramon Magsaysay would probably not work for a Tony Blair or a Joseph Estrada. Circumstances will never always be the same, and the nuances of personality certainly lend a lot to whether a particular style can lead to mayhem, or maturity. For every soft dictatorship of a Lee Kuan Yew, for example, there is always the polar opposite of the mindless totalitarian terror of Stalin or Pol Pot. And for every democratic graces of a Nelson Mandela, there will always be the flip-flopping softness of a Corazon Aquino. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, in the beginning, was bent on continuing the leadership style of her president-father, but now would seem dangerously close to emulating the mistakes of the person who unseated her father from Malacanan -- Ferdinand Marcos.
Leadership, it seems to us, has nothing to do with personal morals or history even. Fidel Ramos was an architect of the Martial Law, yet he managed to usher in, even if only for a very short time, an economic turn-around for the Philippines. Some of the best American presidents -- Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton among them -- flaunted mistresses in the public eye, while Bible-reading do-gooder Jimmy Carter was considered for the most part as a fumbling chief executive who was a lameduck throughout most of his presidency.
Then there is the feedback from those who are led: all of us have certain leadership styles we respond to. I, for one, like being under the wings of someone who can manage to inflame my imagination with a show of measured ambition. But I wilt under the slow grind of consensus: it reminds me of a time in Tokyo when the dormitory leadership I was subjected to took care to rein in the tiniest bit of opinion from all forty members of the house...over such ingratiating details such as whether to buy a
blue mop, or a
red mop. (It took thirty minutes to settle on a brown one.) I also like a non-patronizing pat on the back, which is always a fuel for any member of an organization. But I also know a lot of friends who respond favorably in complete opposite ways -- and they thrive in those styles as well.
Consider a yearbook editorial staff I once joined in college under the leadership of a young classmate who was, let us just say, eager to please everybody. Hers was a leadership style I found familiar in many local organizations: it was a kind of consensus-building taken to such uber-democratic extremes it virtually became a tyranny of the nonsensical. Do you remember the maxim, "A camel is a horse designed by a committee"? It felt that way. Our young editor was too eager to take in everybody's advice that the yearbook we eventually produced became a mad combination of a cookbook and a fashion spread, with cartoon characters -- among them a cow, a hen, and a cook -- sprinkled all over the pages giving gossip and sage advice. It was a veritable disaster.
What my former editor really lacked was a personal and concrete vision she should have fought for, a singular aesthetic principle she should have with which to rally the staff over to create a product pulsating with organic unity. And because she landed a job without a clear vision of what she wanted, she fell for a mutant kind of consensus that resulted to a half-baked job. Alfred Hitchcock, the acclaimed film director, is a paragon of somebody with uncompromising foresight. He created each of his movies with a thorough vision, assembling the necessary elements to create an effective whole. From his oeuvre come some of the best films ever made, including
Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and
Rear Window.
The same characteristic can be found in many of our most effective leaders. It thrills us when Microsoft's Bill Gates sets a deadline date for a revolutionary new software to be launched and shipped, even though the barest outlines of a design have yet to reach the drawing boards. It thrills us when Oprah Winfrey envisions a "Wildest Dreams" extravaganza, luring in television viewers with her quest for the happy life. It thrills us when Abraham Lincoln sets out to abolish slavery in a country teeming with the practice, resulting finally to a cleansing Civil War that would change forever American history.
This illustrates a grand definition of leadership, taking seriously the metaphor of being a captain of the ship, steering everybody to a destination one sees ahead.
The Indian hero Mohandas Gandhi had vision, something so steadfast he died for it. He wanted a political and religious independence for India from the British, where there would be equality between Hindu and Muslim, and between people of different castes. With his vision came enablement, empowerment, and energy. He walked the talk -- Gandhi was
the program he advocated. He fasted. He used his charisma, his disregard for self, and his words to effect change. They worked. And everything started, of course, with vision. From that vision sprang India.
The sad thing is that "vision" is what is most especially lost in Dumaguete City.
We had a mayor once who had vision: he wanted a future Metro Dumaguete that considered a steady realignment of population, traffic, and sectoral centers. He wanted our main street to become a pedestrian walkway patterned after the best cities in the world, and even hired an architect of American renown to blueprint what would have been the future. He wanted a marina that would have been the capstone to a grander version of a Dumaguete Boulevard. He wanted a new city center that would have shifted progress and expansion to an underdeveloped part of the city, so that Dumaguete could grow out more evenly instead of just having everything concentrated on three thoroughways.
People got scared, softened as they were by the false illusions of old-time gentility.
It is a damning reflection of the political maturity of Dumaguetenos when this visionary was voted out of office, to be replaced by somebody whose most decisive act of late was to ban
The Da Vinci Code from movie theaters.
Because, one could ask:
What is the vision for Dumaguete City? Today, one looks at the local headlines to finally see how our previous fears and illusions of gentility and living in the past have overtaken our circumstances. A fellow blogger
Dominique Cimafranca, somebody who takes to heart the development of Dumaguete, talked about this before in these pages.
What Dominique
wrote bears repeating:
And how did Dumaguete fare [in city competitiveness]? Let's just say that we could have done much better. We didn't make it into the top ten list of the small cities category, a distinction enjoyed by nearby Tagbilaran.
How did this state of affairs come about? Why, despite our vaunted position as university town and BPO destination, did we rank below our close neighbor? It was with questions like these that I and several other members of the Dumaguete community from academe, business, government, media, and civil society attended the PCCRP workshop held at Silliman University... Some of the findings pointed to things we already know about, in fact, are issues the citizens have been raising for the past several years: unreliable and costly electricity, poor interconnection between [telephone companies], heavy traffic, and the growing incidence of crime. Some...were also eye-openers: that Dumaguete, comparatively, is an expensive place to do business in, that our local inflation rate is high, and that correspondingly, the prices of our basket goods also becomes high. Some findings were also alarming: the types of graduates we are producing do not match the needs of the local economy, ostensibly because our best and brightest students have their eyes set to opportunities outside of the city.
Some findings, on the surface, seemed contradictory unless one knows the peculiarities of the city. According to the study, we have a good road network and an acceptable vehicular density; however, our traffic management is poor. Of course, that's because of the pecularities of the stop-and-go traffic and whimsical habits of our tricycle drivers. According to the study, we have a good ratio of policemen to the population; at the same time, the incidence of crime and resolved murders is high. Draw your own conclusions.
My conclusion: poor and clueless city leadership backed by a politically immature population.
In the final analysis, nobody --
certainly not me -- is asking anybody to be a Superhero. We ask only for a leader with a vision, and a populace who knows how to elect one. We need somebody who is beyond saying, "I don't have the monopoly on ideas," and then proceed to suggest...another workshop.
I will end with a quote from Mick Yates, a globe-trotting CEO who also runs the international organization LeaderValues:
Leadership starts with having a vision, then developing a plan to achieve it. It is based both on data assessment and intuition, hope and fear. It is a noble challenge. A vision of the future is the key to getting started as a leader. Without one, go back to square one.
Dumaguete has enough of always being in square one. Please, let's up the ante, and embrace the future.
Labels: dumaguete, issues, politics, urban planning
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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