The quicksand of haphazard urbanization

Jobers Bersales

The brewing issue between businessmen and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) over the latter’s plan to build an underpass on United Nations Avenue in Mandaue is but a symptom of more social tensions to come in the future. Three weeks back, in fact, questions were also raised regarding the yearlong repairs expected on Ouano Avenue in the North Reclamation Area.

At the very center of this and more coming stresses is the drift of urbanization now obtaining in the metropolitan section of the island, from Minglanilla to Liloan.

At the very least, whichever side you are on, we all agree that the urbanization of Cebu over the last three decades has been haphazard and largely unplanned. With the Local Government Code empowering local chief executives over their territories and constituencies, urbanization in Cebu has become even more problematic, akin to that of Manila. (Some even say it is worse).

This is the time to lament the absence of Mega Cebu, which would have been correctly the beginning of the answer to the problems now obtaining.

Mega Cebu, that quasi-public body led by the private sector — especially with the late Bobby Aboitiz as its most public face — was a well-intentioned body that sought to put sense into this urbanization quicksand that Cebu is now in. It even came up with a good urbanization plan for Metro Cebu.

Fortunately, there is still the Regional Development Council, whose private sector representatives are leading the barrage against all kinds of infrastructure projects that seem to be made without any coherence.

There is only one solution that urban planners will propose to get us all out of this quagmire we are in: establish a Metropolitan Authority that links all local governments under one super-body in order to ensure synergy and convergence of disparate local government units (LGUs) with competing and narrow interests. I say narrow because every sitting chief executive, in this instance a city or municipal mayor, has to literally concentrate his work on responding to the needs of his immediate constituencies (in short, his or her voters) and not care about the problems and concerns of adjacent LGUs.

The initial attempt was already made with the creation of Mega Cebu, which would have succeeded until Mayor Tomas Osmeña pulled Cebu City’s participation out of the equation. This single unilateral act by the mayor showed clearly how powerful LGUs can be in the absence of a super-body controlling their turf’s interests in the context of an urban metropolis comprising many cities and municipalities where social needs and tensions do not respect geo-political boundaries and spill over to neighboring LGUs.

While I fully understand the desire of DPWH to ease traffic congestion with all their infrastructure projects, there is no one looking at the bigger picture among LGU executives, whose interests and concerns are hemmed in by their constituencies. Businessmen, unfortunately do business not just in one city or town. Hence this phenomenon where we now see the private sector, especially businessmen, making noise increasingly whereas in the past we always thought of them as conservatives and unwilling to clash with government for fear of retaliation.

We have simply reached this point where the social tensions over the nature and direction of Metro Cebu’s development can no longer be ignored even by conservative entrepreneurs because they are the ones losing with every day that the public and social infrastructure deficit are not correctly addressed.

Now is therefore the best time, not just to revisit Mega Cebu and its vision of a better Cebu, but to also assert its viability. Otherwise, we sink further in the quicksand of haphazard urbanization.