It’s amazing how very little has changed even as Cebu moves forward into the thick of the 21st century.
Consider this observation: “Newspapermen are very fond of describing Cebu as the Queen City. Right-thinking Cebuanos view this description with timid pride or with downright condescension, for they know it is an absurd misnomer. For in actuality, what is queenly about a city that cannot even provide the majority of its people with decent sidewalks? Why should our sidewalks be dirty and tortuous?”
That comment was made not yesterday but some 43 years ago by an architect, though not an ordinary one at that. Brave, to say the least, was architect Cristobal Espina, at the time the head the Architecture department at the University of San Carlos. A first placer in the architecture board exams of 1951, he had sent a lengthy piece to The Freeman entitled, “An architect’s proposals for a better city” which was published full-page in two installments of the paper. (Most of Espina’s children, incidentally, would later follow his and his wife’s footsteps and become deans of the College of Architecture and Fine Arts at USC, Omar Maxwell and Joseph Michael, and another one at UP Diliman, whose name escapes me at the moment.)
Cristobal Espina, an architect of national renown already at this time, must have lost a few friends after publishing his proposals, especially after enumerating all the dirt and whatnot lining or abutting Cebu City’s sidewalks, identifying by name each culprit establishment. Tracing obstructions and encroachments on sidewalks alone took two full installments in the paper, clearly driving home the vastness of the problem and also showing that Espina had walked the route, from the Capitol down to Osmeña Boulevard to Juan Luna and on to Colon Street, pointing out open canal after open canal as well as high curbs fronting each and very establishment, both high and mighty as well as the lowly piece-goods store.
Sadly, the ultimate point Espina was making, the sheer absence of proper design methods and of valuing human dignity, then as now, seems to be a continuing battle not just for Cebu City alone but for the entire Mega Cebu area, from Consolacion down to Carcar City. Worse, the problems have expanded beyond the sidewalk and moved on to road obstructions amid the dirt and filth of the metropolis, from tattered tarpaulins of long-gone advertisements and now-closed stores to spaghetti wires and, you guessed it, more open canals.
Of a city’s livability, the elder Espina noted: “Dumaguete City has a very beautiful and scenic sidewalk along the waterfront. Cebu has given up an opportunity to have both a functional and decorative strolling area in the city…No urban are will ever look beautiful, clean, safe and well-organized without cooperative endeavors where every individual who compose it are required to invest a little of himself or of what he has in a common endeavor to make this beloved City of Cebu a real Queen City of the South, not merely a queen through doubtful shibboleths.”
This space is sadly not enough to elaborate on the late Cristobal Espina’s observations and proposals but I believe it sufficient as the election season heats up, to hopefully see some discussions towards making Mega Cebu really a place that Cebuanos can all be proud of: clean, green, and sustainable, not just pockets of livability only for the rich in high-walled enclaves or five-star hotels here and there.
Judging by the fact that in Cristobal’s time and now in his sons’ time of the present, the same aspirations reverberate, are we really doomed to live in filthy and disheveled towns and cities forever?
Erratum: In last week’s column, I inadvertently wrote Barrio Masaba as Maaba.