Michel Kerf, transport and ICT practice manager of World Bank in East Asia and the Pacific, hammered the nail right on the head when he specifically mentioned preservation of heritage sites that might be impacted by the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project.
As I mentioned in last week’s column, the proposed route, now set to be revisited and hopefully revised, will most probably affect a number of historic sites along the way.
There is a possibility, for example, of putting up a BRT Station right beside the open space across the old Hospital del Sur simply because it is a large open space marked by two or three century-old Acacia trees.
The entire space, including the century-old Hospital del Sur building which I believe now serves as nurses’ home for the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center, is currently hidden behind a cement wall.
(One can see this only by climbing the white elephant of a skywalk blocking the vista of Fuente Osmeña which now serves in part as a waterless toilet and sleeping quarters for vagrants.)
But more than the issue of where the BRT route will be is the more important and overarching concern of the sheer lack of a heritage and development master plan for Cebu City.
I keep on harping about this as much as the need for a drainage master plan and a mass transit program simply because as Cebu growls ever louder as a commercial tiger, we might soon forget the past and just bulldoze history in exchange for the trappings of modernity.
While it is true that we have a heritage-savvy mayor sitting at city hall right now, Mayor Michael Rama will not be there forever. At best, he will probably serve out his well-deserved third term but after that, who knows?
What Cebu City needs is a heritage and development summit that should bring together all the stakeholders side-by-side with heritage advocates. Singapore almost lost all her heritage and history when, flushed with economic success in the 1980s under authoritarian rule, owners of old Chinese shophouses began selling these to eager buyers who then bulldozed them to make way for high-rise apartments and condominium units.
Overnight, the public housing units that were introduced by British colonial rulers were demolished until, fortunately, a small but loud group of advocates lobbied to save at least one section of these. Chinatown also almost disappeared had it not been for this lobbying.
A closer model to Cebu City would be Georgetown in Penang, Malaysia, a World Heritage Site declared by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
It is simply sad that Cebu City, which dates its founding as a Spanish settlement way back in 1565, cannot even qualify for nomination in the prestigious UNESCO world heritage list.
And yet if only a unified heritage plan can be developed, one that harnesses local universities and private businesses to revitalize and rehabilitate the old colonial and pre-colonial sections of the city, we might get a chance at getting noticed.
All these must begin with a clear vision, followed by a unified master plan and a heritage conservation code which would then be supported by a strong arm of implementation.
What we have now is the reverse of these steps. There is the mayor as implementer who has helped preserve/restore sections of old Cebu, but there is as yet no singular plan to guide all these efforts and bring everyone to one single sense of purpose and goal.
Anything to do with infrastructure development, be it the BRT or a Mass Railway Transit system, would have had no need for tactical campaigns by civil society groups to save this or that edifice or to avoid this or that route, if we had a city-wide heritage and development master plan.
It’s your call now, Mayor Mike.
Time to call everyone to a heritage summit.