A goose city that serves Samal Island

5/25/2014

 

HASHTAGS MINDANAO

By Cha Monforte

 

A goose city that serves Samal Island

 

Davao del Norte Governor Rodolfo del Rosario might just have a far-reaching vision- the Samal Bridge too far. OK, it been long officially justified that the bridge can spur massive development to the island.

 

“But it’s not free, how much is its toll fee?” asked Vice Mayor Al David Uy, who’s family is long friends of Ronald Bangayan, owner of Mae Wess ferries. It might cost more than the P10 ferry ride at present.

 

The vice mayor categorically said he is in favor of the bridge, but he just have a lot of questions. Another one is, will authorities first develop infrastructures inside the island before the bridge, or put up the bridge first before the infras? “It’s like a chicken and egg question.” 

 

That’s only for the future, folks. Meantime, IGACOS Councilor Alberto Ortiz enjoys riding a ferry or short sea trip as the island is so near to Davao City in the first place.

 

He fears about the influx of squatters, settlers once the bridge is there. And come to think on how to dispose their additional wastes, and provide land to accommodate them. 

 

A community organizer Jojo Tejano charges that the the IGACOS city government has been ejecting people from island’s coastlines through the years using the Urban Development and Housing Act (UDHA) as a legal cover.

 

He claimed that Samal shorelines have been cornered by the rich and developers leaving no public beach for the islanders to swim on freely. 

 

But the city government has been penalizing beach resort owners for their over-water structures to implement its position for an open access to shorelines and foreshore areas.

 

Really, there’s no such thing a free lunch. There should that toll fee for every passage of person or vehicle in the bridge. Constructing the Samal Bridge costs a lot- P6 billion, which could be instead use to solve the problem of lack of classrooms in typhoon-ravaged provinces.

 

But then, there’s only heavy traffic of people going to the island during the weekends, and what to do with the bridge during the rest of the days? Is the bridge really that feasible with that traffic?  

 

Samal Island for this present epoch – while on the road to recovery from typhoon Pablo- can be left to its being just an island. The bridge is just not necessary. It’s an island so interconnected to the workings of Davao metropolis. And here’s the goose. 

 

The goose metropolis, Davao City that is, has been there serving well the island. It’s been laying the golden eggs for Samal. If foreign tourists have been visiting in greater number to the island in the recent years, it’s because Davao City’s tourist operations center has been including the nearest Samal Island as a lush beach and eco-tourism destination.

 

If the island has been massively trekked on now by people mostly from Davao City especially during weekends, it’s simply because it has the nearest and still unpolluted beach resorts, and by now it has already many swimming facilities- pools and the sea with breakwater- to choose from.

 

It’s not only coins for videoke but also dollars converted to pesos that have been left in the island each time outsiders and people from Davao City and nearby provinces go there.      

 

So there, Samal Island has been looked up as a part of the city than a part of a province. Proximity often defines the interconnectedness of one urban place to another. The magnetic pole of a larger city is boosted by how far it serves the market and populace of its neighbors. 

 

Because Davao City is a metropolitan city and it has all the products and services that people need, naturally it benefits more from the patronage of its neighbors. Samal’s market is ever dependent on the goose city of Davao, that’s just a 15-minute lantsa or ferry ride from its unpolluted beaches. (@chamonforte, @ruralurbanews)

The placemaker and the Davao City Square

5/18/2014

HASHTAGS MINDANAO

By Cha Monforte

The placemaker and the Davao City Square

In many cities in US and Europe, more people are advocating for transformation of their places. The high development of advanced economies in the world has resulted to cities being so  oriented to automobiles, skyscrapers and malls that soon neglected the importance of plazas, squares and other public spaces.

A movement called placemaking is reclaiming public spaces as spaces where people have to enjoy, converge, socialize, walk and bike. The robust urbanizations caused by top-down policies and the vertical growth of cities in advanced economies have led to mindless impersonal relations between persons and traffic gridlocks. Sadly, the making of our own cities are going to that direction.

The placemaking movement wants to foster cultural identities and build stronger communities. Placemakers call for community-driven urban designing process that “would free a city from the homogenizing effect of plans imposed from above, allowing it to grow organically, place by place, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.” They want squares and public spaces to scatter and grow like they want Paris not to become a homogeneous global city that erodes its local character.

Placemakers want to shift the paradigm and trend of urban planning, transportation, their policies, systems and priorities. Placemaking is a way to create sustainable cities and preserve the environment especially in this age of climate change. They want people to stroll in the streets, walkways, enjoy sidewalk dry markets, sit in benches viewing rivers and scenes in the city. Or walk or bike around and get the full health benefits of doing it. The plaza is the place that brings people together. There’s a need to have sense of space in planning, rekindle cultural identity, the need to reshape the urban environment, they say. They form pedestrian and bicycle alliances. They call to rightsize downtown streets. And placemakers resist government projects and policies that create barriers to biking, walking and placemaking.

I see that the placemaking movement fears that built urban environment might be so redesigned into so modern environment that it forgets to provide public spaces for people to traditionally converge and talk to each other. Placemakers advocate to make cities become more walkable, bikable and livable. It is becoming a powerful new social movement that reaches Latin American and African countries. It is still be to be heard loud and clear in Asian countries.

Applied in Davao City, placemaking can be given a biggest push if a large square is carved out in its old  downtown. Over fifteen years ago I postulated a possibility of carving out a Davao City Square enclosing around the streets of Quirino, Magallanes, Claveria and that road by the Gaisano Mall. In my postulation, the PUJs are barred from entering the square. Only private vehicles and taxis are allowed to enter. Pedestrians would have to walk, bike or take light tramcars to go to places inside the square. Or allow limited aesthetically designed trisikads or tartanillas to ply inside the square. In the scheme, the PUJ-caused traffic is eliminated within the square. It automatically frees and unclogs the city’s oldest central business district of the hundreds of thousands of noisy and air-polluting PUJs, and gives space for a special urban renewal.

Authorities then would further move in for aesthetic, public space- and environment-oriented physical facelifts of available public spaces. Consider the scenario of Davao City Square having a lot of trees growing, more benches, tiled pocket parks to compliment the People’s Park and the park fronting the City Hall, more covered walkways, more spaces for walk and bike lanes. Heritage buildings will rise up to compliment with private towers and condos. It relates with the coastal light train transit thought out before, and possibly with an underground train in so distant future. The northbound and southbound rotundas and dropping points of PUJs will be established, and more concepts to buttress the Davao City Square.

Revolutionary? How’s this now? For Davao City to join with the sustainable global cities it must have a square for walkability, bikability and unique urban renewal. Davao City has no square in the first place and it is contented only to provide a small People’s Park. Making a large walkable square is giving the city’s old heart a breathing space.

Mayor Rody Duterte can easily carve out the Davao City Square by mere mayor’s circular only – to start a tea party for his presidential draft, with environmentalists and placemakers. Then we can immediately enjoy cups of tea or bottles of beers under the many shades of first balled low growing trees in the freed sidewalks and pocket parks while first imagining a stunning view of the squared downtown in the city. The influential and powerful mayor can easily make a public space. He can be the placemaker in the country. The City Council’s ordinance can come in later.  (@chamonforte, @ruralurbanews in Twitter)

Our state of transportation and the mighty China

5/18/2014

HASHTAGS MINDANAO

By Cha Monforte

Our state of transportation and the mighty China

The moment other countries boasts how their grand transportation plans are we are struck to thinking how backward is ours. The Mindanao Railway Project is now forgotten and both legislative and actions for it stopped. We are reduced to waiting for who will champion for it- verbally. But as of now there’s no news about it.

Whatever is happening to our national highways is- compliments of the general appropriations act of Congress. Our public works department’s accomplishment is dependent to GAA budget. Our budgets for road infrastructure- the maintenance budget for the road’s wear and tear as well as for the opening and pavement of national roads- remain pegged to agency’s growth projection from the recent year. By that, nothing revolutionary can expected yearly. We simply got no money for a great floodwater diversion canal from the Compostela Valley’s mainland valley, or a long high seawall for Tacloban City for the next typhoon and storm surge. Our state of infrastructure is after all dependent on the state of our economy.

If ever China is getting bolder and boastful day by day it is because the country now has much money to spend for gargantuan projects. It’s China’s economy, stupid, and for becoming mucho dinero in the new globalized order it has become aggressive to squat and poach on our maritime territories. The great brain twist of Pinoy’s colonial mind long bombarded by American values is the learning that it’s not all America there is to dream of, but China to see and travel to. It is starting early in this decade that study trips of our officials have been made to see China and what’s happening there.

Before, we dream – when can we ever reach America? “God created the world and the rest is by China” is a superlative for China’s great economic standing in all things that it makes which the mushrooming shang-shang stores sell at low prices. News and images in social media and the net have opened Pinoys’ eyes that there are, too, highly industrial cities in China that started long time ago. Our eyes have been fixated to knowing and seeing the industrial complexes in the West that for a long time we seemed to imagine that there were only backwardness, totalitarianism, temples, Bruce Lee and flying kungfus in communist China.

Forget communism, “if not of Mao Tse-tung millions of Chinese might have died of hunger,” said a late Tsinoy neighbor who had hardware in a then rustic town in Compostela Valley. That was twenty years ago when he uttered that statement to me. I didn’t know why- when we heard 20-76 million of Chinese who died during China’s great famine and starvation attributed to natural disasters, lack of food production (due to policies like the farm collectivization), about 2.5 million of whom due to communist purges, in Mao’s initial reign.

I reckoned the Tsinoy’s timeline in coming to our country. He must have come before World War II as he bagged a Pinay in Toril, Davao City. She accompanied him when they retreated from Toril during the war and they settled to vend for survival in a Comval town. The Tsinoy must be one among the fearful millions who fled China after Mao won his revolution in 1949. But he was definitely one of the great millions of Chinese who revered Mao as a great leader. Was the Tsinoy’s statement a belief to Mao’s Great Leap Forward that first transformed China’s economy from an agrarian economy to an industrial one? Whatever, I knew he often listened to short-wave Chinese-speaking radio program at night. The frequency band was like a counterpart of the Voice of America in the 70s.

Anyway, back to transportation.  Wew, China is thinking out aloud again. It plans to build high-speed railway to US so people can travel back and forth China and the US including the countries of stopover without flying. Seems a ridiculous idea but “if Beijing gets its way that’s exactly what will be possible in the future,”  Beijing Times put it. That news comes following China’s industrialization after Mao, that is dramatic but nauseating as to envelop Bejing now of snowlike smog. China’s urbanization tempo has been fast but it goes awry when it created problem of ghost modern, Parisian buildings by sheer absence or lack of occupants.

China’s planned high-speed railway is really fast as it would run about double of the full-speeding Bachelor Bus through the undersea tunnel that is about a more than a little length of Davao City to Butuan City. But the vast country boasts already a high-speed rail network connecting its cities. Before, it takes nearly 24 hours for people travelling from Beijing to Guangzhou, with a distance of over 2,000 kms. Now the journey time is cut to just 8 hours by bullet train. If we could only have bullet train, travel time to Cagayan de Oro from Davao City via Buda is only about 2 to 3 hours compared to the 6 hours of fastest private vehicle travel.

“The China-US railway is just one of four ambitious projects the country is thinking about undertaking. One line would connect China to London with stops in Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, while another would link the country to countries like Iran and Turkey. A fourth line, meanwhile, would stretch from China to Singapore, stopping in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia.” Wew, that would eventually connect to the Philippines.

We are thrilled to that prospect. But meantime, we are aghast at the thought that China has been lately making land reclamation on Mabini Reef following series of squatting and poaching acts to our maritime territories in the recent years. We can only pray to international court and be still strategically offensive to guard our West Philippine Sea as we have proximity advantage though our naval and air forces reel on limited equipment and fighting machines against a mighty China. (@chamonforte, @ruralurbanews in Twitter)

The fall of industrial giant, the story

5/7/2014

HASHTAGS MINDANAO

By Cha Monforte

The fall of industrial giant, the story

There was a fall of industrial giant, the competitive description of Iligan City before. There was that fall as when the National Steel Corporation went bankrupt and shutdown operations in November 1999. So other industries supplying NSC and its downstream industries closed shop, too, like dominoes falling, on the first wave of disadvantageous trade liberalization in the early 2000s sending the city’s economy into turmoil.

The NSC, we recall, was once known as the largest steelmaking plant in Southeast Asia and the pride of Philippine industry. The NSC was resuscitated in 2004 with the entry of Malaysian investors but they shortly sold their controlling interests. A rich Indian family won the bid but they aggressively trampled the rights of our workers, who then staged wildcat strike against them. By 2010, NSC’s plant halted operations until these days. End of the story.

Why NSC collapsed? A former NSC employee has his simple view: NSC went bankrupt after the bar slab steels were eliminated in the production chain. He said it was caused by a national policy. NSC then was the receiver of Mindanao’s all steel scraps which it recycled to be good, non-substandard steels for domestic consumption. One product out of one policy. That was all he could recollect long years after he was laid out from work. He didn’t know about the nitty-gritty of steel markets and tariffs affecting NSC steel products- hot-rolled coils, hot-rolled plates, cold-rolled coils, and tinplates, etc.

It was in the late 1990s that the Asian financial crisis came and so the peso depreciated to unprecedented levels. “With many of NSC’s loans and supply of raw materials paid in dollars, the steel company just could not cope with servicing its debts,” said one memo explainer. “Trade liberalization and the cheap steel imports was also among the major factors that contributed to NSC’s demise. Competition was so stiff because of the dumping of cheap steel products from such countries as Russia and Korea,” labor unions said.

“In fact, NSC was not the only victim in the dumping of cheap imports to the country. The cement industry also raised a howl when imported cement from Taiwan, Indonesia and other countries flooded the market supposedly through illegal means, eating up a large percentage of the local manufacturers’ sales. The two cement plants in Iligan- the Iligan Cement Corp. and the Mindanao Portland Cement Corp., as well as the Alsons Cement Corp. in neighboring Lugait, Misamis Oriental, felt the blow,” labor unions recollected. A few other companies servicing the NSC, as well as smaller business firms in the downstream industry, were forced to close shop, too.

When NSC closed shop, the scrap iron business lost P1.4-billion and the Refractories Corp. of the Philippines lost 30% of its market. Mabuhay Vinyl Corp., supplier of NSC’s chemicals, was severely hit, and the National Power Corp. lost P720M in sales yearly, Philippine Star reported in May 2002.

But who were the actors then before the curtains fall in the great NSC show? NSC’s woes started with privatization. It was El President El Tabako who pushed for the NSC’s privatization for thinking out loud that the government “ain’t supposed to run a steel company, and that it’s better handled by the private sector – despite the fact that at that time, 1994, NSC belonged to the top ten corporations in the Philippines,” said a heckler in the net. That belonged to the Philippines 2000, tiger economy battlecries of El Tabako.

For wanting to limit the government’s financial exposure on State-owned corporations, so Malaysia’s Wing Tiek acquired controlling interests of NSC in November 1994 and shortly it retrenched more than 500 workers for the first time since NSC’s establishment in 1974. But being not steel maker, Wing Tiek sold its sold its entire 69.2% stake to Hottick in December 1996 while the government through the National Development Corp. optioned its own 12.5% stake to the latter on February 1997.

But the latter was of the same mold of the first buyer, a steel trader, not a steel maker. Hottick sold NSC again in 2004, and in the bidding the Global Infrastructure Holdings Ltd. owned by Mittal family, Indian nationals, won. So NSC, next called as Global Steel, resumed operations, after four years of closing shop while the NSC’s selling had been going on. But the resumption of operation took only five years as in February 2010 the Global Steel employees made a strike completely paralyzing the plant operations.

“The Indian company is flagrantly violating Philippine Labor and economic laws since it took over in year 2004 on the pretext of alleged liquidity problems and profitability issues by the abusive Indian investors in collaboration with the corrupt government officials,” the striking Global Steel workers charged. The once NSC never did recover- until now.

The DTI recently bared a draft of the road map for the iron and steel industry showing that by 2030 the country should be a globally competitive provider of quality steel products for domestic users. What road map to boost when it gives a far distant year for us to become competitive? We were once the No. 1 quality steel provider in Asia, and now we look for 2030 to recover? This is impossible as the curtain for 2015 Asean Integration is beginning to be raised! Just last year the country steel consumption reached six million metric tons, and about 50 percent of that was met by local production when in the past we took all.

The simple view of the former NSC employee is revealing that our national leaders profit from the status quo of allowing steel imports to supply 50 percent of our domestic steel requirements- to bloat their personal pockets. (@chamonforte, @ruralurbanews)

The fall and rise of industrial giant Iligan City

HASHTAGS MINDANAO

By Cha Monforte

 

The fall and rise of industrial giant Iligan City 

 

Iligan City, the city most touted before as the country’s industrial giant with the National Steel Corporation’s shining presence, is obviously now living to be self-feeding to its development and urbanization. I went to the city for a short break recently and found it to have already more high, big buildings and malls. 

 

Fifteen years ago, it was only Gaisano Mall, east of the city’s central business district and by Tambacan coast at its rear, that claimed the title of having structural dominance among the rest. Rundown big buildings owned by city’s pioneer families and businesses are still on brisk lease business in the city’s main street, the Roxas Avenue, like what remains to be old buildings in Claveria and San Pedro streets in Davao City. 

 

Iligan City before particularly in the 80s and 90s was propped up by the now dead NSC. It was NSC and its downstream industries which fueled the city’s economy. The super company had over 4,000 workers working in three shifts. The NSC workers were considered as the elites in the city’s working class for having fat salaries. 

 

In my decade of monthly travels in city in the 90s, I did not hear about the orig NSC workers striking. What was there to strike at when even their gray company polos or NSC IDs were treated like credit cards when NSC’s night owls and drunkards had left nothing to spend for more during the wee hours at the height of drunkenness in city’s R & R joints, dancing halls, drinking bars and brothels.

 

Besides the NSC the city has still three cement factories, coco oil factories and other obnoxious manufacturing plants and ancillary industries operating in its northern corridor along the national highway. They rose up from threats of the first wave of disadvantageous trade liberalization and dumping of cheap steel and cement that came in the early 2000, though one said the corporate ownership structure had changed. The city’s Kiwalan area is still covered with snow of cement dusts. That’s still visible when the bus I was riding on passed by along the area peopled with informal settlers.  

 

The urban poor folks are still there, along the city’s highway, like in the Timoga soils where I had trodden on for many times to bridge negotiations between the urban poor occupants and the powerful Macaraig-Macapagal family. It’s almost two decades now when they faced a spectre of demolition and relocation, and they might just be lucky that their makeshift structures remain, as the mother of ex-PGMA, Dona Eva Macaraig and late ex-President Dadong Macapagal have obviously the heart. Or they don’t have no plan yet – and ever- to develop Dona Eva’s inherited land adjacent to the famous Timoga flowing pools from cool spring waters splurged from above ground, near Ma. Cristina Falls. The last agreement forged was for the urban poor settlers to be relocated to the other property of Dona Eva in nearby Barangay Buruun. 

 

The sprawling compound of the NSC is now almost a forest with high growing gmelina trees. An ex-NSC employee said to me that in 2000 the NSC went bankrupt after the bar slab steels were eliminated in the production chain. He said it was caused by a national policy. NSC then was the receiver of Mindanao’s all steel scraps which it recycled to be good, non-substandard steels for domestic consumption. 

 

After NSC’s collapse, he said in his raw recollection, few years after, NSC reopened under a new operator who was a “tihik nga insik”. The re-operation was short-lived. “Maybe Chinese steel businessmen are continuing to lobby to President PNoy Aquino that we are still importing substandard steels from China,” he said. That’s a simple recollection that’s etched in collective memory of the NSC workers.

 

Rightly, there was a fall of an industrial giant, that was Iligan City. NSC was the pride of the Philippine industry, being the largest steelmaking plant in Southeast Asia. But it’s another story to tell. Regardless of the fall, the city continues to be still an industrial in character more in its north than in its south where the rusting NSC plant is located. 

 

But Iligan City has urbanized greatly more than a decade after with the locating of new Gaisano Mall at its center, and more restos, dine ins, and medium bazaars along its old main streets. An ex-police chief has replaced the politicians of the old political clans and families in running the City Hall. He is Mayor Celso Regencia. At dusk in its known “traffic light” corner, an electronic billboard runs the mayor’s campaign, “Welcome to the City of Waterfalls.”  (@chamonforte, @ruralurbanews)

The CBD of Davao City

HASHTAGS MINDANAO

By  Cha Monforte

CBD for the Central Business District is the urban core of a place, say a city, where most of its citizens first conglomerate to live, transact, work, buy and sell. It’s the downtown for cities, or the poblacion for towns, the city or town proper. It’s the place that got urbanized first among other areas, the most busy by its economics, work places, location of institutions-  foremost the city or municipal hall, and by the consequent built-up area caused by population increases.

The CBD is the magnetic centre of the place that attracts population and plays the hub of human and economic activities. It’s the urban core, the urban shell nuclei, where faster life and more human activities pulsate in a place that is once a rural area, a barrio, a bukid. But non-strictly speaking, there’s also sort of CBD in our remote, far-flung barangays. Often, it’s the purok that has the first big store or many sari-sari stores where barrio folks gather to buy, hang out or drink tuba. A CBD is not always centrally located in spatial term (using space).

It appears that the Davao City’s old and small CBD right after World War II had spatially configured to have small h-shape structure. I am drawing this out considering the City Hall’s location, the businesses that flourished at the vicinities of the old business streets of San Pedro, Claveria and Uyanguren and the role of Sta. Ana wharf in the old city trade. The old CBD was slowly and continuously settled by population within and around it. It grazed outward from the Davao Gulf shorelines. It was a small CBD with centripetal force sliced a bit in its southwest part by the sea.

The 1960-1990s saw Davao City as a compact city with less urban sprawl. During this long period, the CDB-attached population grew with more in-migration of people from the outside. But it can be seen that while the city’s centripetal force kept on building up population and activity concentration at old CBD, and in effect enlarging it, other built up areas also expanded along the linear route imposed by the traversing north-to-south highway where manufacturing, service and business activities slowly located through the years. Particularly, informal settlements (read: slums) grew also along the gulf’s shorelines.

In the postwar period, it was in the decade of the 90s that the city has its start of urban sprawl and suburban growth with the continuing population build up in areas outside the CBD and with the developers having the heyday to establish subdivisions. In the early 90s, the growing CDB then was spiked by the establishment of Victoria Plaza, the first mall acknowledged.  Downtown business grew with the construction of new buildings and hotels within the CBD and in its inner south a warehouse style retail business was set up, the Macro. These spurred the nuclei expansion of the CBD. Towards the decade of 2000s, the city’s suburban sprawl came with the emerging built-up areas in Buhangin, Maa, R. Castillo, Puan, Toril, Mintal, Tugbok and Calinan. These areas are so built-up now two decades after.

The city’s CBD was benefited by the growing regional economy and a population base during the period. By 2000 the city population overshot the 1 million mark. The city’s entire urban shell expansion appears to be multi-nuclei character, indicating its multi-nuclei urban growth that mixed up with linear highway- and industry-led urban pace as shown in the earlier settlement expansion along highway towards Bunawan in the north, Toril in the southwest and Calinan in the south (with the big opening of the Buda route in the early 90s).

Now built-up areas flourished and the presence of new malls in other locations like the SM Ecoland, NCCC Maa, SM Lanang Premier, Gaisano Toril and the still being constructed Gaisano Tibungco is just proving such multi-nuclei urban growth of Davao City, which has diminished the city’s CBD business function. Davao City has been growing and urbanizing in wider spaces with an enlarged CBD with concentric rings of pocket business centers within and around it and with expanding growth corridors in its suburban areas. (follow @chamonforte in Twitter, FB)

The way it was in net, CP technology in Davao City

HASHTAGS MINDANAO

by Cha Monforte

Events in the past are easily recalled when one finds things, objects of the past. When one starts to get older, recollection can be blurred and hazy for the details but often not for the main, important episode, fact or process. Often it’s your locale where your recollection revolves on and over, and springs from.

I recently found the thin 8-inch floppy disk while doing housecleaning and my mind raced back to the old PCs in the early 90s. I remembered the blue screen, the white fonts and blinking cursor after the DOS (disk operating system) got in, and you started typing in. Then you used the audible matrix dot printer. Towards the mid 90s, Bill Gates’ Microsoft Windows came in, putting colors, fastness and ease in computing.

The infancy of mass computing in the Davao City at that time came with the entry of analog cellphones. My first CP was 5110 and I bought it at pricey P5,000. It’s down to P300 now after the digital CPs got a market boom. The still expensive Android and smart CPs now will surely go the way the 5110 went. But that’s when manufacturers and developers got billions of bucks from selling and smarter CPs appear in the market. But I must not wait as mobile net-capable phone is requisite of trendy social media-based journalism.

When I worked at a government office at the back of Ateneo de Davao University, along the narrow Juan Luna Street from the early 90s to an early year of the next decade, I saw the first internet cafes in the city flourished side by side to each other. It was in the next door, a small webpage and software developer, Digilution (owned by a US-based Davaoeno IT wizboy Rex), that I first got to know of what an Internet is. I venture to recall, that was 1994.

At that time internet was still young, and the speed of the lowest subscribed internet was so slow. I recall Mozcom as a pioneer net provider in the city. I did online research, and discovered that the net could feed you awesome billions of bytes of information to whatever words you keyed in in Yahoo search box. It was about in the mid 90s that I first saw someone keying in in his CP. The text-capable CP emerged and had the beeper phased out.

There was yet no Google at that time. The MIRC was the most used chat service. Just next after the MIRC, designed in black-and-white by default, the Alta Vista and Geocities provided chat forum in colors. It was then that I got to know more of chat slangs as lol, brb, etc. Yahoo was more of search and email stuff. Then towards the late 90s Yahoo introduced the Yahoo Messenger (YM), which got so popular in the country until Facebook replaced it.

It was YM that provided the venue for many Pinay hot moms and byudas to flirt and hope for second happiness with foreigners, as YM showed many usual horny Indians in the wild, wired net that goes so wireless now in the age of smart CPs and tablets (no pun intended, just stating an observed fact). But still I have my Yahoo email ad while having also the latecomer Google’s Gmail ad. I suspected it was FB which killed my Friendster account.

My FB timeline showed that I joined Facebook on Dec. 6, 2008. That was six years ago, the time when I saw FB starting getting popular in the city. When Friendster was a hit, the online gaming had its boom. “Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg,” stated Wikipedia, the top online encyclopedia-library that is already accepted as source and annotation in masters and doctorate studies. Hasta la vista libraries! A year prior that I saw now Senator Bam Aquino hosting on ANC calling Pinoy IT wizards and capitalists to seize in on computer- and net-based incubation business. But obviously hindi tayo nakasakay as India now is far ahead than us in outsourcing and selling software from the programming base, though we may have fairer market niche of call centers.

Changes in IT industry is giving us opportunities ad infinitum. It was the way the CP and net technology then that we observed and tried to seize on. But we bungled in the great IT opportunity. Where lies the blame? Indian author Kandar said that the “United States’ technological lead was driven in no small part by the brain power of brilliant immigrants, many of whom came from India.” It was only beyond 1999 that the Indian government aggressively backed up its computer engineers and scientists, on the premise that intellectual capital and knowledge development in electronics and telecommunications were vital to India’s growth and development.

At that time, we had IT brain power at par with India’s but we left our programmers at the mercy of the ill-equipped Tesda-accredited tech-voc schools after we had the IT brain drain. We shrank from launching ambitious flagship IT programs and ventures and focused to other things. Immigrant Indian programmers working in the US returned to their country, cajoled by their government. India has now Bangalore, equivalent to California’s Silicon Valley.

Sadly, we are largely IT users than inventors, developers. Sadly, our government, then and now, buries its head on the sand while we top in the world then in texting and and now in selfies. (@ruralurbanews)

—

column

Mati’s urbanization tempo

HASHTAGS MINDANAO

By Cha Monforte

Mati has fairly progressed in the last decade. It tried to become a city but it was spurned by the Supreme Court, along with the 15 other new cities. When the highest court of the land flip-flopped, the 16 new cities became towns, municipios again. The last thing the Supreme Court did was to declare Mati as city again. Time to rest.

Many towns had become cities before without sweating out. Time wasn’t yet so strict before when there was yet no need for a cityhood plebiscite, and no need of having to pass a triad of requirements. What was needed was only the approval of the city charter by the local sanggunian.

In the past, a town can become a city by strategic consideration, say a province has really no city to boasts of like Compostela Valley now. There was no benchmark, no qualifications before. But Nabunturan, Comval’s capital town, now can no longer become a city via Congress will without the plebiscite. Most importantly, the capital town has to pass the qualifications of income, population and territory as provided by the Local Government Code of 1991.

The LGC of 1991 first provided for the cityhood requirements- an income of P20 million, a population of 150,000 and a territory of 100 square kilometers. LGC’s imposition of qualifications resulted to more cityhood bids. From more than 50 cities before the code’s enactment,  their number dramatically rose to more than 140 cities as of 1984. Many towns became cities because of the small income requirement. But because a typical LGU is Internal Revenue Allotment-dependent, the appetite for cityhood to partake greater slice of the IRA sprang up.

As many more wanted to become a city, the income requirement was increased to P100 million in 2001 with the passage of Republic Act No. 9009. The law was specific to mention that the P100 million income should mean locally generated funds. Which means it should be less of the IRA, that is always the bulk of LGU revenues. The law has an either-or provision for the population and territory requirements. That makes the income as most required while aspiring towns would have also to qualify one of the two other requirements.

In effect, the law amended the cityhood provision of the LGC of 1991. Still many LGUs vied to become cities with them misinterpreting the P100 million as to be the total income composed of the IRA and the local sources. The Congress then became a basket of 16 cityhood bills, which became laws. But there was already RA 9009. The league of cities revolted, complaining of shrinking IRA share.

The group of 16 new cities asked the Supreme Court for an exemption from the raised income requirement as the league of cities pushed to revert them to town status.Included in Mindanao are Tandag in Surigao del Sur,  Lamitan in Basilan, Bayugan in Agusan del Sur, Mati in Davao Oriental, Cabadbaran in Agusan del Norte, El Salvador City in Misamis Oriental. It is in this case that the Supreme Court flip-flopped in its decision. The highest court first decided the cityhood status of the 16 new cities was unconstitutional in Nov. 2008 then it reversed its decision restoring their cityhood in Dec. 2009 but it reinstated its 2008 decision in Aug. 2010 making their cityhood unconstitutional.

When Mati was declared as municipio again it could have feigned like Bacoor or Dasmarinas, whose people resisted against cityhood bids for a long time knowing that higher property taxes would be imposed after the cityhood. They had already achieved a high degree of urbanization and had an annual income that already exceeded that of many lower-income cities, but their people resisted and it was only lately that they acceded with the cityhood. Mati has a coast and vast land, forest and mineral resources as its advantages. By its rather fast urbanization tempo now, the Mati local government can sit back and relax while only feeding its own urbanization to sustain itself.

It got a legal saving grace when, thanks Heaven, the Supreme Court on April 12, 2011, finally ruled that Mati and the other 15 municipalities would be turned back into cities even without complying with the P100-million annual income requirement imposed by the Local Government Code.

(@ruralurbanews)

—

column

Why Iloilo in top selfie city ranking?

HASHTAGS MINDANAO

By Cha Monforte

How to explain the ranking of Iloilo surpassing Davao City? I view that the #selfie ranking via Instagram indicates levels of urbanization of Philippine cities as gauged, in this particular respect, by the people’s knowledge on net technology as supported by their economic means to acquire and adopt what’s the latest in technology such as the Android’s mobile.

Iloilo City

Since it’s Instagram and the hashtag #selfie that was used in Time’s ranking, Iloilo’s ranking in higher notches compared to Davao City suggests a cultural force at play in people’s posting of selfie-tagged photos. Instagram isn’t yet so massively popular as FB in the country though it is popular among the sleek middle class.

There’s no debate on the higher level of urban sophistication of Makati, Cebu, and Baguio compared to Davao City, that is situated in historically neglected Mindanao. Davao City is more urbanized than Iloilo City based on the urban characteristics of their respective central business districts (CBD).
Iloilo’s ranking just suggests that in terms of Internet technological trend adoption the city’s Ilonggo middle class shows to be faster in adopting, more competitive, and most especially prouder to engage their collective selves in the digital world.
*****
It was successful and peaceful 77th Araw ng Davao celebration. In the 70s I recalled being brought by my late mom every Araw ng Davao. We traveled whole day on the rugged road riding the CBC bus, and traversing the risky, slippery zigzag dirt road by the Mawab cliff. It was during the great moments of Marcos as a popular leader. I can still recall the large PH flags and balloons flying at the PTA grounds with the oversized photos of Marcos and Imelda at the background. It was jolly moment. I can recall also a bit on Marcos bio film “Iginuhit ng Tadhana” being shown at the PTA grounds where the Araw ng Davao big celebration was held. After the Araw, my dear mom brought his children to frolic in the Summer Land pools, or play and dine at D’ Garden. There were yet too few great places to enjoy in the 70s in Davao City, very much unlike now in the city’s modern era of malls, hotels, condos, restos and pubs the people with long pockets can choose from where to frolic and enjoy. (@ruralurbanews)

Urbanization of Mindanao places in the FB Likes

HASHTAGS MINDANAO

By Cha Monforte

There are places categorized as cities and yet they are still largely slow-moving, sleeping rural jurisdictions. I’ve gone to Oroquieta City, and I found the place pristine and largely rustic. It has fresh sea wind breezes. It’s a city that has yet to urbanize. It’s different to the larger cities in Mindanao that I’ve also gone to- that have fast-pacing tempo of living and which show urban dysfunctions already like traffic, smog, pollution.

Oroquieta City

Anyway, Oroquieta like the small Gingoog City and Tangub City cocooned out to be categorized a city when time was not yet stricter for Congress to declare and convert a town to city. Now towns aspiring to become cities have to pass the qualifications of having P100 million in local income, and either having population of 150,000 or a territory of 100 square kilometers.

Formally naming a place a city in the country is an administrative matter. But there places that aren’t yet called cities that by their urban character and urbanization tempo are actually functioning cities. They far more surpass the urbanization facets of those already named cities in the old fold. Take the towns of Luzon. Being the beneficiaries of the decades of bias national resource allocations of Manila government, and being closely hewed with the economic and spatial processes of the Metro Manila megacity, Luzon towns developed to belong in higher urban hierarchy.

Take their good infrastructures, take the modern amenities that abound in them. In private matters, just look up the Jollibee, McDonald outlets that have sprouted in Luzon towns, and you don’t have second guess that Mindanao towns wallow in underdevelopment and sub-urban class.

In layman’s feel, urbanization indicated by the rise of population in the area due mainly to high in-migration rate of people going in, is that marked degree of vivacity (jolly mood)- kabibo in our vernacular. When the place is sleepy, dull and timid, we often refer it as rural area. It’s often the city or town center, the downtown, the poblacion, the kabesera, the capital that exhibit a jolly character while a city has also rural areas in fringes.

Late UN consultant and regional planner Dr. Ed Prantilla once told us in our master in urban management class at University of Southeastern Philippines that you know how urban is the city in the thickness of the yellow pages devoted to it in the telephone directory. Rightly, smaller cities paled in comparison to metropolitan and megacity gauged by the yellow pages alone.

We are now in the Facebook age. Taking Dr. Prantilla’s cue, I searched in the FB different cities in the country and took the number of likes in the FB pages, and lo, the pages’ likes can as well indicate each city’s urbanization level. The likes may best indicate the number of people, especially the young and the net literates, engaged or conscious with net technology.

But when people interact with the world using the latest information technology, is it not that the likes reflect a level of urban sophistication of the people in the place? Net technology is first and massively popular in urban areas. It reflect the net and wireless phone infrastructures in the place. But even given the IT infrastructures in placed, when people of the place have least literacy and urban sophistication, there could least FB likes. It’s the bottomline.

Gauged by the FB pages’ likes, the hierarchy of cities in Mindanao is revealed. Davao City proves to be in the top, the most urban by its more than 149,000 likes as of this week. It’s followed by Cagayan de Oro City with 84,000+ likes, then Zamboanga City with 81,000+ likes. This triad of greater cities of Mindanao has long been established since before, and they are more strengthened now by the FB likes’ indicator. General Santos City places 4th with its 59,000+ likes. The rest of Mindanao bigger cities rather look to be placing in mid urban hierarchy as their likes have the margin of 30,000 likes from Gensan’s likes.

What is astounding trend though in Mindanao’s city hierarchy in mid category is Tagum City’s shooting star FB statistics- 33,000+ likes. It surpasses the industrial city of Iligan which has 31,000+ likes, the old cities of Pagadian and Butuan which have 30,154 likes and 24,000+ likes. Surigao City has 15,200+ likes. The FB likes might as well indicate how fast a city has propelled itself to greater heights in a timeline, and hence, comment on the efficacy and efficiency of its governance in letting investments choose to locate in its area.

Moreover, the FB likes can be a basis to classifying cities by putting those having close likes statistics. These four are having similar urbanization tempo (that speed) or same urbanization level (that degree, in high or low) as lower hierarchy cities- Panabo City with 6,761 likes, Ozamiz City with 6,200+ likes, Digos City with 5,800+ likes, and Gingoog City with 5,700+ likes. What is the other astounding is that the towns now that had become controversial when the Supreme Court nullified their cityhood status are behaving to be in this category like Bayugan, Agusan del Sur with 5,729 likes, Cabadbaran, Agusan del Norte with 5,152. But the SC-spurned Mati surpassed the lower hierarchy cities with its 8,487 likes!

The other SC-spurned place, Lamitan in Basilan seems to be urbanizing similarly with the capital town of Nabunturan in Compostela Valley, the province that has yet no city, with their 3,594 and 3,086 likes, respectively. But the likes of the two are greater than the 2,410 likes of the Island Garden of Samal, which has 10,112 likes though for the FB Page- Samal Beaches. To know the extent of urbanization of rural places via the FB, well, the lumad-dominated and remote Talaingod in Davao del Norte has 1,200+ likes.

And what about Cebu City vis-a-vis Davao City? Like what has been long been established by regional and urban planners before, Cebu (with 258,00+ likes) is far greatly urban and in higher city hierarchy than Davao City (with 149,000+ likes). Never mind the place where Malacanang is based since time immemorial- (imperial) Manila, Philippines has 577,000+ likes. Lo, it reflects quite a double of Visayas’ development, and a triple of Mindanao’s development. FB likes mirroring historical neglect and regional disparities, huh?

—

column, March 25, 2014