Right.
I don’t know when and where our city officials got this virulent ‘development bug’—it must be an undiscovered COVID-19 variant—that attacks the central nervous system, eating away brain cells and severely affecting the ability to compose rational thought.
Somehow, they suddenly see this fantastic light in their collective reverie that makes them imagine Baguio City as a modern theme park—something like a lovechild that would be the result if Las Vegas “effed” Disneyland.
It features futuristic elevated monorail trains zipping through Magsaysay Avenue, an acrophobics’ challenge walkway with transparent glass floors ringing that tiny hill around Mines View Park, and such other adult cheap ‘thrill rides.’
That hideous concept I call the “Session Road Uglification Plan” is apparently just the tip of the iceberg. There’s much, much more in the pipeline and the deeper you dig the more absurd the concept becomes.
What a waste of brain matter. And what a pathetic effort at pretending to understand how to plan a city.
Your heart longs for those days of yesteryears when people understood what city planning means.
It took just one mind—that of American Architect Daniel H. Burnham—to conceive of a truly modern city way back before 1909 that unintentionally became the crown jewel of the fledgling Philippine tourism industry back in the day.
It had a manmade lagoon at the center, with a very tastefully-designed outdoor skating rink, a city auditorium, a library, a football field, an athletic bowl, an official Governor’s Mansion fronted by a long reflecting pool with a kiosk at the opposite end.
Behind it was a picturesque flight of stairs that led down to a horse-riding briddle path, so the horses won’t just be standing idle after the games.
What games?
Oh, did I forget to mention—there was a polo field across the briddle path where equestrian enthusiasts deftly chased each other around on horseback and hammered that white ball that was about five times bigger than another smaller white ball that other men with shorter sticks chased around on foot for eighteen holes at a country club yonder.
Of course, not all of these facilities I described existed immediately upon Baguio’s chartering on September 1, 1909. But they were all in Daniel Burnham’s mind, and hand-sketched tracing cloth plans for Baguio City--now carefully kept in the museum archives of, ironically, not Baguio but the City of Chicago in the US.
For the next several years after its birth as a city, the mission of a city planning office was to faithfully execute what was on those tracing cloths. Those plans called for a post office, a city garbage incinerator, a public market fronting a public plaza, and several residential districts that would be called ‘camps.’
Why camps? Because Baguio City was primarily a military project. Kennon Road was designed and built by an American Army Engineer, Col. Lyman Kennon, who commanded an eclectic work force composed of US army engineers providing the techie services, a huge contingent of Philippine Scouts providing security, and local menfolk carrying much of the grunt work.
They started at the foothills of Rosario, La Union and slowly worked their way up the Bued River bank, establishing a construction camp every four kilometers or so.
That’s why there’s Camp 1, Camp 2, Camp 3 and so on all the way up to Camp 8 all along Kennon Road’s 34-kilometer length.
At the completion of the project, the Filipino constables (they were called Scouts before there was a Philippine Constabulary)—really the only components of the project’s crew who were mostly not from Baguio—had no place to stay. So the US colonial administration gave them their own residential district—Scout Barrio. It wasn’t called a camp because it was intended as a permanent place for them.
But once you give a concession like that to one group, there will be other groups demanding equal treatment, of course. The problem is, while it is true they might be of some service to the administration of US Governor General William Howard Taft that was running the neophyte city, mostly they did so on temporary basis—as contractual civil employees, teachers on limited semestral assignments or training stints, that sort of thing.
So they were also assigned housing districts—City Camp (for civil employees), Teacher’s Camp (for teachers), Sanitary Camp (for utility employees)--all used to be the site of bunkhouses for transient accomodations. Baguio was a very well-planned city. Government focused on needs, not gimmicks.
If anything, it was the private sector that focused on building something grandiose, whose timeless beauty, elegance and architectural glory would never be matched. Ever. It’s called the Baguio Cathedral.
You see, the problem with today’s millennial city planners is they don’t know Baguio City’s history. They are a product of computer schools bristling with CAD-CAM software (“computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing) and coming off hours of playing games on PC. So they think of Baguio like piecing together a new Minecraft playing board.
And I’m being awfully generous with that characterization.
They think development planning is about turning Baguio City from “Third World” to “First World” when all they are doing is just varnishing Baguio’s cosmetic attributes as a Third World playground for First World tourists.
I strongly supported Benjie Magalong as my mayor in 2019—and still do today—because I thought, “Ah! A genuine Baguio boy like me. They’re not gonna pull the wool over the eyes of this one. He grew up in Baguio, as I did. We have the same heart.”
Maybe we have the same heart.*
