Baguio: Urban Issues 0
Perched 1,500 m. up in the highlands of Benguet, Baguio’s air is naturally cool; its surrounding pine forests, refreshing. It is generally 8oC cooler in any month here than anywhere in the lowlands. So when Manila boils at 35oC, Baguio still remains cool at 26oC. It is an experience for local tourists to walk into a dense Baguio fog with zero visibility.
The climate and the terrain had pleased then US Governor William Howard Taft so that he picked out Baguio as the summer capital of US servicemen and civil officials. In 1907, Washington D.C. contracted American city planner Daniel Burnham to design a mountain getaway here for 30,000 Americans and their Filipino domestics. When constructed, US soldiers started going to Baguio for a month’s R&R.
In 1946, the Americans left. But where the Americans had built little, Filipinos began an all-out construction of hotels, cottages, and summer vacation houses. These are yet besides the residential homes and social facilities like schools that need to be put up. Surely, Baguio’s uncontrolled and little planned growth will sooner or later take its toll.
Baguio City is a plateau of 49-sq.-km.-area that has been originally designed for only 30,000 people. It tapers off to the Guisad-Lucban Valley in the north, and to a system of narrower valleys in the south where Bakekeng, Camp 7, Crystal Cave and Loakan, are currently located. Now, it blows the mind to think that the city hosts a population of 300,000—10 times its original design.
Once an idyllic charming city, Baguio is now groaning under the weight of urban issues that pester metropolises like Manila. Migrants outnumber Baguio’s native highlanders. They built shanties on the steep hillsides that overlook the city and greet the tourists. With overpopulation come issues like the slums, sanitation, pollution and traffic jam. The city’s water system is conking out. And when it rains hard, Burnham Park’s lagoon overflows and floods the city road.
Such issues only show that Baguio is way past her prime. After all, she is the first, the grand dame, of all Philippine destinations which give her more pressing reason to shape up. Local tourists expect much from her because they looked up to her. Every Filipino grade schooler is reared up in the idea that she is Baguio. Not for nothing why every Filipino must make his obligatory hadjj to the City of Pines before traveling elsewhere. Or why Baguio is not just a cool summer hideaway but a weekend town of Manila.
If anything, the urban issues are far from unsolvable. There is no city in the Philippines where you will find taxi drivers handing you change down to the last centavo except in Baguio. This yet besides the free but helpful tips they pass to you while driving. And there is no telling whether they are natives or migrants.
In a city that got honest taxi drivers, anything is possible. Of all the urban issues that hound Baguio, crime doesn’t count. This explains why the city has become a college town. Parents cannot feel safer anywhere else for their kids’ college education than in Baguio.
Hopefully, political will and wisdom will use this rare, invaluable, asset to turn things around.
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