Metro Manilans are in dire need of parks and green spaces. Compared to more progressive cities in the region, we have one of the fewest public parks and open spaces in proportion to our urban area and population. The whole Metro Manila has fewer than 200 hectares of parkland available for its 12 million or so citizens. (There is in fact more area devoted to golf courses in the metro compared to public parks.)
Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Sydney and New York have between 1,000 and 2,000 hectares of parkland available for everyone’s enjoyment. Although we had several hundred hectares allocated in our 11 previous master plans for Metro Manila, almost all of these have been cut up, sold, or otherwise filled with buildings and development. Today, what is developed for parks is fashioned from leftover spaces from the metropolis’ haphazard development.
One such park is in Pandacan; it is carved out of what is essentially a traffic island. I have always meant to visit the park after years of passing it as I motored from Paco Station’s Plaza Dilao to the Nagtahan Bridge. I had always wondered at the supreme lack of planning and thought that went into building a park in between two busy roads. What were our officials thinking when they did this?
Many times I passed the area, I would notice parents with children, and sometimes, children alone, try to cross the busy roads to get to the park. It was like a game of patintero, but the stakes in exchange to get to the park were lives and limbs.
I managed to get down to the area last week. It was a Sunday so I thought that the traffic would be calmer; it was not. Heavy trucks and fast cars use the stretch of road on both sides. The long stretch of park can be reached by only one pedestrian bridge. People are afraid to cross except during the day. The bridge has high parapets, which hide the top from scrutiny. You can never tell what awaits you at the top. Apparently the place is frequented by vagrants and almost never visited by maintenance crews …it was filthy.
No wonder most people on either side of the park/traffic island would rather risk their lives crossing the roads to reach the place. The residents have breached the park at several points of its perimeter fence. There are no pedestrian crossings. Manila officials, it seems, do not think it wise to encourage the practice and don’t put the zebra lines, maybe to dissuade crossings. But people have little choice. Fast vehicles have no warning and in the evenings it is even riskier. Many reportedly have met accidents but I could not ascertain if there were any fatalities; it would not be surprising.
In the park itself, the first think I found was an old mattress with a young street urchin sleeping soundly at 4 p.m. As I walked along westward I noticed that many of the concrete pavilions were filled with people having siestas. The older boys and men seemed to have first dibs at choice spots. I realized that living in informal settlements on either side of the park does not provide the most ideal opportunities for good rest, so people go to the park to snooze. The rest seem to be recovering from drinking sprees or bouts sniffing solvents.
The park had lights, the over-decorated kind that was fashionable a decade ago. They looked like they were theme park lampposts. I do not know how many still worked but many were broken. There were no lights marking the pedestrian crossings, nor were there any at the bridge.
Thankfully there were trees and token landscaping in the park but not enough to screen noise or pollution from the heavy traffic on both sides. The lawn areas were balding and the soil compacted. It was obvious there was close to no maintenance after the initial construction of the park.
In the center of the narrow park, at its widest (about 30 meters or so) was the children’s playground. It was chock full of kids making do with a deteriorating assemblage of rusty equipment. Swings were missing seats and slides were pock marked with rusty holes rendering them useless. The design of the play equipment left much to be desired in terms of safety. There were no cushioned landing areas with rubberized matting. Sand would have been an alternative, but all the kids had was concrete-hard soil to land on if they fell.
At the western end of the park I was surprised to find a monument. It is about four meters in height and looked like it was designed in the 1980s, judging by the style of bent metal sheets a la Castrillo. The monument was built to honor Dr. Maria Paz Mendoza-Guazon (1884-1967). She was a pioneering woman doctor and educator. One of the first graduates of UP in 1912, she took her post-graduate in the United States and Europe. Guazon went on to and distinguished career and eventually become the UP’s Dean of Women in 1928. She was also the first Filipina to hold the presidency of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Guazon’s memorial is totally invisible from the street. Its placement vis-a-vis the park and the two roads make no sense. It is also in a state of disrepair, with its foundations chipping and the metal casing rusting away. It appears ripe for scavengers to cannibalize. Such is the fate of hundreds of memorials and small monuments around the city. Many seem to have been exercises for city historical departments to produce photo-ops for incumbent officials to preside at. Many, like Guazon’s, are forgotten, blighted by negligence and doomed to disappear forever.
What also seem to disappear are any opportunities to build proper parks in the metropolis. There has not been a new city or district-sized park (about 20 hectares or larger) built in the last half century. All the parks and playgrounds since have been shaped out of odds and ends …or, like this park, fashioned out of a traffic island.
How many of our monuments are, in fact, resting on traffic islands? It seems that after Rizal’s obelisk we have not provided proper settings for any of our monuments. The Quezon Memorial and the Bonifacio Monument are the centers of rotundas, but these are large and the memorials tall enough to function as a proper landmark. On Roxas Boulevard, by the roadside, you can find about a dozen, many with their limbs and parts missing, or hidden away from view from swiftly passing cars. Almost all are badly placed, with a few looking like they’re hailing a taxi or watching parked cars.
What we need are more parks for all, better and more respectful settings for our monuments. What we need is a saner way of planning for open public space, one that will not risk people’s lives, rather, enhance them with the opportunities for recreation, relaxation and enjoyment.
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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.