What Mayor Morato understood about rain that we forgot

When Mayor Tomas Morato, a Spanish-Filipino businessman and politician born in Xábia, Alicante, Spain, walked the unpaved dirt and wilderness of Quezon City in 1940, planting sampaloc saplings along what is now the street bearing his name, the threat of high water wasn’t solved by concrete. It was solved by soil. Today, as Metro Manila faces inundated avenues and stranded commuters, we tend to talk about flood control through a lens of hard infrastructure: pumping stations, deeper underground culverts and taller concrete river walls.

But if you dig into the archives of the original 1941 Frost-Arellano Master Plan, the blueprint Morato was tasked with executing as QC’s founding executive, you discover a humbling truth: the city was originally designed not to fight water, but to make room for it.

Morato’s early city setup relied on an approach that modern urban planners call “nature-based solutions,” though in the 1940s it was simply called common sense. The city’s blueprint carved out massive 20- to 50-meter open green easements along riverways like the San Juan, Culiat and Kamias creeks. The logic was simple: tropical rivers expand. When typhoons hit, water was meant to spill into grassy, unbuilt park buffers, sinking naturally into the water table without touching a single doorstep.

Behind this design was a profound respect for topography – an understanding that Quezon City is not flat land, but an elevated, rolling plateau carved by five major river systems and dozens of tributaries. The original planners understood that water moving downhill across a plateau carries gravitational momentum. By preserving unpaved ridges, wide valley floors and deep soil buffers, they allowed the land’s natural contours to slow down, absorb and direct storm runoff safely. Flattening those contours, filling in natural catchment basins and walling off rivers forced rainwater to find its own paths – turning asphalt streets into high-speed artificial rivers.

But what followed in the post-war decades was a slow-motion triumph of commercial concrete over ecological logic – a quiet, block-by-block conquest where real estate value steadily trumped environmental design. As post-war population and economic pressures mounted, unchecked commercial developments steadily swallowed up the city’s natural floodplains. Yet, unlike many neighboring local government units in Metro Manila that still resort to piecemeal gutter widening and political guesswork, Quezon City’s current administration has taken decisive steps toward getting things right.

Recognizing that decades of ad-hoc concrete additions were failing, the Quezon City government formally partnered in 2020 with Project NOAH (Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazards), operating under the University of the Philippines Resilience Institute. This landmark partnership marked a decisive pivot: shifting flood control away from guesswork and political horse-trading toward high-resolution, science-based hydrological modeling. The primary deliverable of this partnership – the Quezon City Comprehensive Drainage Master Plan (DMP) – unveiled a stark reality.

By mapping all 44 tributaries and modeling five-year to 100-year rain return scenarios across the city’s 142 barangays, Project NOAH demonstrated that traditional gutter widening was useless against the massive volume of surface runoff generated by a paved metropolis.

Because the open soil is gone, the modern plan must mine the built environment for artificial “sponges.” Engineers are now excavating massive stormwater detention reservoirs directly beneath neighborhood basketball courts in barangays like Sta. Monica and Tandang Sora, designing them to hold hundreds of thousands of liters of rainwater during typhoons before slowly trickling it back into the grid. The City Hall lagoon and the open lawns of Quezon Memorial Circle have been repurposed into temporary retention basins to slow surface runoff across the city’s river networks. Furthermore, the city has enacted Green Building Ordinances mandating on-site rainwater harvesting for major commercial developments, while real-time sensor networks give low-lying barangays early warning hours before river surges peak.

In short, modern engineers are using high-tech civil works to trick a paved megacity into behaving the way it did naturally under Morato. We are spending heavily to retrofit what we once gave away to real estate expansion for free. Yet, retrofitting subterranean tanks can only do so much if our vision for urban renewal remains trapped in the past. For decades, “urban renewal” in Metro Manila has been treated as a synonym for gentrification – demolishing older neighborhoods simply to build taller glass towers, wider flyovers and bigger commercial complexes. Climate-resilient urban renewal must mean something entirely different: unpaving the city.

As long as local governments continue approving aggressive commercial developments without strict environmental oversight, even the best drainage plans will be fighting a losing battle. For too long, political candidates have treated flood mitigation as an opportunity for “ribbon-cutting” optics and pork-barrel civil works – building visible, band-aid concrete dikes while simultaneously green-lighting commercial developments that worsen urban runoff.

Mayor Morato and his 1941 team built a city designed to breathe and absorb. Today, we are spending billions trying to build artificial lungs for cities suffocating under concrete. The science of flood management has evolved, but the law of the landscape remains unchanged: give water space or it will take yours. And, if we want leaders who will protect our neighborhoods over real estate profits, we must start by using our votes wisely.

Mayor Morato gave Quezon City a blueprint that respected the land, giving tropical rains the space they needed to flow, sink and breathe. The current Quezon City administration’s science-based Drainage Master Plan finally honors his legacy by engineering modern ways to give nature back its room. But a master plan on paper is only as strong as the public will behind it – and it is up to civil society and empowered voters to reject short-sighted politics and safeguard the historical foresight our city needs.