Origins of Metro Manila

Taking a cue from Dr. Jose Rizal, we must look back to see our way forward. The start of 2014 is a good time to do this and mull the future of our metropolis. I’ve always advocated the merging of this conurbation of 16 cities and one town called Metropolitan Manila but the idea is unacceptable or inconceivable to many.

The idea is not new. One of my research sources on the matter is a magazine article from 1961 written by the prolific Hermie Rotea and published in This Week magazine.

Rotea opens his article with the question: Should Manila, Quezon City and Pasay City be merged into one big city? We must remember that 50 years ago there were only these three cities. All the rest, including Makati were towns of the province of Rizal. The population of the entire region was only about three million but these three cities were physically merging via urban and suburban sprawl. The present day problems of traffic, crime, pollution and blight were already unbearable even back then.

The piece points to an origin for a merger from as early as 1935. Acting Governor General Eugene A. Gilmore (after whom the New Manila Avenue was named) formed a committee to draft a bill creating Greater Manila. This was to include Caloocan, San Juan, Mandaluyong, Makati, Parañaque, portions of Las Piñas and two other sites that eventually would become Quezon City and Pasay City. The bill passed the Senate but floundered in the House.

The idea stuck in then Senate President Manuel Quezon’s mind despite the plan to move the capital to Quezon City, which was approved in 1939. The outbreak of World War II in December 1941 led to Quezon’s executive order actually forming Greater Manila; made up of all the towns and areas mentioned in the original bill draft.

The move, according to Rotea’s article, was supposedly a strategy to save central Manila and its surrounding towns and cities from destruction, by declaring Greater Manila an “open city.” It worked for most of the war, except of course when Manila was “liberated” in 1945.

Greater Manila was dissolved after the war. With the coming of independence, the government pushed through with moving the capital to Quezon City. Also by 1950 Pasay City was created. The next decade saw accelerated growth of the three cities as well as a private development-led site in the town of Makati. There came a rising clamor for merging of these three. President Ramon Magsaysay was also reportedly for the merger, but he died in a plane crash in 1957.

Rotea sought the stand of the three mayors of these cities on the issue of a merger. Mayor Arsenio Lacson supported the ide saying “…any approach that would take these cities as disparate and distinct from each other would in time be catastrophic to the general welfare of all parts of the community. Because of the growing problems of these cities …(the) present consideration of the structure of local government can no longer be determined by tradition, but by the type of functions that have to be provided.”

Lacson clarified, “(Manila) faces a great deal of problems that go beyond its boundaries affect uniformly the citizens of the entire area. Such problems that affect Manila and the suburban areas concern adequate water supply, flood protection, arterial roads, a good transport system, epidemics and diseases, factors which affect the physical and cultural wellbeing of the community.”

Mayor Norberto Amoranto of Quezon City was against the merger but when interviewed, Rotea reports, hizoner refused to elaborate. The same went for Mayor Pablo Cuneta, who was also generally known to oppose the merger.

In the article, Rotea also included another interview with the City Engineer of Manila, who pointed out the Pasay City was, in fact, part of Manila anyway. The two towns of Pineda and Maytubig that formed it used to be under the Civil Province of Manila, which “existed for 300 years during the Spanish regime (with a) territory of 265 square miles extending from Bulacan River in the north to Las Piñas along the bay and from Montalban, Marikina, San Juan, Mandaluyong, Pateros, Taguig and Muntinglupa landward.”

Rotea concluded that there was a good case for merging “…Manila, Quezon City and Pasay City into one big metropolis …” citing additionally, the view of some that “..The government has indiscriminately created cities more for political rather than for economic reasons.”

The article is from the ‘60s. The Martial Law government created the Metro Manila Commission in the ‘70s to address the issues and problems that had accumulated since the 1930s. Planners of the MMC looked at the merger again despite the fact that metro Manila was given a governor. They noted that the several towns and cities were segregated according to political boundaries and not according to economic needs, functional efficiencies or geo-morphologic realities. A plan was hatched to re-define the metropolis into about five or six major sections; merging several adjoining towns and cities into more practical and governable components of a larger conurbation.

The plan disappeared after the People Power revolution. The ‘80s saw the effective devolution of the Metro Manila Authority into a body mainly looking only at metropolitan traffic and garbage.

Today Metropolitan Manila is a certifiable mess. Traffic, crime, pollution, flooding, urban blight, disease and urban dementia cross component city boundaries at will. We need the political and communal will to change things if we are to move forward as a metropolis. We need to re-draw or erase political boundaries entirely and re-imagine, as well as re-shape the capital into a resilient, culturally-vibrant, socially-inclusive and fun place to live in.

The future means embracing a metropolitan mindset, governing it as an urban province (as it was in the past) and taking immediate action in the present. Otherwise, I’d might as well just reprint this column again next year.

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Feedback is welcome. Please email the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.