Run the town

Win a chance to clean city streets and kick out all that heavy traffic in a competition that will award the best of today’s young urban planners.

MANILA, Philippines - When it comes to uniting Filipinos on social media, there seems to be no better way than to pit them together in a horrible EDSA gridlock. (Come to think of it, the flooding of España does the trick too.)

But whining every night won’t actually make the traffic move faster or the flood disappear. After all, when a problem pops up — or gets worse through time — the best thing to do is to plan a solution and to take action. However, with a problem as big as Metro Manila, it’ll be impossible to do it alone.

Activistar Advocacy, an environmental educational group based in Singapore, will give the 14- to 20-year-old dreamers and doers a platform to showcase their plans for a better city. This is through the Planning a Clean and Green Township competition.

The winners will be decided in three rounds: Proposal writing, multimedia presentation, and model-making. The first round will kick off with a briefing workshop on Feb. 7 and Feb. 12, 2015 for the participants, where the town proposals will be developed. The groups with the selected proposals will be sent to Singapore for a five-day study trip from March 31 to April 25, 2015 in preparation for the final rounds. The top three winners will be given a chance to present their plans to the mayor of Manila and the 10 best prototype townships will go on a traveling exhibition in Manila and Singapore.

If the special tour or a chance to talk to the mayor about your traffic woes aren’t enough to get you pumped up to enter the competition, Activistar will also be giving cash prizes, certificates, and titles such as the Young Mayor 2015 Award to the winners. You gotta admit, that’s way cooler than your friend’s mayor badge in Foursquare.

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For more information and details how to join, visit the official competition website at http://assembly.activistar-ads.com or e-mail join.us@activistar.com. — Maine Manalansan