Reimagine

After days of wading in dirty water, it is now time to finally take a longer view of the situation.

Two million people were affected by the floods. At the height of the calamity, over 300,000 required care in evacuation centers. At the worst of the calamity, over 80% of the metropolis was under water.

The final cost of this tragedy is still being calculated. The final toll will be truly staggering.

The National Capital Region accounts for a third of the country’s gross national product. Along with regions 3 and 4, this part of the country accounts for about half of the nation’s wealth-creating capacity. It is also, as recent events show, the most vulnerable to chaos.

This is an untenable condition.

Floods are generally democratic events, affecting all equally regardless of standing or gender or religion. That is true only in principle. In reality, vulnerability is unequally distributed. The poor bear a greater share of collective misery.

With 12 million people cramming a narrow strip of land between a lake and the sea, Metro Manila is an odd settlement from first glance. The crowding pushed communities to the lakeshore, the fringes of the bay, the shade of unsteady slopes and literally above the occasionally rampaging waters of rivers and creeks.

With one of the highest population densities in the world, Metro Manila pushes its poorest to become also its most vulnerable. As a general rule, the poorer you are the more precarious your domicile.

If you are rich, the preferred domicile should be flood-free Bonifacio Global City or Rockwell. If you are poor, there is little choice but Happyland (on the Tondo shore recently rammed during a storm surge by stray barges) or Tumana in Marikina (where flash flooding reaches 20 feet high).

Consequently, one’s quality of life in this metropolis depends on how high you are above sea level — unless, of course, one lives in a place vulnerable to landslides.

Parts of the city, because of over-exploited aquifers, are actually sinking. The worst nightmare, of course, is that the sea and the lake become one. That seems apparent in my hometown, Malabon.

Fresh water sourcing for this large urban population will be an issue. As water use rises with improved incomes, there will not be enough during the dry months and too much during the rainy season.

This week, thanks to the calamity, the eyes of the world focused on Metro Manila and all its oddities. Why, we are all asked, is so much of the nation’s population and created wealth concentrated in a most vulnerable sliver of land?

Global news coverage focused on the worst-hit areas — which are also the cities otherwise hidden undersides. Why, we are all asked, is there so much trash clogging our waterways and the meager drainage system there is.

The reports highlighted the fact that Metro Manila is an urban sprawl that happened without the benefit of planning. Subdivisions sit on flood plains. Waterways are blocked. Like the city’s horrendous traffic, water flow is unmanaged. There is sparse wastewater treatment and poor solid waste disposal systems.

What the footages do not capture is an even greater oddity: even as Metro Manila is an integrated urban sprawl, it is managed by 17 distinct political entities. Each town and city in this concrete jungle is a separate kingdom, jealously guarding their prerogatives in zoning, building codes, business permits and waste management.

With this administrative anomaly in place, it will be too much to expect effective management of the place. There has been little incentive for the mayors to yield their prerogatives. There is little incentive too for the national leadership to reconfigure the odd politico-administrative structure governing this chaotic place. A single, elected leadership for the NCR will be nearly as powerful as the President, as the Mayor of Manila was during the fifties.

Metro Manila is effectively a single city, like Metropolitan Tokyo or Metropolitan Bangkok. Yet it is ruled by 17 different kings, each marching to his own tune. We can only begin to sort out the core design problems of this metropolis only after we sort out this administrative anomaly.

The MMDA is not the solution. It is a largely powerless institution tasked mainly with managing traffic flow. It cannot even get a handle on garbage collection, turf jealously guarded by the mayors. It cannot even impose a uniform number coding policy on Makati or force Manila to adopt U-turn slots.

That is not the end of it.

Superimposed on the administrative anomaly of the metropolis is the chronic tendency of the national bureaucracy towards independent agencies competing with each other. For instance, there is an agency war between the DOTC and the DPWH over who is in charge of the proposed connector roads linking the SLEX with the NLEX.

We have to fundamentally reimagine the way Metro Manila is governed. Only then can we begin to work on a common land-use plan to mitigate the chaos produced by decades of free-wheeling urbanization. Only then can we begin working on an integrated flood-control plan.

Unfortunately, there is no political consensus on this. The political elite on the national level would not want to yield power to a possibly assertive metropolitan executive. The municipal elites who control local governments will fight extinction.

The greater likelihood is we will hobble along with a disordered metropolis prone to calamities because the political elite will refuse the sort of change required. We will have to endure the blatant electioneering in the face of tragedy we have seen the last few days from political leaders who shirk from the core of the problem.