The urban planning and professional management of Bad Homburg City

(Part II – “If Jesus Were Mayor”)

Yearly, our Grade VIII high school students play City Mayor as each group of six in a class simulate “SimCity,” an intricate computer lesson that designs a city and its landscape from a selected terrain. They produce an organized, efficient city in contrast to the chaotic cities of Metro Manila. “Urban Planning” according to Nigel Tyler who developed its theory in 1945, “guides the orderly development of settlement and satellite communities (barangays), which commute in and out of the city and share its resources.”

From the City Hall, the mayor lays out the components of government offices, budget, revenue collection and licensing, the court house and prison, police and firefighting section, business and residential zones with access to parks, museums and schools together with the church, hospitals and markets. Roads with mass transport system, water and electric power, sewage and garbage disposal are strategically inputted.

Why the ideal cities do not exist in the Philippines

Upon the election of a new mayor in the Philippines, he/she brings with him/her few confidential staff. These are usually the social secretary, the chief of staff, an aide de camp and some field employees. Those that will be retained are civil service personnel who remain in the office regardless of who the new city mayor or chief executive will be. If they do not feel like working for the new leader, they may request for a transfer of office.

In the case of city administrators (or the so called “little mayors”), who are running the operations of the city government, it is necessary that they share the same vision as that of the incoming mayor, whose projects will need to be efficiently implemented.

What happens then with the unfinished projects of the outgoing mayor? This is the dilemma in our country, for politics is still the name of the game. Unlike in other countries, programs of the government are continued by whoever will sit as the leader.

The lady administrator of a historical German city

I met Frau Maria Scholz in 1992 when she spent Christmas in the Philippines with her brother, German Ambassador Peter Scholz. After being a teacher, she assumed the position of a professional city hall administrator. A true professional, she stayed in office almost all her lifetime. In the Philippines, mayors keep changing every election time, replacing city administrators with their own protégées, who, unfortunately, are not necessarily competent. In Germany, while the mayor and the 59 parliamentarians are elected regularly, the administrative staff remains unchanged, providing a stable bureaucracy.

In her modest penthouse flat overlooking the Taunus Mountain, the Homburg Palace, and the treetops of the woods that surround the city, Frau Scholz and I chatted over a glass of sweet Vermouth about her life and work. After 20 years of faithful service, she officially retired as “first lady” of Bad Homburg. However, Wolfgang Assman, the newly elected mayor at the time of our visit, still counts on Frau Scholz as a consultant.

The “bad” in Bad Homburg stands for “thermal bath,”, referring to the famous spa half an hour away from Frankfurt. This holiday spot was founded by Kaiser Wilhelm II and Landgraf Friedrich II. Royal guests from all over the world have fallen in love with the place, and so never tire of vacationing there. Today, it is a place for everyone, especially for German retirees.

City administrator works out the mayor’s major concerns

Before fulfilling a travel grant in Germany to visit model apprentice and technical schools (counterparts of which the Hanns Seidel Foundation were helping to establish in the Philippines), I requested Ambassador Scholz if I could visit and interview his sister. A typical organized German, he confirmed all the details of my short stay in Bad Homburg, accompanied by my husband. We took a taxi from Frankfurt airport to the Maritim, which was less than an hour away. After calling Frau Scholz, she was at the hotel in minutes to take us to lunch with the thrice-elected Mayor Wolfgang Assmann. With an extra hour before mealtime, she drove us in her red car around the city of 51,000 people to see its two popular highlights: the Kurpark and the Homburg Palace, with a side visit to a Montessori kindergarten.

After lunch, we toured the modern city hall. She was especially proud of the Parliamentary Hall where she arranged weekly meetings of seven committees to discuss the town budget. This relates to taxes and their distribution, building plans, traffic problems, environmental problems, sports and recreation, problems of social and cultural affairs. What fascinated me was the Planning Office, which contained about 10 tri-dimensional models of the city of Bad Homburg, showing its expansion within 40 years. They conceived of the ideal plans for reconstructing the city after the damages wreaked by WWII. The professional city engineers, construction and maintenance teams have been implementing them faithfully.

City planning competition provides the model landscape architecture

My two-week tour of apprentice schools in different federal states allowed me to observe German country-type hotels and voc-tech courses at Saarland, which borders France and reunified Berlin. As planned earlier, I paid another visit to Bad Homburg for a closer look at how they maintain and beautify the city. Since my PAL flight back to the Philippines was from the Frankfurt airport, I took the regular bus rides – made for the convenience of retirees – direct to Bad Homburg. Frau Scholz continued to assist me, this time introducing me to the Green Office. Filipino computer specialist Hector Aguilar, one of several kababayan professionals who reside in the city, graciously acted as my interpreter.

On one wall, seven three-dimensional models of the city hall in different landscapes, winning entries of a city planning contest held many years ago, were on display. The existing stadthaus was built according to this winning plan. Two huge steel cabinets revealed landscape architectural plans of trees, shrubs, and seasonal ornamental flowers, designed in the latter part of the 18th century by Joseph Lenne, to complement the Kurpark geyser fountains. The various trees were bought from two major nurseries in Germany, and replanted to replace the old fallen ones. Using young trees, which cost cheaper at 600 DM instead of the 3,000 DM taller and mature trees, saved money for the city.

6 department heads care for this tourist haven

The Green Office was right beside the Clean Environ Office. In the latter, I met the over-all Finance Manager Herr Daltzow, who gave me several white and yellow statistic papers that explained very clearly in diagram form the existence of the Administrative and Technical Department tasked with cleaning and beautifying Bad Homburg. Sixty-one workers, under Herr Mitwoch and three assistants, looked after the canals and streets of the city as well as the carpentry maintenance of fences, plant boxes, benches and signboards. Herr Schobert managed the 58 garbage collectors and drivers who pick up the debris regularly according to a detailed one-year calendar (with specified days for garden refuse, metal, glass, bulky house furniture) given to each residential and commercial place. Herr Weber as the motor pool chief had seven workers. The playgrounds, jogging pathways, and trees were cared for by 24 workers under Herr Horn, while the smaller shrubs, hedges, and ornamental flowers were maintained by 23 gardeners under Herr Wilming. The seasonal flowers, which surround the monuments and statues all over the four parks (by the Castle, the Church, the Roman Fort, etc.) were grown by nursery lady Frau Vaupel and her 10 workers. They also provide the cut-flowers for the official functions of the city mayor.

The landscape that charmed a Russian czar and a Thai king

Early in the afternoon, Frau Scholz took me for a stroll across the Kurpark. It was the second loveliest stroll I took in Europe. The first was in the Tivoli carnival park in Copenhagen. The bust of landscape architect and designer Joseph Lenne, surrounded by pink pansies, greeted us along one entrance pathway. A mother with a toddler smiled at Frau Scholz. I noticed from my first day in the city that almost everyone knew her. The dark-and-yellow-green trees mingled with various conifers were all over the four-hectare park, where grass was allowed to grow wild, with flowering weeds here and there.

A small onion-domed Russian church, donated by a Russian Czar sat on a hillside. A two-meter-wide cement pathway, bordered by a bicycle path that wound gracefully in and out, and up and down the uneven garden, was punctuated with giant three-geyser fountains and a pond with a few ducks. Beyond this, the newly repaired golden Thai gazebo rose brightly against all the greenery. It was a gift from the grandfather of the present Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej. We passed the red-sanded tennis court and a white country clubhouse filled with teenagers and their parents. Then we reached the middle section of the park where Frau Scholz pointed out how the trees were constantly pruned to give a clear sight line of the entire park at every angle from where we were standing.

As we walked further, we reached the small casino dwarfed by the red brick bad (bath house), which was fronted by a colorful courtyard of flowers. There, the lady manager welcomed Frau Scholz warmly, and gave me a gold jogging pin and a handful of brochures about the different cures and health benefits of the spa. Beyond the theater, where a small concert was being played, was an ice cream house where we sat down to have a big cup of ice cream. Here, we watched three men play golf in a 9-hole golf course for children.

A distance away from the bath spa was six old-fashioned fountains. A handsome man in his fifties smiled at us while he filled his thermos with mineral water. I stopped to taste the cool water, and felt energized immediately. It was salty, fizzy, sour and cool – medically analyzed to cure body ills.

Men who love their work

If every city has this green sphere of beauty, quiet, and harmony woven by men who love their work then: “The peace of God shall flood our soul. In our ear shall ring the glorious freedom song of the bird on wing and the very air one breathes shall be rich with the fragrance of celestial bloom.”

- At the foot of the Master

When will we Filipinos make that world come true?

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