To see is to believe

We have been writing about physical framework planning in the last two weeks and we have seen the difficulty of grasping its essence, much more its importance to our daily lives. And it may not matter a bit to our daily routine how really the future is shaped by our government. Mundane problems take precedence over hypothetical ones, tomorrow's woes are more important than next year's, or next decade's. But government's work, especially in long-term planning, transcends the daily course of life of the community of people it governs and serves.

Before anything else, allow me to expand what I said about the government "shaping our future." Whether it likes it or not, the government almost always becomes the target to blame for anything we don't like about the way we live, and this is especially true in third-world countries. Even in the U.S. of A. in its situation now, the tight economic outlook of ordinary Americans is blamed on the alleged failure of government - may it be the President, or Congress, or their two opposing political parties. We always assume that the government is responsible. Because it is by virtue of the mandate of the people.

Mandate, now that's a peculiar word. In its simplest dimension, it means authority. Government does what it should because it is "authorized" by the people. A peculiar situation arises when it fails because we would be divided on who to blame - the government itself, or the people who authorized it. A lot of people will say, "we deserve the government we elect," and when an elected official is found wanting, we elect the same politician the next elections. But mandate goes beyond that - it is a trust given by the people (in a collective sense) to a bureaucracy to carry out all the functions of governance, including planning for the future.

And thus, whether we like it or not, the act of planning (for the future), whether national, regional, provincial, city, municipal, or agency, is a political act, lodged in our elective officials (well, appointive as well, although the authority flows from the former). Any plan which lacks the imprimatur of government is ineffective since it doesn't carry the authority from the people. We even have problems with official government plans not carried out because officials get changed, how much more for plans not sanctioned by government.

The problem with the physical plans, which the government really do prepare but nobody really cares to know, is their time horizon - 30 to 50 years. Who would really mind what the government expects to have 50 years from now? We want to see what is in store for us tomorrow. Well, we understand projects do take time to materialize, so we are happy dissecting plans for the next three or five years, which is really the planning horizon for medium-term plans. Thus the Medium-Term Philippine Development Plans, timed to coincide with presidential terms is more interesting to people rather than 50-year plans.

And really, the sad thing about physical framework plans is that we cannot visualize it, or even imagine how the country or its cities look like 30 years from now. And part of the problem is the uncertainty of the future - the farther in the future you are, the more difficult it is to see what to expect. Planning is mainly forecasting and projections, maybe accurate to a certain degree for near future, but would be grossly inaccurate for long-term analyses. Plus, we don't really know and we cannot predict how technology progresses then.

"To see is to believe!" Unfortunately, this is how people think. It is easy to imagine how it would look like to have another bridge to Mactan from mainland Cebu. It's harder to evaluate how the population concentrations will react because of a new bridge, or how economic activities will realign. If you ask anybody in 1984 how Metro Cebu will look like in 2014, they would be at a loss for words. Or if some will venture predicting, their imagined futures would be very different from each other. Even if these people are trained planners.

But physical planning has an advantage - these are framework plans, mostly of land use, built-up areas and transport nodes, networks, and corridors, all of which are fairly immutable. But the lack of long-term planning, or even just mixing the principles of short-term and long-term planning, produces the kind of dysfunction we often encounter nowadays. The way of Metro Manila is a good example. NAIA is full with no alternative in sight, and MRT-3 is full, with long lines, with the solutions still in the years to come. As always, the government (unfortunately, the present one) is blamed. Yes, government it's the result of government's inadequacy of long-term planning, which means these should have been addressed 10 to 20 years ago. (to be continued)