THE Iloilo City Traffic Management and Engineering Unit installed directional railings along the Diversion Road supposedly to ease traffic in U-turn areas. But a number of jeepney and taxi drivers are complaining because, according to them, instead of making the flow of traffic smooth, it creates a bottleneck as not all vehicles are making U-turns in these areas. Only one lane is left to be shared by the many who are heading straight, thus clogging the road.

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THE 1984 film Ghostbusters contains a scene in which two dog-like statues come to life. The monsters burst from their concrete shells, roar into the night, and leap off in search of humans hosts to possess. The ensuing relationship between the demons and their human hosts is parasitic, with the demons benefitting while the humans become their slaves.

The metamorphosis of the natural world into urban regions mirrors this transformation, only in reverse. Humans have imprisoned living entities in concrete, abandoning the symbiotic relationship that benefits both us and the planet. As opposed to the film, the real-world parasite is not that which has been imprisoned, but rather those doing the imprisoning: human beings.

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A SIMPLE walk from my office to the nearest mall usually involves a delicate ballet of side-stepping cars parked on the sidewalk, sneaking around utility poles, ducking shopfronts, walking around restaurant picnic tables, passing through gaps in the barbed-wire fenced medians, and, of course, avoiding jeepneys, tricycles, and trisikads. It’s an obstacle-course of survival challenge, and that’s just in the first block.

It doesn’t need to be this way. The public realm in all its aspects - transit, parks, plazas, roads, and sidewalks - ought to be to planned first and foremost for the pedestrian experience. Not everyone drives, but everyone is a pedestrian, at least at some point during the day.

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DPWH Secretary Hermogenes Ebdane Jr. has issued National Building Code Development Office Memorandum (NBCDO) Circulars 5, Series of 2006 and 2, Series of 2007, pursuant to President Arroyo’s Administrative Order 160, directing the department to conduct inspections, assessments and dismantling of billboards posing imminent danger to life and property.

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THESE DAYS, when you go around Iloilo City, most likely you would not miss the dumps along the road which just pile up day after day and the smell that lingers, becoming more putrid every time rains come. Of course, the garbage and lumps of earth by the road get collected regularly but people kept on bringing out the remaining trash and sludge from their houses that the job of hauling them to the dumping ground seems endless. It was almost a month after the floods, but the rotting odor has tarried – a pellucid reminder of the killer water.

The city has already done a lot of cleaning up – flushing the sludge, unclogging the drain, deodorizing the rot, sanitizing the rubbish. Immediately after the water has started to subside, the city has mobilized relief operations – setting up of 32 evacuation centers, gathering from the good Samaritans and distributing to the calamity victims food, water, clothes and medicine, and installing water treatment machines; debriefing the victims and the concerned government and private institutions; and assessing the havoc.

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EARLY every morning, after the roosters’ shrill call, a creature rises in Metro Iloilo, snarling, burping, and chewing the earth as its crawls. With a skeleton of steel and a heart that pumps oil, it carries people in its belly, shaking them from side to side. This creature is the jeepney, a mode of public transportation, and at times it seems to outnumber all the other creatures in the region, even the people.

Public transportation is a key feature of the public realm. It not only transports people across the region, but it also ties them together within it, forging a sense of shared identity. Transit is a mobile architecture, a moving landmark that defines a sense of place, like London’s Underground, Toronto’s Red Rocket streetcars, or Thailand’s countless tuk-tuks.

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Have you ever considered a brownfield for your project? You may not realize it but perhaps your project is being built on a brownfield.

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Iloilo City Urban Poor Affairs Office (ICUPAO) chief Roy Firmeza associated the burgeoning population of squatters to fast developments in the metropolis.

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Iloilo City Mayor Jerry Treñas called for the said meeting after learning that Iloilo City was not included in the top 7 best performing mid-sized cities of the 2007 PCCRP ranking.

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