We beg to differ.
It seems that newly installed Manila Mayor Isko Moreno has launched what could be a revolutionary era in the Philippines’ capital city. One of Moreno’s first acts was to clean up the popular shopping district of Divisoria of illegal street vendors. Initially dismissed as just another routine stunt any average newly-elected mayor would mount during…
Read More “Manila Mayor Isko Moreno’s Disciplinary REVOLUTION” »
Let’s get one thing out of the way, Manila is a dump — literally. Pictures and videos of Manila including the iconic Luneta Park littered with mountains of trash have been circulating the Internet support this view for many. It’s been a dump for decades and it will stay a dump as long as Joseph…
Read More “Under Mayor Joseph Estrada, Manila is still a dump” »
The No Single Driver rule. It’s the bane of the miniscule minority of Filipino private motorists who can afford to tool around Metro Manila alone in their own personal cars. With the implementation today of this rule along EDSA today, one can expect only a small proportion of EDSA users to be up in arms….
There’s a lot of talk lately about “re-building” Marawi City. Jose Montelibano in his Inquirer column today offers thoughts on what needs to be considered to not just to do that but to do it right, as in build A New Marawi that, at the same time, puts it on a path towards becoming a…
Read More “A New Marawi City that is SQUATTER-FREE is an absolutely worthwhile goal” »
As usual, the whole “debate” around the plight of the hundreds of thousands of jeepney drivers and the “threat” to their “livelihood” presented by the prospect of modernising public transport in the Philippine has taken a wrong turn. Highlighted by the usual “socially-aware” cliques of “activists” is the wellbeing of what is, essentially, a relatively…
Read More “HOPE lies in imagining a JEEPNEY-FREE Philippines” »
Gated communities, like jeepneys, are stopgap measures that became institutionalised and so ingrained in the national psyche that, as we see in the general tone of the debate surrounding this issue, people simply find it next to impossible to comprehend the cancerous nature of their existence. They are legacies of a succession of weak and…
Read More “Manila’s gated communities should be opened to public access to alleviate traffic” »
Filipinos are madly in love – as in hard core. In this chapter of our analysis of Filipino dysfunction, let’s touch on the Filipino’s love affair with concrete. If there’s one thing OFWs will pour their hard-earned money into – it’s gonna be cement, truckloads of it! Why not? Well, development from the Filipino perspective…
Read More “Concrete Evidence of Filipino Unbridled Urban Development” »
The recently-concluded Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Metro Manila proved that to get the best results out of the Philippines’ premiere metropolis, its residents need to be excluded from major events like these. This is quite ironic considering the theme of APEC Manila 2015 was inclusion — getting as many ordinary Filipinos in…