A Call to Urban Planners in the Philippines
We all know the prevailing issues facing our archipelago.
Habagat. Rising sea levels. La Niña. Extreme rainfall. Storm surges.
Whatever we call it, the reality is the same: every rainy season, we see the same story - baha.
And after every major flood, we seem to return to the same conversation: dredging, widening waterways, building retaining walls, raising embankments, constructing pumping stations and implementing another round of “flood control” projects.
Yet the problem keeps coming back.
It has been more than a year since the flood-control controversy became a national issue, and somehow, the conversation still feels familiar. I recently saw an old Facebook memory of Karen Davila calling out the government: “Parang naglolokohan tayong lahat.” And honestly, it still feels relevant today. But this is not a political post. I have already accepted that corruption exists across political colours and parties. I am less interested in debating who is stealing and more interested in asking a much bigger question:
Are we even approaching the problem correctly?
This is a call, particularly to our urban planners, architects, landscape architects, environmental professionals, and transport planners. We cannot solve flooding by looking at one district, one river, one barangay or one LGU at a time. Our cities do not operate that way. Water does not recognise political boundaries. Traffic does not recognise LGU boundaries. Neither does climate change.
We need to start looking at the Philippines as a connected urban and environmental system. Secretary Vince Dizon's observation that there is no comprehensive government plan should be a major red flag. If we continue without a coordinated, long-term strategy, I fear we will simply repeat the same cycle next rainy season - and the next one after that.
Perhaps the problem is that we have been treating flooding primarily as an engineering problem.
It isn't.
Engineering is part of the solution, but the bigger question is how we plan our cities, our rivers, our coastlines, our catchment areas, our open spaces and our development patterns.
And this is where urban planning needs to have a much stronger voice. Dredging the same river can provide short-term mitigation. Retaining walls and riprap can protect certain areas. Pumping systems can move water. But these are interventions within a much larger system. With changing rainfall patterns, rising sea levels and increasingly extreme weather events, we cannot simply keep building higher walls and deeper channels and expect nature to cooperate.
In fact, perhaps we should stop calling it “flood control.” We cannot control Mother Nature. We can manage water. Accommodate it. Redirect it. Store it. Slow it down. Give it somewhere to go. And design our cities to live with it.
Look at Singapore.
Singapore established the National Parks Board as a lead agency responsible not only for greenery and biodiversity, but for managing and enhancing the broader urban ecosystem. What is interesting is not simply the amount of greenery.
It is the integration.
Floodways, detention basins and drainage infrastructure can become landscapes. Parks can become part of the water-management system. Green corridors can connect neighbourhoods. Shared paths can accommodate pedestrians and cyclists, often separated from vehicular traffic.
A park doesn't always have to be just a park.
A basin shouldn't be just a piece of engineering infrastructure.
A drainage corridor can become public space.
A green corridor can become a transport network.
And a flood-management strategy can simultaneously become a mobility, recreation, environmental and public-space strategy.
These are not necessarily grand engineering solutions.
Sometimes they are simply better planning.
Imagine if our rivers, waterways, floodplains, parks and transport corridors were planned as one interconnected system.
Imagine flood-retention landscapes that become parks during normal conditions.
Imagine continuous greenways connecting communities, allowing people to walk and cycle without competing with vehicles.
Imagine restoring natural waterways and wetlands instead of continuously constraining them.
Imagine planning development around water rather than simply trying to force water away from development.
And perhaps, while doing so, we might also begin addressing another chronic urban problem:
traffic.
The opportunity is to stop solving these problems separately.
Flooding. Traffic. Green space. Recreation. Biodiversity. Public health. Urban heat. Active transport. They are connected.
So perhaps what we need is not another isolated flood-control program, but a national urban resilience framework - one led by urban planners and environmental professionals, working together with architects, landscape architects, hydrologists, transport planners and engineers, and in partnership with LGUs and the national government.
DPWH has an important role. We need engineers. We need infrastructure. We need construction.
But perhaps DPWH should not be the institution defining the entire urban response to flooding.
The engineering agency should engineer.
The planners should plan.
The environmental professionals should protect and restore ecosystems.
The architects and landscape architects should help shape the places where people live.
And all of them should work from one comprehensive, long-term national strategy.
Because the Philippines doesn't simply have a flood problem.
We have a planning problem.
And if we continue to treat every flood as an isolated emergency, we will continue spending billions responding to symptoms rather than redesigning the system that creates the vulnerability.
So this is my call to the urban planning profession in the Philippines:
Be heard.
Speak beyond your individual projects, districts and LGUs.
Challenge the way we define the problem.
Demand the bigger picture.
Bring planning back into the centre of national infrastructure conversations.
Because perhaps the question we should be asking is no longer:
“How do we stop the flood?”
But:
“How do we design our cities so that when the water comes, our cities know what to do with it?”
That, to me, is where the real conversation should begin.
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