Baguio and Benguet’s distinctions
>> Monday, May 22, 2017
BENCHWARMER
Ramon
Dacawi
Urban sprawl is distinctly rendering dubious Baguio
’s distinctions.
It’s the City of Pines
now losing its scent of and sense for pine. It’s a Flower Garden City yearly
celebrating its status with blooms grown and cut in Benguet or cut
out of paper. The only temperate city hereabouts in the tropics now mothballs
its winter clothes most of the year. The city of occasional fog now experiences
a hazy view more from smog than low-lying clouds and mist.
Change is giving us
new distinctions.
We now have a
thriving business in water delivery. We now have more homes with water tanks
jutting out where fireplace chimneys used to be. We may not have been the first
to sell bottled water, but our restaurants did pioneer the no-order, no-serve
rule on drinking water as a conservation measure. We’ve installed the most
expensive and sensitive gadget at the foot of our main street to correctly
measure to the minutest parts-per-million the quality of our urban
air that we now and then can only smell and see, yet
can’t approximate without it.
At the height of
Typhoon Feria years back, Burnham Park was finally flooded up to Kisad Rd. ,
together with the former one-story stone market that is now the multi-level
Maharlika Livelihood Center . News of the inundation caught on in Metro-Manila
where people couldn’t imagine how a mountainous terrain could be flooded.
Visitors do get
confused. We tell them Baguio logged the highest rainfall level ever in 24
hours, yet our taps are dry. That irony becomes more pronounced as we continue
sealing our open areas with concrete. “Utaksemento” provides the umbrella
effect of rainwater being logged by concrete surface or rushing to the rivers
and spilling into the seas instead of sipping into the ground to recharge our
water tables.
With global warming,
we may soon lose the heaviest rainfall record. But even with global warming,
we’re still 10 degrees Celsius cooler than Manila anytime of the year. It will
always be hotter down there where hand-me-down jackets are cheaper
than up here where the first “wagwag” or “ukay-ukay” shop opened.
Strawberries are still
aplenty that we still leave them to visitors. Never mind Benguet’s lament over
the fact that “Baguio strawberries”, “Baguio beans” and “Baguio brooms”
actually come from the province’s towns of La Trinidad, Buguias and
Sablan..
At least, the flower
growers in Bahong, La Trinidad, rightfully the country’s Rose Garden Caipital,
won’t mind the presumption of visitors coming for the “Baguio Flower
Festival” about Baguio producing what it shows and sells them. It’s
a quid pro quo with the farmers as long as we do more flower festivals.
Personally, I proposed
the holding of a taxi festival to celebrate our having the most number of units
in relation to population. The proposal fizzled out when I found myself
repeatedly beaten to one on rainy nights.
It’s different now
with the polluted Balili River endlessly flowing from Baguio to La Trinidad and
Sablan. That joke about symbiosis – about Baguio ’s organic sewer flowing into
the river to fatten La Trinidad-produced lettuce that ends up in Baguio ’s
salad bowls – is no longer funny, at least for town mayor Romeo Salda.
That should explain
in part what snags the Metro-Baguio Plan, euphemistically renamed BLIST
(Baguio-La Trinidad-Itogon-Sablan-Tuba), concept of urban development from
getting off the ground. The four Benguet towns harbor that uncomfortable
feeling that BLIST would just enhance Benguet’s role as Baguio ’s resource base
and repository of its trash.
Still, the BLIST is
the option, for the urban sprawl – planned or unplanned – will continue to
spill into Benguet. We need the plan to achieve
what planners call a “holistic and comprehensive”
approach to development of contiguous areas sharing a fast urbanizing
landscape.
We have to adopt the
plan, before Metro-Baguio-Benguet experiences what Baguio has turned into – a
city that just “growed and growed” (to borrow Topsy’s ’s words in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin) –even with a master plan laid out over a century ago by
Architect Daniel Burnham to guide the development of the country’s Summer
Capital.
Whatever. Baguio is
still Baguio even with its imperfections. (e-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com/ecowalkmondax@gmail.com for
comments).
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