MANILA- Cagayan De Oro City and Iloilo City won the inaugural Liveable Cities Design Challenge on Wednesday for their proposals of a government evacuation center, and an APEC meeting venue, respectively.

Organized by the National Competitiveness Council (NCC) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the competition highlights the best designs for disaster-resistant city government or evacuation centers and the development of areas surrounding a possible meeting venue for next year's hosting duties of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit.

Cagayan De Oro City's proposed "Oro Central" will primarily be a four-storey public school with 200 classrooms.

It will have laboratories, a multimedia library, parks, playgrounds, and multipurpose spaces.
As its secondary purpose, the building will be the base of a network of evacuation centers, as well as the command center during disasters.

Its parking lot will double as a space for mobile clinics, showers, standby rafts, and canine kennels.
A multipurpose hall will become an assembly area for responding government and non-government agencies, as well as a distribution area for evacuees.

A sky garden will also be used as a distribution, assembly, and stacking area.

Classrooms will become temporary shelters, and a green roof will be a debriefing and wellness area for evacuees.

Meanwhile, to complement the Iloilo Convention Center, cultural and urban areas in Iloilo City will be revamped.

Fort San Pedro, for example, will have more parks and open spaces. Sunburst Park will be expanded to have a park with recreation spaces, food stalls, and assembly areas.

What used to be the City Slaughter House will become the Rivercraft Pavilion for tourism and transportation. It will have a solar roof and wastewater treatment facilities, and will take advantage of natural light and ventilation.

NCC co-chairman Guillermo Luz said the grand winners, along with runners-up Roxas City, Valenzuela City, and Zamboanga City for the government evacuation center category and Cebu City, Iloilo City, and Legazpi City for the APEC meeting venue category, were praiseworthy in the way they utilized resources, maintained ecological balance, made their cities disaster-resilient, and used their land efficiently.

Good design, he said, was not just about the looks. It was about the projects being of service to the people.
"At the end of the day, this is not about planning," he said. "This is about execution."

Luz said the projects must be implemented on time, at the right price, and in the right place. Financing, maintaining, and operating were also factors included in executing their winning designs. 

Five cities competed in the APEC meeting venue category, while 10 competed in the city government or evacuation centers category.

They were judged according to adherence to architectural design princpiples; integration of concepts related to economic and social linkaging and integration, ecological balance, physical or land use efficency, and disaster resiliency; and financial viability.

Alliance for Safe and Sustainable Reconstruction president Nathaniel Von Einsiedel, whose organization was established early this year in response to the need for reconstruction in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Yolanda, enumerated the four obstacles to implementing similar designs that would make cities liveable and resilient.

First, national agencies had conflicting interpretations of policies regarding land use.

For example, the Department of Agriculture required that land no longer be agriculturally productive in order to be given clearance for other uses, while the Department for Trade and Industry encouraged and provided incentives to investors and developers of special economic zones.

Second, national agencies had disjointed policies regarding the relocation and resettlement of families living in danger zones. For example, the Commission on Audit required that the land already be titled in the name of the local government unit before it could be developed as relocation and resettlement sites, but in many places, lands were not titled, or if they were, ownership records were outdated or nonexistent.

Third, elected local officials refused to use the power for eminent domain in acquiring land for development projects and public facilities. They would rather purchase cheap land or accept donated land, which were often in bad or disaster-prone locations. This heightened the vulnerability of residents to disasters.

Fourth, partisan politics prevented coordinated, timely, and consistent decisions from being made.

 
Einsiedel remained hopeful, however, saying a more resilient world was within reach. What was needed was unity in order to implement the winning plans. 

"We cannot predict when or when the next shock to our well-being will happen, whether from the global financial system or as a result of a changing global climate or a pandemic like Ebola.

"Threats and stresses to our 21st century world will come in all shapes and sizes. What we can constrol is how we respond, how quickly we bounce back from the blow. Humans are not born resilient. We have to learn it. We have to adapt to it," said Von Einsiedel.

To see their projects to fruition, Cities Development Initiative for Asia project engineer Brian Joseph Capati advised that local government officials look for alternative financing sources for their urban infrastructure projects to augment their own funds.

Sources would include asset leverage; capital markets; domestic financial institutions; private institutional investors; private sector participation; and multilateral, bilateral, and export credit agencies.

With cities making up 50 percent of the Philippines' total population and accounting for over 60 percent of the country's economic growth last year, the link between urban and rural areas should become stronger so that economic growth was dispersed equally across the archipelago, said USAID mission director for the Philippines and the Pacific Islands Gloria Steele.

By: Tricia Aquino

Original Source: http://www.interaksyon.com/article/97316/cdo-iloilo-bag-first-liveable-cities-design-challenge