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A century later, the master planner's City Beautiful ideas still have meaning.
In 1905, American planner Daniel Burnham imagined a City Beautiful in his master plan for the Philippine capital of Manila. And for much of the 20th century, pockets of reality matched Burnham's vision.
Taft Avenue is a case in point. A century ago, Burnham envisioned a graceful tree-lined boulevard, linking Manila's new Washington-style mall to comfortable suburban housing. "I grew up on Taft Avenue in the 1950s," recalls Augusto Villalon, a local architect and preservation planner. "There was a streetcar. There were still trees. You could walk to the corner store for ice cream."
But times have changed. Today, an elevated light rail line runs down the avenue, its bulky concrete structure blocking the sun and trapping pollution and noise on the street below. The view from the tracks is of a crowded warren of houses, apartment buildings, warehouses, shanties, malls, schools, streets, and alleys. Smoke-belching Jecpncys, elongated mutations of World War II Jeeps that serve as the country's main form of public transportation, clog the roads.
When Burnham and his associate, Pierce Anderson, arrived in Manila in December 1904, the old Spanish colonial city had fewer than 250,000 residents. Burnham forecast a city of 800,000. Today, some 10 million people live in the sprawling urban area, a conglomeration of 17 cities and towns, and close to that number commute to work or study in the capital every day.
Tremendous population growth-Metro Manila adds 60 residents per hour-is just one aspect of a century of urbanization that Burnham couldn't dream of. The grand themes of the post-Burnham 20th century-decolonization, automobile domination, World War II, the Cold War, Third World poverty, dictatorship and democracy, urbanization and globalization-have shaped the city.
I have lived in Manila off and on since 1984. Despite its poverty and pollution, it is still a wonderfully vibrant metropolis. Its unplanned chaos-narrow streets filled with beggars and hustlers, soaring skyscrapers, crowded shanty towns, cigarette vendors and pedestrians dodging traffic on heavily congested roadways, horns blaring above the constant roar of poorly muffled vehicles-burdens daily life but also adds to the city's encompassing and ultimately alluring energy.
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