Happy New Year! The year 2014 brings high hopes for my industry where the building boom continues relentlessly. But where the rate of building is brisk, so is the competition, and the rush to outdo and outrun the structure next door and be profitable at the same time leaves a lot of room for some considerations to fall between the cracks.
I hope that developers will do some navel gazing in their 2014 jump-start planning sessions—if they still haven’t done so as 2013 closed—and commit to provide better products for the public.
1 Stop claiming to be green when you are truly not. It takes a lot of effort to build something “green.” It also costs a bit more. The recent fashion in this country is “greenwashing,” where everybody waves the flag of sustainability to grab attention to their developments amid the fakery of their environmental consciousness. A green roof alone does not make you green. I respect those developers who make a conscious effort not to be green without having to tell everybody that they are.
2 Save our green spaces. In other countries, developers are required to integrate the displaced greenery into their structures. Others like Singapore even demand that the new greens integrated are more than those initially displaced. A city in a garden rather than a garden in a city. And we? Just a city, a very hard-surfaced city. Even our own city “fathers” are destroying the parks by bidding them out for commercial development. And we know why. Shame.
3 Don’t build where the infrastructure will not support you. Some developers work with the government or even spend their own money to make sure that the surrounding roadways and utility provisions can accept the density of services required by their development. Don’t plunk your project into an area that cannot accept its populace. It is like adding more cholesterol to an already clogged artery.
4 Preserve our heritage. Stop tearing down historical legacies only to replace them with ugly retail monuments that totally disregard the history of the place and our humanity’s enrichment. We need to have an awareness of our cultural and historical sites for they are sources of inspiration and provide a sense of national identity. It is so sad that we have to promote eco-tourism to the rest of the world because we have preserved so little of our built history. Let’s not erase the little that remains of that.
5 Test your systems. In a country that is rated the third most disaster-prone in the world, building systems have to be able to take on all natural forces. This relates to structural, air conditioning, water supply, waste management, gas supply, elevators and other transport systems. Recent catastrophes have proven that climate change knows no borders. I’m no doomsday prepper but if you’re building large communities and tall structures, you have the moral responsibility to ensure the safety of your buyers. You cannot build something completely disaster-proof, but be conscientious with designing and constructing with the proper safeguards and safety factors, and make sure that these are wholly implemented during construction.
6 Don’t think small. Small-scale developers think they make little impact on the environment. Wrong. Just see how a small restaurant with insufficient parking allotment can cause traffic to pile up for hundreds of meters due to patrons’ cars maneuvering in and out of their roadside tandem parking. The city is an organism, and any minute dysfunction will affect its entirety.
7 Build for people. Your developments can be magazine-cover worthy with designs that are gorgeous or highly intellectualized, or they may be highly profitable projects that make your year-end financial reports impressive. But they don’t qualify as real environments if they do not support the mind, body and spirit of its users. Developers should switch on their intuitive and emotional brains, moderate their consultants’ design egos, and for a moment remove their money-maker’s hat in order to put themselves in the shoes of the people they are building for. Only then can you truly have a product everyone can be happy with.
Lastly, up the ante. There are still developers putting up new structures that look like they were designed 15 years ago. If there is no thought to how it looks, I dread to imagine how much thought was put in to make it work. We’re moving another year forward. That should only mean better places for people, both from inside and out.
Contact the author through designdimensions@abi.ph or through our Asuncion Berenguer Facebook account.