Outside the walls of Prontera is a vast Poring-laden field, a nursery for the novices of Rune-Midgard. By crossing this field, the Adventurer can go south to the Izlude harbor or west to the desserts of Morroc—a remnant when virtual worlds were divided into zones. You can imagine the delight when the trend to express such fictional worlds became more “open” as we saw in Skyrim and, later on, in The Breath of the Wild. Today’s open-world darling, Genshin Impact, allows you to revel in the Germany-inspired city of Mondstadt, the China-inspired city of Liyue, and everything in between—crossing the lakes and rivers, climbing mountains, and all the trappings of an adventure.
These immersive experiences are no mere accidents. The cities of these worlds—and the worlds themselves—are a product of design. While the worlds of Skyrim and Genshin Impact drew inspiration from real-world cities, these game worlds benefitted from the direction of a dedicated team—or teams—for level and world design. Such focused units can plan, execute, and conjure cities based not only around the game’s internal lore but also on specific objectives that a place ought to fulfill in the story. However, in the game called Life, such a city design process has been less than intentional.
I grew up in a neighborhood by the border of Imus and Dasmarinas, in the province of Cavite. We may vote for Imus, but the infrastructure projects that impact us the most are from Dasmarinas. These suburbs started as municipalities in Cavite, one of the bedroom provinces of Metro Manila. In the 1990s, the housing projects that boomed in the province offered economical housing opportunities for those that worked in the metropolis—and thus the spread of the urban sprawl to other bedroom provinces and thereby creating the Greater Metro Manila Area.
Urban economics explains such phenomenon through locational choice theory, where people can choose to live farther from the “central business district” (CBD) when transportation is affordable and the cost of rent in the CBD is high. With the nominal cost of transportation barely changing during that time, the availability of cheaper housing outside of Metro Manila increased the density of neighboring provinces and, in turn, drove agglomeration forces that explain the radially outward growth of Regions IV-A and III.
Why then did Dasmarinas ascended into cityhood ahead of the nearer Bacoor and Imus? How much did the existence of a university area and ecozones in Dasmarinas allowed the city to defy theoretical expectations? The answers deserve a separate inquiry on their own but such possibility is a reminder that the seeds of cityhood are not always neatly pre-ordained. After all, the city is the manifestation of the collective outcome of the decisions up from policymakers and down to the citizens.
One touted way for cities or burgeoning municipalities to not leave their growth to chance is to create a “masterplan”—a plan that has taken stock of the city’s characteristics and charts the course of its future. Such is the norm in other cities, indeed. In a smart city workshop in Germany, I had the great opportunity to meet the key policymakers of Duisburg, a port city in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. I dared to ask how they can ensure the fulfillment and longevity of their smart city masterplan. They were surprised by such inquiry, a surprise that, apparently, drew from their experience of legislating their city masterplan and seeing it through fruition amidst any change in the political compass.
Can you imagine a Philippine city not only swiftly crafting a masterplan but also legislating it with the firm belief that such a plan will come to fruition AND survive any change in political power? Perhaps, we are all too familiar with the Burnham and 1950 plans for Metro Manila and how such plans did not come to full fruition either through shifts in power, changes in the base assumption of such plans, slow-down from the red-tape of public infrastructure, or a combination of such. If our zeitgeist and circumstance renders us a society that cannot abide by plans, what is the future of a city masterplan? How, then, will the future of our cities look like?
Elroy Rendor 