About one million hectares of the Delta is inundated by more than a meter of water every year. Learn how the Vietnamese government has tried to manage this natural phenomenon

By Arlene Christy Lusterio

“Same same but different,” is the common Vietnamese phrase that means similar but not the same. In many aspects, the Mekong Delta of Vietnam looks similar to rural Philippines: the wide expanse of rice fields, raw dirt roads, and friendly faces of rural folks that greet strangers like me. My quest to understand and search for meaning and justification to the ever expanding informal settlements along waterways in the urban centers of the Philippines brought me to this neighbor in Asia, a country with a long history and a surviving culture of living with water, Vietnam. Read more »

TAO-Pilipinas’ annual training and immersion program for students and new graduates focuses on the creation of disaster-resilient and sustainable communities

By Geraldine Matabang

“It’s very good to see young people get into disaster risk management.” This was the shared reaction of disaster risk management specialists Blenn Huelgas of UN-Habitat and Mayfourth Luneta of the Center for Disaster Preparedness on the first day of the 2006 Young Professionals (YP) Orientation Workshop on Social Housing held by TAO-Pilipinas on October 17 to 21 in Antipolo City.

The theme of the workshop for this year was “Young Professionals Working towards Sustainable Communities: Integrating Community-Based Disaster Risk Management in Social Housing.” The objective of the five-day workshop was to orient both design professionals and representatives of people’s organizations (POs) in actions and approaches that can contribute to enhancing the capabilities of communities, especially in social housing sites, to reduce and cope with the negative impacts of disasters. Disaster resilience is seen as one of the key characteristics of sustainable communities. Read more »

A volunteer learns more about architecture and life in a design workshop with an indigenous community in Bukidnon

By Paolo B. Aguila

The project started out as a simple volunteer design project for our organization, UP Task Force Arki (a service-oriented student organization based in the University of the Philippines College of Architecture). The Kitanglad Integrated NGOs, an organization based in Mt. Kitanglad, Bukidnon (in Central Mindanao), asked TFA through its partner NGO, TAO-Pilipinas, to suggest designs for the Mt. Kitanglad Cultural Heritage Center.

The Mt. Kitanglad Cultural Heritage Center is envisioned to serve as a venue for cultural understanding among the various indigenous people, mainland settlers, and the local government units around the area. It will house spaces for cultural activities and also serve as a support facility for the tourism activities in the Mount Kitanglad Range National Park.

“We were there to learn as much as we were there to share”

We started drafting design schemes after getting the requirements. It turned out to be really difficult, since it was impossible to design for people we haven’t met, for a site we haven’t seen, and for a culture that’s almost entirely different from ours. We didn’t think the project would be successful if the huge gap in the middle of the design process couldn’t be filled. So three of us, Architect Anna Gonzales, Jhun Fabrero (another TFA member), and I, packed our bags and flew all the way to Mindanao for the much needed architect-user interaction. Little did we know it was going to be a lot more than that. Read more »