by Ena Angelica Luga

I remember my mom and I were making waffles. Suddenly the chair on which I stood started to rock, and I fell. The batter being cooked in the waffle maker spilled and scalded my leg. I remember being in the car afterwards, and imagining the road engulfing us. That is about all that I remember. I was only four years old.

I do not remember what happened after I fell. I do not remember how we got out of the house and into the car. I do not remember where we went afterwards. I do not remember hearing the wails of people waiting to be rescued from the Hyatt Hotel that was described as collapsing like an accordion being squeezed to produce sound. I do not remember the stench of cadavers rotting, the lack of water and electricity, the food shortage. They say children are the most to make use of selective memory as a coping mechanism. Hence, I rely on my mother’s stories to complete the picture of this part of my life.

Our family had been in Baguio for more than five years before the 1990 earthquake struck. With my dad then in the Army, we lived in the Philippine Military Academy. When the ground started to shake, my mother said it felt like we were out on sea during a storm. It was difficult to believe that we were actually on land. Everything was being tossed as if by strong waves. She remained glued to where she was, watching the refrigerator and television as they seemed to come to life. She describes them as seemingly walking, swaying from side to side as they moved forward. All the glassware stored in cupboards fell and were shattered, but she noticed them only after the ordeal. She was mesmerized by the “walking” appliances, shaken only from this stupor by my dad’s aunt who was then vacationing in our home. Lola Honey was hanging clothes outside to dry when the earthquake started. She then started screaming for us to get out of the house, but all the doors were blocked. In the end, we had to climb out through a window and drive to our neighbor’s lawn where we set up a tent not long after. Moments later, rain started to fall hard.

Hyatt Hotel in Baguio

About an hour before the earthquake, mom said the animals started acting weird. Our pets were restless. The dogs were howling and running around the house like fools. The chickens kept crowing despite the fact that it was the middle of the afternoon. On the other hand, everything seemed eerily still and quiet. Even leaves were not moving because there seemed to be no wind at all. But during those times, nobody looked out for signs like these. Nobody expected what happened an hour later.
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A Belgian architect works with informal settlers in Pasay in dreaming up their future home

by Tracey Loontjens

“It wasn’t always easy: we needed to let go of our European way of thinking to create architecture, and to consider and understand a completely different way of living, different circumstances and traditions.”

Tracey makes the model for the low-cost housing project

As part of my studies in urban planning, which I combine with a postgraduate program about North-South issues, international relations and development cooperation, I decided to come to the Philippines and do an internship at TAO-Pilipinas. The Philippines is one of the fastest urbanizing countries in the world. As an architect and future urban planner, I wanted to learn more about the characteristics of Philippine cities and villages, about their history and present, and about their actual problems by examining the specific cultural, political, economic, and social context of urban forms of this country and to compare this with other cities or regions.

I had certain ideas and expectations about my stay and work here before I left. But, although I had travelled already before in Asia and prepared myself well by doing research about the country, I knew it quite well only in theory and could only guess how it would be to live and work here. I didn’t know what the urban poor communities would look like, how the people would be, what stories we were going to hear, or in what way the culture would influence me. But in the past few months those words and images came alive. It became my world and I became every day a bit more part of it.

So far, it has already exceeded every imaginable expectation, and I’m still getting surprised every day.

I come from Belgium, a small European country with only 10 million inhabitants – a quantity which generally equals the population of an average, medium size city in Asia. So living in a megacity such as Metro Manila is quite overwhelming. Although we (because I’m here together with Brecht, my partner, who is also volunteering at TAO-Pilipinas) experienced Manila at first as a bleak, overpopulated, and polluted concrete urban jungle, we discovered every few days new things, learned to read the complex urban tissue and appreciated its cityscape, given color by the Filipino people and their daily habits.

TAO-Pilipinas played an important role in this. During our stay here, we were confronted with homeless people and visited poor communities in informal settlements. But we couldn’t help but notice also the luxury of the high-end,  sometimes gated communities, the high-rise buildings, and the shopping malls. It’s not always easy to comprehend this enormous gap, but our work at the NGO helped us to understand the development of this megacity, as well as the living conditions of its inhabitants.

From the beginning, we were involved in a lot of different projects of the NGO and had the opportunity to combine the work at the office with field trips or community and project visits. Through these visits, we realized that being poor is not necessarily an obstacle to creating a well organized and functioning community and that people with a limited income are not only often much more socially active, but also more creative than most others, in how they use space for example. We learned that you do not necessarily need to have an incredibly complex design to provide new housing areas for former slum dwellers, but that simple interventions can also improve the housing environment, and the general quality of life in that area – remarkably.
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by Sara Yllner

“By studying a context in a country quite different to my own I gained a deeper understanding about what parts in the planning process are vital for a community to be successful and sustainable in the long run.”

This semester I finished my ninth semester as an architecture student at Lund University in Sweden. The reason I chose this course set in the Philippines was that I wanted to go somewhere completely different from Sweden and learn to look at architecture from a different point of view. I really didn’t know what to expect even though I’ve had the opportunity to travel quite a lot to India, China, and Syria but I never really understood the whole context and how one, as an architect, could contribute to change certain situations.

In Sweden, we tend to take everything for granted. There’s clean water, a sewage system, electricity, internet, television, and libraries. Everybody goes to school, and almost everyone has a roof over their head. It is easy to forget that all these things are not a given for everybody, or rather the majority of the worlds’ population. When I talked to people in the Philippines they couldn’t believe that a country could only have 9 million inhabitants, which is more like the population for a mid-size city in Asia. I, on the other hand, had a hard time grasping how a city with 16 million people was organized and how much the regions could differ.

TAO-Pilipinas organized our trip in Manila together with Lund University and our teachers Johnny and Rachelle Åstrand. During the four intense weeks we had study visits to informal settlements, high end gated communities and everything in between. We also got to meet people with all kinds of different occupations involved in the planning and housing sector in the city, such as the mayor of Quezon City, architects, planners, and many more. We also got the opportunity to interview people from all levels of society which was really interesting and educational.
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