Status Updates From Making Sense of the City

“The plaza is truly a public space.”
— Fernando N. Zialcita, Sacral Spaces Between Skyscrapers

The needs, wants, and desires of everybody else are marginalized; these desires normally include the desire to be unharmed by noise and environmental pollution, being able to safely walk the streets, or more generally, simply having a say in the transformation of their environment."

If we thus ask the question according to whose desires the larger city of Metro Manila is modelled, then the answer has to point to a number of powerful families who engage in private urban development and mold their urban land according to their particular desires - along the alleged desires of the wealthy tenants of their constructions.

"As cultural artifacts, [cities] can be understood as 'man's most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire.' Cities, thus, are expressions of human desires. The question to ask, however, is how human desires are expressed, filtered, and selected to give shape to the city...

Thoughts on Zialcita's: Sacral spaces in Metro Manila are gradually becoming muddled, all in the name of conforming to global standards of what a metropolis should be.

The constituents of municipalities are connected with one another because of religious traditions, festivities, commodities, and local dishes. Do we need to sacrifice these things in exchange for the idea of progressiveness?