On women and the Philippine city

This has been a long time coming in my mind, but I finally found courage to write it. Leslie Kern’s Feminist City really resonated with me when I read it a year ago in London, and now that I wade through Philippine cities and battle with patriarchal space, words just came out pouring, and I finished writing this in a few minutes. CNN Philippines Life published this in time for International Women’s Day, and within two hours of this being online, I received so much “Me Too” feedback on having to find clean public bathrooms while menstruating, keeping safe at night, and just generally, making it as a women in the urban, patriarchal jungle.

Read my essay here, and I’d love to discuss how we can improve cities to cater more for women and girls.

Bracing informal communities for COVID-19

With COVID-19 threatening the world, many countries are challenged with how to deal with informal spaces, congested areas, and communities with low or no capacity to deal with the pandemic.

I recently worked with INKLINE to publish a guide on how we can better brace our communities to have a fighting chance. This guide looks into more tactical and affordable actions on protecting families in crowded areas. Read the article here.

If you know friends who work with informal communities, kindly share the guidelines with them. Keep safe, everyone!

EnP Board Review Series: Presentation on Planning & Information Management

I had the pleasure of helping out during the 2016 UP Plano Board Exam Coaching Sessions, and was tasked to give a review on planning and information management. This is a compilation of selected topics on planning data, beginning with hierarchies and structures, and continuing well into frameworks, statistical analysis on socio-economic information (population projection and demography, location quotients, etc.) familiarisation with research terms, and an overview of GIS history. I picked out said topics because the exam questions on data and information revolve around these.

Items needed: Calculator, pen and scratch paper

People’s Cities: Urban Talks with Benjamin dela Pena

“We’ve been planning our cities around the dimensions of cars. What we’ve known for five thousand years is that cities are for people. So we need to get it back to the dimension of the people.” – Benjamin dela Pena

Benjamin dela Pena’s public talk at UP SURP, entitled Current Issues in Urban Planning: New Ideas and New Thinking

I had to have a flight moved to be able to emcee for this event, but, more importantly, I just had to be able to listen to one of the greatest urban minds I’ve ever heard from, and who came to UP-SURP.