Parks in our city
I’ve always had a soft spot for parks—not necessarily the grand ones with monuments and fountains, but the small, slightly worn ones where locals actually go.
I prefer those that have benches occupied by old men reading the paper, corners where kids chase each other after school, a patch of grass where someone eats lunch under a tree. These are not glamorous places, but they do more quiet work for a city than almost any building we design.
Parks in the metro
I’ve been thinking about them more than usual lately because WTA Labs recently completed a study, “Parks in the Greater Manila Area”, and the findings are hard to shake.
The Greater Manila Area provides, on average, 0.62 sqm of park space per person. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends 9 sqm. We offer less than 7 percent of what is considered the minimum for a healthy city. Eighty-eight percent of the cities and municipalities in the region do not even reach 1 sqm per resident.
Comparisons
These are terrible numbers and the comparisons are even more uncomfortable.
In Metro Manila, cemeteries occupy 823 ha. Golf courses occupy 660 ha. Parks occupy 602 ha. We have made more room for the dead and for the leisure of a few than for the daily breathing space of many.
For every sqm of park in the metropolis, there are 72 sqm of built area. The average park in Metro Manila is about the size of 15 basketball courts. The average cemetery is the size of 14 parks, and the average golf course, the size of 40.
Look at our neighbors. Hanoi provides 17.1 sqm of park per person; Kuala Lumpur, 8.5 sqm; Singapore, 8 sqm. Even Bangkok, which shares some of our urban difficulties, offers more than twice what we do.
Cities further afield do better still—Guangzhou at 17.1 sqm, Seoul at 16.5 sqm, London at 16.2 sqm New York at 13.6 sqm. Tokyo, at 5.7 sqm, provides nearly 10 times our average.
These cities have come to understand that green space is civic infrastructure—not ornament, not afterthought, not the residue of what is left after the roads, the subdivisions, and the malls have taken their share.
We have understood the opposite. We have treated parks, for generations, as precisely that residue.
Internal inequity
The internal inequity is just as sharp.
Within Metro Manila, Makati provides 2.09 sqm per person, Muntinlupa 1.38 sqm, Pasay 1.14 sqm, Marikina 1.08 sqm, Quezon City 0.66 sqm, Manila 0.40 sqm. At the other end, Malabon offers 0.02 sqm, Pateros 0.03 sqm, Navotas 0.05 sqm, Mandaluyong 0.06 sqm. This is a hundredfold gap between neighbors.
Even the 30 largest parks in the Greater Manila Area tell a complicated story. Half of them have less than 40 percent tree cover. A number of them sit inside gated communities or institutional enclaves, accessible only to residents or permit holders. The parks we are most proud of are, in too many cases, not fully public.
This matters because parks do work that nothing else in the city can do.
They give children space to run. They give the elderly somewhere to sit. They give workers a place to eat lunch under a tree. They cool the air around them, often by several degrees, and they absorb stormwater that our drainage systems increasingly cannot. They host the small, unscheduled encounters that make a neighborhood a neighborhood.
A city without parks is a city where its residents have nowhere to simply be.
Open civic urbanism
I have written often about what we, at WTA, call Open Civic Urbanism, the idea that shared spaces are not amenities but the very armature of a functioning city.
Parks are the clearest expression of this principle. They belong, unconditionally, to everyone. When we measure a city by the generosity of its parks, we are measuring something deeper: the extent to which it has agreed to be a city at all.
The WTA Labs study is not a document of despair. It is a document of measurement. We now know, with real precision, what we have and what we do not. The question of what we do with that knowledge is a separate one, but it is a question we can finally answer with clarity.
A few beginnings are already visible. Marikina has quietly built one of the most generous park systems in Metro Manila along its river. Muntinlupa has held onto green fragments most cities would long have paved over. Pasig has shown what a local government can do when it treats public space as essential rather than decorative.
Even Rizal Park, all 37 hectares of it, reminds us that the city is capable, historically and programmatically, of great public space. It has simply stopped building more.
Sustained commitment
It is time to start again.
What we need is not a single grand gesture but a sustained commitment across every city and municipality.
We need parks in Malabon and Pateros, not only in Makati. We need parks that are open and free, not enclosed behind gates. We need parks large enough to contain an ecosystem, small enough to walk to, and numerous enough that no Filipino family is more than a short walk from one.
We need to stop treating the 9-sqm standard as aspirational and start treating it as the minimum because it is.
A city is an arrangement we make with one another about how to live in close quarters. The park is where that arrangement becomes visible. It is where we learn, in the simplest way, to share ground.
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