DURING the Marcos Era, there was apparently a general impression that the human settlements approach was “invented” by the former First Lady Imelda Marcos, and this impression seems to have lingered even up to now.
The truth is, Mrs. Marcos (now Congresswoman Marcos) simply adopted an economic development concept that was already popularly used all over the world at that time, and was in fact already accepted and popularized by the United Nations. As faith would have it, the MHS was abolished, along with everything that had any connection with the human settlements approach, except the MHS housing projects that are still standing up to now.
Setting aside economic development from national politics, I see the need for the revival of the basic needs approach in relation to sustainable housing and renewable energy (SHARE) even if the technical term “human settlements” will no longer be used. Fortunately, the spirit and mission of the MHS still lives on in the present day Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC), the lead agency now for everything that has to do with the concept of “human settlements” as we knew it then.
SHARE is the acronym that I am proposing to signify the revival of the basic needs approach, this time modified to incorporate the “green and blue” convergence. Just like the old basic needs approach, it will have sustainable housing as the centrepiece component, but along with it, renewable energy will also be given equal importance. Aside from energy, water and transportation will be the other two critical public utilities that will be prioritized.
It is a generally known fact that many housing projects fail or are abandoned because there is no clean water and there is no affordable transportation available. This is a problem that should already be corrected in new and future housing development projects, and I believe that the solution to this problem lies in the cooperative approach, and by that I mean the ownership of the community water system and the community transport system by the cooperatives that will be formed among the new homeowners, possibly organized as a parallel to the legally mandated Homeowner Associations (HOAs).
Depending on where you live in the Philippines, the quality of water varies. In some places, water on tap is safe to drink, but in other places, it is not, forcing people to buy bottled filtered water instead. This is an extra drain on the budgets of our people who are already burdened with heavy expenses.
The technology for water filtration is already commonplace. It is just plain and simple reverse osmosis, a technology derived from the business of filtering water for dialysis purposes.
The technology is so simple, such that water filtering stations are now in every street corner. It would really spare residents a lot of money if filtered water could be supplied by the cooperatives on tap already, meaning to say that it is already pumped into the residential units as part of a centralized plumbing system.
Just like buying LPG in canisters, it has become the practice to buy filtered water in bottles, and everyone now takes it for granted that it is something that we have to live with, something that we could no longer change.
That is really very far from the truth, because anything in liquid or gaseous form could be pumped directly into residential units by way of centralized plumbing systems./PN
