Heritage, tourism, and the bottom line

On a rainy Friday, the last thing one would wish for is a trip to the University Belt, but a day to discuss heritage conservation was difficult to pass up. Besides, I’ve heard about the Far Eastern University’s art deco buildings, and that could only be an added plus to traveling all the way to Manila. 

 

A couple of wrong turns, and a full hour after leaving home, and late for the first set of speakers, I found myself seated comfortably in the art deco auditorium designed by National Artist for Architecture Pablo Antonio. 

 

But there was every reason to feel uncomfortable as I listened to speaker after speaker at the 6th Towns and Cities Conference talk about plans—and dreams!—of conserving heritage alongside the goal of tourism. Yes, tourism. 

 

Here I was ready for conversations on revitalizing the cities we live in, here I thought that I was going to hear about the grand plans of conserving the symbols of our past. Instead I was given for the most part a sense of how we view the idea of heritage as tourism, how we would like to conserve heritage with the goal of getting foreign tourists to come to our shores. 

 

A disconnect

 

Heritage tourism of course is a valid category: this is why we enter a country and want to look at vestiges and ruins of its past, why we go to churches and cemeteries, why we go to museums. 

 

But look at studies on what heritage tourism is, and how it works, and you will find one thing to be true: heritage conservation and tourism do not go hand-in-hand. 

 

If at all, tourism is seen as secondary to it, as mere by-product. We do not conserve heritage in order to enliven tourism. We conserve it because we must, because we should, because we care enough about our history and our identity too. 

 

That tourists might come for it is an added bonus.  

 

But hearing about the plans for Intramuros from its administrator Jose A. Capistrano Jr., it became clear that the line between restoring structures and building new tourist attractions were blurred. Case in point: the apparent vision for the façade of the Maestranza wall facing the Pasig River is Clarke Quay in Singapore. 

 

It seems well and good, but the disparity between the two is striking. Clarke Quay is now but a stretch of bars and restaurants in renovated shophouses for what is an existing expat population in Singapore; the Maestranza is a historically symbolic site for nation within the Walled City that is Intramuros—everything and about heritage and history. 

 

Granted that Clarke Quay and the Singapore River it faces carry with it a history of commerce and trade, but it was also in light of that history that the Singapore government cleaned up the Singapore River in the 1970s, before even envisioning the space as possible tourist and expat attraction.  

 

What of the Maestranza and the Pasig River in front of it? What of the poverty that surrounds this area, the stench of the river, the squatters and congestion? How is this reconciled with the vision of a Clarke Quay in Manila? 

 

This same disconnect from a foreign model is in the plan to build a version of The Hague’s Madurodam within the old Philippine Constabulary Barracks also in Intramuros. 

 

It is beyond me why a miniature version of the old Intramuros is better money spent than if we actually worked on the conservation of the real structures that still exist. Add to this the fact that Madurodam, while a tourist attraction, is actually really a park for kids, where a miniature Holland exists for them to feel like giants, where history melds together with the contemporary images of The Netherlands, all in one space. It is barely about heritage really, and I don’t know if the scale replica of old Intramuros will matter when the real structures are just right outside.

 

This same kind of ungrounded dreaming was in Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) Chairman Francis Tolentino when he talked about EDSA becoming a Highway of Heroes ala St. Petersburg. When he talked about esteros being converted into streets! When he talked about the motorcycle lane! The no kotong policy! Ano raw? Yes, this was time spent taking pride in how the MMDA has made our streets safer for locals and tourists alike, yet anyone who even goes out on those streets every day, every pedestrian, will tell you that he feels as unsafe and as inconvenienced as he always has, if not even more so. 

 

And here really is what’s wrong with even thinking about heritage as tourism: it allows for heritage conservation to be about creating pockets of affluence in cities that are everything but. As if taking something out of context, as if a grand new mall, or a fine dining restaurant, a bridge that connects Binondo to Intramuros, will erase the stench of the Pasig River, or allow us to forget the squatters’ area nearby, or make us all feel safer about the city we inhabit. It seems that as far as this discussion of heritage and tourism is concerned, our tendency is not just to dream, but to forget common sense altogether.

 

Make it habitable

 

Because common sense dictates that we first make the city habitable, and then we think of selling it, yes? We do not sell the safety of our streets, we make it default for everyone.  

 

Which was in the talk of Florian Steinberg, Senior Urban Development Specialist of the Asian Development Bank, as he highlighted the fact that the revitalization of a city is premised on respecting and caring for its open spaces, its historic sites and its symbols, and ultimately the people who inhabit it every day. 

 

Which was also in Arch. Dominic Q. Galicia’s dream of conserving and reimagining Escolta into a business-processing outsourcing hub, that’s premised on reimagining the whole community within and near it, where congestion and safety are primary considerations. 

 

And even as Jos Ortega, CEO of JWT Manila, ended up talking about heritage as tourism given the subject of branding heritage, he also inadvertently pointed a finger at how different the Philippines is from say, Florence, Italy. Where in the latter, culture and heritage is already part and parcel of the citizenry’s existence, and here it’s clear that not even the government has cared enough about it. 

 

Ortega asserts, we need an authentic story for our city, and our citizens need to be able to tell that story. But it seems we must first begin with a story worth telling, because our cities are actually ours.

 

This lack of ownership of our cities is what was in the most truthful and honest talk of that whole day, and I can only thank the heavens for Arch. Paulo Alcazaren. With him there was no dreaming. Instead we were all pulled violently back to Earth by the history of Manila he told, which was also about a history of its degeneration into the congested city of the present, where historical sites and structures have already been lost to development, proof positive of a string of governments that have cared less and less about heritage and culture and necessarily, history and identity. 

 

This is ultimately what talk of tourism sacrifices, precisely because we are no Italy or Holland, no Singapore even. We cannot as of yet imagine the conservation of heritage to be removed from the weight of identity that it must create and reimagine, we cannot just work on the Maestranza and invoke Clarke Quay because its role as symbol for national identity requires it to mean so much more than that. 

 

And too there is this: any imagination of heritage sites as tourist attractions, any pocket of a high-end restaurant here, expat country there, is necessarily up against the real conditions of nation. Conditions that are about streets unsafe for walking, public transportation that will have you clutching onto your bag for dear life, no functional public toilets, no proper and up-to-date street signs, congestion and poverty and inequality. 

 

In the end, if we must insist on selling pockets of affluence as heritage tourism, then we are bound by honesty and truthfulness to sell the world outside of it as nothing but close to anarchy. Though I believe tourists know that by now. –KG, GMA News

 

The 6th Philippines Towns and Cities Conference was held on November 4 2011, and was organized by the Heritage Conservation Society, Urban Partnerships Foundation (UPF), Philippine Institute of Environmental Planners (PIEP), the City Government of Manila, the Manila Historical and Heritage Commission and the Far Eastern University.