THERE are only a few opportunities within the year when we can bring the year-round frenzy to a halt because of a socially-sanctioned respite intended for religious reflection.
In the era of cheap airline seats and the obligatory vacation selfies on social media, the annual Holy Week festivities are now characterized by the same frenzy brought about by the mad dash to hit the sun, sea, and sand in the country’s 7,641 islands. Many families especially from the urban centers take this occasion as an opportunity to travel together to new places.
The high level of interest of Filipinos to see and experience the magnificent attractions of their own country is surely a healthy thing. The boom in local tourism goes a long way in teaching a new generation how to rid themselves of biases and ignorance about how their compatriots live in other places of the country other than their own. But whatever human and vehicular traffic is gained by the country’s rural and coastal destinations, the once crowded cities also benefit from a brief respite.
The result is the drastic reduction in the cramped populations of the country’s congested cities. And for the few people who are stuck in these urban areas, the gridlocked metropolis is transformed into the ideal city for a few days. There is no traffic and it is a breeze to navigate the city’s streets with only a few vehicles jostling on the wide and clear avenues.
Over the years, more and more people have resorted to this kind of reverse vacation, where one does not have to travel but instead wait for the multitude to leave in order to experience the city differently.
Hotels have cashed in on this phenomenon and invented a term for it. The vacation to far exotic places is eschewed for the “staycation” inside the controlled environment of an urban hotel in a city suddenly deserted of people. With more than of half of their inhabitants out of the metropolis in these occasions, the city where the hotel is located is transformed into an ideal destination which does not require travel.
This annual exodus out of urban centers during the Holy Week reveals how cramped and congested our cities are, such that when they are emptied, they become pleasant and manageable urban communities. The emptied cities provide a study of contrasts. The public transport experience ceases to become an ordeal in these few days of respite and even the quality of the air is noticeably better. If only all the shops were open, then that would be the ultimate fantasy of every urban dweller fulfilled, hassle-free consumerism without the crowds, a development that would
What happened in the evolution and development of our urban cities? Why have a few of our cities become the catch basins of people in droves more than what their carrying capacities can handle?
The genesis of the megalopolises like Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, and Metro Davao of a developing economy like the Philippines provides clues into this evolution. Population growth in these old trading centers was mainly fueled by rural to urban migration by virtue of the transformations in the regional economies.
The establishment of trading houses in the ports, and the beginnings of a manufacturing sector in the urban areas accounted for the pull factors in urban migration at the turn of the last century particularly for Manila and Cebu. Whereas the pressures of colonial extraction in haciendas and the appropriation of indigenous ancestral domain as forest reserves, ranch land, and plantations became the push factors that drove people down into the urban areas.
It is mainly the uneven development between our urban and rural areas that provide fodder for the continued in-migration into our urban centers. The feudal and backward agricultural industries in the rural areas designed to benefit only a few landlords and politicians could barely sustain a growing rural population. The result has been the steady stream of migrants to the urban centers who take on the jobs and services of the low paying informal economy. Save for a few nuances here and there, this has been the general process in a semi-colonial semi-feudal mode of production.
After the Holy Week, the multitude will return to the cities they have deserted a few days ago to assume once again their roles as cogs in the perpetual operations of the metropolitan machine. They have been recharged, sated with their fill of sun, sea, and sand, only to get back to grind once more until the next vacation or “staycation”.
