How Skypod 3.0 Reminds Us of the Philippines’ Relationship With its Mountains
Written and Mapped by: Daniel C.
Why Slater Young’s Skypod 3.0 Remind Us of the Philippines’ Relationship With its Mountains
Slater Young’s The Rise at Monterrazas is a luxury condo development in Cebu situated on a part of Metro Cebu’s mountains, showcasing sophisticated artistry, taking inspiration from Banaue Rice Terraces. The rice terraces of the Cordilleras, like that of Banaue’s, are an architectural and cultural marvel of our indigenous roots, with our ancestors shaping the steep slopes of the mountains to cultivate their needs while keeping a harmonious relationship with the environment. However, as the project, also fondly called Skypod 3.0, claims its reverence to such cultural treasure, it has raised questions on the country’s relationships with its mountain landscapes, especially with our current generation’s struggle against climate change. This phenomenon will drastically impact our lives in the coming decades.
Mountains and the Philippines
Mountains are a ubiquitous sight in the Philippine landscape. Tectonic activity is responsible for creating the islands in our country, with a mountain or a mountain range emerging to provide each island with character and history. Luzon’s Sierra Madre serves as the country’s ‘shield’ against typhoons; Bicol’s Mayon Volcano is the beauty, the pillar of the region’s identity; the Cordilleras serve as one of the last bastions of the Philippines’ indigenous society, their site of resistance against Spanish encroachment aided by their mastery of the mountains, visible in the wondrous Rice Terraces that provide them food as well as fame. Hiking has also become an everyday tourism activity for those coming from the city; it provides additional income for locals, where mountain slopes are appreciated, along with the forests, the animals, the streams, and the falls they shelter.
Mountains are also home to the country’s indigenous peoples and host to the country’s forests, which are habitat to countless, still-unstudied flora and fauna. Their ecological structure continues beyond the mountain’s slopes but goes as far as the plains. In the case of Metro Manila, the metropolis’ system of rivers and waterways trace the upland from the Sierra Madre in the east, in the provinces of Rizal and Bulacan through waterways such as Pasig, Marikina, and Tullahan Rivers, down to Manila Bay. Nature reminds us of this whenever a typhoon strikes: The increasingly balded forests of the mountains cause murkier, faster flash floods, with eastern cities such as Marikina and Pasig bracing it first, such as Ondoy’s (2009) impact in Marikina, or more recently, Typhoons Rolly and Ullyses in 2020. In Cebu itself, 37% of forests across the province have been logged for the sake of continued neoliberal urban development, leading to an equivalent of 117 kt of CO₂ emissions.
In the Maps: Skypod 3.0 and Metro Cebu
Climate Resilience
Climate Resilience refers to a city or a community’s ability to cope with the impacts of climate change. This can appear in the form of adaptation or adjusting infrastructure (at the city level) or lifestyle (at the personal level) to the existing or expected effects of intensifying climate events; mitigation means actively reducing the expected impact. For example, a person adapts to intensified rainfall by ‘raising’ the elevation of their house; a city mitigates the impact by building long-term infrastructure like dikes and improved sewer systems. Climate Resilience can also be achieved through a city or community’s planning on the macro scale, down to capacitating and informing the general public on the personal scale.
Cagayan De Oro’s “Lunhaw Strategy is the city’s policy of employing the “Green Strategy” (‘Luntian’), which intends to preserve forest reserves and green spaces, increase street walkability, and reduce urban heat stress, and the “Blue Strategy” (‘Bughaw’), where water flow is managed to prevent floods as well as store it for water security. The Green Strategy is pursued by identifying forest reserves, planting street trees and greeneries, and protecting biodiversity. The Blue Strategy is pursued by creating water impounds strategically located in the city’s river systems.
In both strategies, mountains are critical sites as they also hold greater capacity for forest reserves, and the water and resources of rivers come from a mountain’s streams that flow downstream, including water for irrigation and consumption.
Therefore, the proper land use management of mountains is needed to improve a city’s climate resilience, as increasing the area and volume of forests helps stabilize carbon levels in soils, aiding in the reduction of Greenhouse Gases in the atmosphere.
Mountains: An Exploited Landscape
In many cases in the Philippines, mountains and the hinterlands have been sites increasingly exploited and violated. The impacts are not isolated in the uplands and its slopes. Mountains in the country are sites of lush forests and untapped natural resources: timber, coal, biodiversity, minerals, and water, to name some. Illegal logging activities and mining have encroached and altered mountain landscapes to extract the resources they possess. After all, the Philippines is one of the most mineral-rich countries in the world: third in gold reserves, fourth in copper, and fifth in nickel. These leave the land scarred with hectares of fallen trees, polluted waterways, and displaced communities. From above, lush green canopies are pierced and pared, emerging bright yellows, browns, and sometimes even reds of the trashed earth, mud, sediments, and excretes from these mining operations. On-ground, people lose access to usable water, food, and resources from the forests and, worse, are threatened by armed personnel. For instance, Sibuyan Island in Romblon has been subject to encroachment by quarry and mining activities. Just last January, the local community organized to resist the passage of trucks carrying loads of nickel ore to be shipped outside the island. Losing mountain forests, also causing declined soil health, increased erosion hazards, and poorer water quality.
However, mountain land-use changes in the Philippines cover more than deforestation. In some cases, mountains are cleared to give way to luxury residential subdivisions, just like Skypod 3.0. Slopes are lucrative sites for such development as they provide a vista and are distant from the cities, exuding beauty and exclusivity. Permanent land use changes like these assure that the impacts on the slopes would be irreversible; decades would be needed for the ecosystem to recover. The impact would not be isolated in its vicinity but to the system and it belongs: from the mountain’s ridges and summits through the streams and rivers flowing down to the cities and plains.
Mountains and Luxury Developments
Monterrazas de Cebu, Skypod 3.0’s namesake and adjacent property, is a subdivision development on the slopes of the same mountain. Roads are drawn in the slopes, and lot parcels are projected to rise, providing a highly elevated village with a view of Cebu City’s horizon, from the cityscapes to the seas. It has been a subject of ire, however, as it has been blamed for the worsened floods in the adjacent sitios back in 2011, as well as a mudslide in 2008 in Cebu’s most populated barangay, Guadalupe, situated near the site. The property development’s ownership has changed multiple times, and the current owner, 8990 Housing Development Corporation, has expressed its intention to expand its portfolio in high-end subdivisions, given its strong demand. Therefore, we might expect more gated subdivisions looking down from the mountain slopes in the coming years, replacing its lush forests and grasslands, and worse, more significant impact on the homes and communities in the lowlands.
The physical difference between Monterrazas de Cebu, a high-end subdivision development, and Skypod 3.0, a condominium development, is that the former has roads that snake along the slopes, houses along it, and grass and trees in between them; Skypod 3.0 has a terraced form following the volume of the mountain, intending to cover the surface, while building strips of greeneries, contrasting the mountain’s former forests. Young states it would have a water system patterned to drip irrigation systems, collecting rainwater and storing it in a tank below. Its implication to the city’s hydrological systems should be identified, as the high surface area of the development and its projected high water consumption might pose more significant implications to the area’s ecological health, apart from already losing the terrain’s natural forests and grasslands. These parameters indicate that the project highly contrasts several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 11 — Sustainable Cities and Communities, given its projected impact on the city in terms of water security and heightened flood and landslide hazards, SDG 13 — Climate Action, as it prevents the preservation and pursuit of mountains as sites of forest reserves and SDG 15 — Life on land, given the encroachment on the mountain’s surface.
The sites are located at Metro Cebu’s edge of urban expansion. As the lowlands have been highly urbanized, growth has moved to adjacent cities, but internally, it has been moving northward to its forested frontier. The mountains are its naturalbarriers to such growth. However, these very mountains have been the next target for urban development. The question now lies: Will urban growth end there? With the continuing demand for housing and rapid growth of our cities, how do we manage our lands to satisfy our needs while preserving the environment for future generations?
The unprecedented scale of this project raises questions and dissent in favor of the welfare of the environment and the rest of the city, especially in the age of Climate Change. While Skypod 3.0 has caused an uproar due to its potential hazards, we must note that these luxury developments, like Monterrazas de Cebu, already exist and require our heightened scrutiny of the impacts they cause and amplify. Any harmful impacts that can be traced to these luxury developments in the mountains are a spatial injustice, especially to those more exposed and vulnerable to Climate Change down in the riversides and the lowlands.
The uproar against Skypod 3.0 reminds us that the country’s mountains have been suffering and, with it, the ordinary people that live in and with it. This piece does not merely serve as a reaction to Young’s architectural visions but also as a call for the government to truly represent the people’s welfare and agenda in creating and implementing our environmental laws and regulations at the national level through the DENR (Department of Environment and Natural Resources), must actively persevere to preserve the land’s ecological health for resource security and economic sustainability; down to the local levels, where land use zoning and management, drawn by city and municipal planning divisions, must actively address and improve their city’s Climate Resilience like Cagayan de Oro’s Lunhaw Strategy. Solutions and programs are already here for us to take inspiration from. The private sector, especially the academe, must also extend its expertise to inform the public of how to collectively improve each community’s resilience, from adapting to climate change’s impacts to organizing them for better and unified response and dissent against developments that would detriment their homes. All these efforts shall not be merely to prevent a future calamity but also to improve the quality of life of the people in our cities.
We must see mountains as parts of the city, integral in access to vital resources, apart from the beautiful view it provides. Our economic policies and agenda should have an active pursuit and preference for sustainable infrastructure and community development that respects the ecological security of the area, in line with the principles of sustainability goals and people-centered development.
