by Beau Baconguis

EDITOR’S NOTE: Beau Baconguis is a Member of ICSC’s Board of Trustees. She delivered this speech during the two-day event Move Together: Regional Exchange and Workshop on Sustainable Urban Mobility and Placemaking in Southeast Asia, held from May 22-23, 2026.

Good morning everyone! I am so excited to welcome you all to the #MOVETOGETHER Regional Exchange and Workshop on Sustainable Urban Mobility and Placemaking in Southeast Asia. I heard you had a really productive discussion and sharing yesterday. I am sorry that I missed that part but we have two more days of sharing and I am confident that we can draw inspiration from each other’s stories and experiences.

I am much older than most of you in this room. Some of us grew up in less crazy times when our environment was greener, the air and water were cleaner, and our food was much healthier and traffic was not an issue. I did.

Our family lived in the mountains of Bukidnon in Mindanao and as children we walked to school with our friends, played in open fields or wooded areas, slid down slopes with just cardboard boxes, climbed trees pretending that a tree was a community and each branch was a home, and made pretend pies out of mud. We grew vegetables, raised pigs and chickens, a few cows, for our own sustenance. That has changed in leaps and bounds especially with growing populations and communities aiming to “develop” and urbanize.

When I moved to Metro Manila for work, I was constantly frustrated by the fact that so much person-hours and energy was wasted just trying to get from point A to point B, not just for me but the majority of the urban population. For decades, an everyday commute for me would mean running after already packed buses and jeepneys just to get to work. It was like playing a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with your ride and you just learn to accept that as a reality of ordinary commuters and that nothing will change. Add on the stress of pollution and the urban heat island effect from the lack or absence of trees and other greenery.

Then one day, a friend of mine convinced me to ride a bike again. The last time I remember riding a bike was in high school. I was reluctant at first, especially cycling in the dangerous streets of Metro Manila but since I lived just a stone’s throw away from the University of the Philippines Diliman campus, one of the few remaining patches of green in Quezon City, I eventually got myself a bike and started riding on weekends just around the university. As I gained more confidence and met more cyclists, I felt I now had a community that I could trust. I started joining longer 50km rides around the Metropolis a few times in a year as part of the advocacy to get more people to ride bikes. Eventually, cycling to work became my daily commute. Luckily, my office was only about 5 km from my home but, still, I had to navigate through a short stretch of Commonwealth Avenue, dubbed as the Killer highway because of the many accidents and deaths recorded in that particular thoroughfare.

In 1997, a few organizations who have been having conversations about how we can make our urban centers more livable, decided to band together and launch a campaign that we called, Trails and Greenways. We were environmental organizations, cycling advocates, urban planners, academic institutions, engineers, green thinkers, and other groups wanting to see a safer, more breathable, greener, saner community. Our plan was to connect all the remaining green spaces in Quezon City starting from the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife, Quezon Memorial Circle, UP Arboretum, University of the Philippines Diliman Campus, Miriam College and Ateneo de Manila University. We thought that if we are successful in making that whole stretch more walkable and safer for cycling and other non-motorized transport, it could provide a template for other local governments of a kind of development whose benefits extend to a much wider population in terms of environment, health and economy.

At that time, it seemed like a pie-in-the-sky especially when people were just trying to get by on a day to day basis. We didn’t get much public support, much less, government attention. We were outliers. We just kept going. We organized discussions and creative bike rides. A year later, we found a champion to help propel the campaign forward in the person of former General Arturo Enrile who was then Secretary of the Department of Transportation and Communication. We got him to cycle with us through the City’s streets and he understood the campaign. So we got his support. Unfortunately, shortly after that, he suddenly passed away before any meaningful plans could even be drawn up. We lost our champion.

Around that time also, many of the members of this group were also involved in the lobby for the passage of the Philippine Clean Air Act. Its enactment in 1999 gave us a strong hook to argue against pollutive industries and transport and push alternatives including expanding green spaces. At that time, climate change was also still not a mainstream issue at least in the Philippines. We pushed on in our own different capacities and priorities as individual organizations, not as a Trails and Greenways campaign.

Fast forward to today, with Southeast Asia bearing the brunt of climate change impacts, pollution from point and non-point sources, development aggression, etc. local governments and even the private sector are now slowly realizing there are ways to reverse the destructive development path they have been taking. Through the years, the dreaming, the planning and movement building continued so that throughout the region and in other parts of the world, we are now seeing changes in how local development is being pursued in a way that is greener, more healthful, fairer, more inclusive, and respects local cultures. Sponge cities, bike lanes, tree-lined walkways, car-free days or car-free areas, bigger investments in public transport systems, ecological regeneration, etc, are just a few examples of what are now being done. However, at this time, these are few and far between. We need more communities, more governments looking at institutionalization of and investment in mindsets and systems like these.

It has been a long 30 years since our local Trails and Greenways campaign. Today, we know that Quezon City has now been moving in the direction that was only a dream for us 3 decades ago. It may have taken long but we are slowly getting there. Now we are hearing stories from the rest of the region and in other parts of the world that are more people and ecology-centric, more inclusive. The question now is, are we doing enough to reverse or slow down planetary destruction? I believe we all know the answer and that is the reason for our coming together today. We are hopeful people. However, we need to harness our community energies, build and strengthen that global movement because the issue of mobility is not just about transport. It is also about ecological restoration. It is about our own survival as a species.

At this point, I would also like to make a pitch for the use of native trees and other plants when undertaking restoration in relation to our mobility objectives. Therefore, we need the support of scientists and other technicians to help us find that balance in developing our plans.

Finally, let me end with my favorite quote from a scientist-activist friend who provided so much technical support to the Philippine NGOs when we were lobbying for the Clean Air Act and the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act, Dr. Paul Connett:

“Docile people get poisoned. Angry people get organized.”

We may be angry at how things are, the policies, the kind of development but I hope that that rage is channeled into positive engagements with good outcomes and not the feeling of helplessness and despair. We need to inspire more people and build stronger movements to provide meaningful pressure to decision-makers and a shift in industry thinking as well.

Persistence, grit, the ability to find opportunities as hooks in our work, with plenty of creativity and, not to forget, FUN, got all of us to this point. Thanks to people like you and the ambitious altruistic goals that you have set out to achieve.

Good luck with the workshop. Once again, Welcome!

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