COLUMN

Also, alumni of the said university, Manny Villar Jr and Cynthia Villar, notoriously known to convert farmlands into subdivisions or residential lands into commercial lands, now, hungrily eyeing the chunk of residential land to build their biggest project to date–Vista City and a new UP branch If the UP Dasmariñas campus is established, a similar sight of a building bringing the prestigious name of one of the top universities in the Philippines begins to blend into the landscape in the city of the privileged; just as how the UP Bonifacio Global City with a name of a business tycoon awkwardly plastered on the building stand among the commercialized grounds separating the BGC architecture and its neighboring communities that saturate the barrier of class differences–begging the question, does the supposedly University of the People begin to be represented by the rich minority?

Witnessing the Philippine social reality, ordinary Filipinos living ordinary lives appear as obstacles to development for capitalists; in every successful magnate's niche is another Filipino's life on the line. Suppose more and more projects, albeit already rampant, precede to abuse the place of ordinary homes to replace them with infrastructure that would indisputably spike up the cost of living beyond reach to minimum wage earners, cities will instantly create longer, thicker, and more prominent borders of shiny, advanced cities next to ordinary cramped houses forgotten and excluded in the plan towards betterment

I am for a pragmatic, backed by science, pro-people, and sustainable urban development and additional state universities for accessible and quality education, but never at the expense of a 'few' damages to advance the lives of some.