From 1898 to 1916, that is, between the end of the Spanish-American War and the passage of the Philippine Autonomy Act, is possibly the most important era in the history of modern city planning in the Philippines. During this relatively short span, a number of noteworthy episodes took place that redefined the appearance, configuration, and meaning of urban environments in the country: a comprehensive urban plan was developed for Manila, the national capital, in 1905; the same year, a monumental urban plan was forged for a new city at Baguio in the north of Luzon Island, a place where buildings,...

In 1898, Philippine society was in a state of great flux. As Onofre Corpuz observes, the year was characterized by a major military conflict, the Battle of Manila Bay, which occurred on May 1.¹ Although lasting just a handful of hours, the encounter between the Spanish Pacific Squadron and the US Asiatic Squadron had an immense impact on the evolution of Philippine society. The defeat of the Spanish navy kick-started a military and political process which, by the end of 1898, brought to an end 333 years of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippine Archipelago. With the signing of the...

To comprehend the restructuring of Manila’s urban environment after the commencement of American colonial rule, it is vital to appreciate the City Beautiful plan that Daniel Burnham and his assistant Peirce Anderson developed. Tendered as the “Report on Improvement of Manila” in June 1905 to William H. Taft, the US secretary of war, the document outlined in just nine pages a number of architectural and spatial proposals designed to instigate “progress” within the Philippine capital city.¹ Because the report was directly dedicated to reconfiguring Manila’s urban environment, Burnham and Anderson’s manuscript unambiguously laid bare what the city as a “modern...

The transformation of a barren site five thousand feet above sea level in Benguet Province into a modern planned city stands out as perhaps one of the greatest achievements of early American colonial rule in the Philippines. Even though this new city in the north of Luzon Island was, in comparison with Manila, small in demographic scale and spatial extent, the settlement, Baguio, had two nationally significant traits.¹ First, it had political worth in light of its status as the nation’s summer capital city.² Second, it was widely acknowledged as being boundless in its beauty given the tying together of...

In his two-volume work The Philippine Islands, Cameron Forbes wrote that during the Spanish colonial era an array of public works were undertaken. With respect to the development of transport infrastructure, Forbes explained that roads and bridges had been constructed, and that toward the end of the nineteenth century a small railway system, albeit one built by private capital under British control, ran northward from Manila toward Lingayen Gulf. Roads, he said, had been a staple of Spanish colonial public work, and their construction had been done under a well-developed labor system known as prestacion personal (forced labor). Public architecture,...

The period from 1898 to 1916 saw the introduction of modern city planning in the Philippines and its proliferation after Daniel Burnham introduced the City Beautiful paradigm to Manila in 1905. This propagation included, as explained in chapters 4 and 5, a number of monumental city plans in the provinces and new civic centers in many capitals of the “Christian provinces.” On a par in terms of volume with urban planning in the United States in the opening years of the twentieth century, by 1916 the environmental character of the Philippine city contrasted with what it had been at the...