BAGUIO CITY – In 1906, this city with less than 500 residents that would become the country’s undisputed summer capital was designed by Chicago-based architect Daniel Burnham to host 25,000 residents.

Filipinos today remember Burnham only for the manmade lake and park named after him. But his name has been inevitably tied to the city he helped build.

Daniel Burnham is considered one of the modern world’s icons for the “City Beautiful Movement” in the early 20th century. This is an urban planning philosophy which theorized that introducing physical beauty to an urban American landscape would inspire its inhabitants to moral and civic virtues during a period preceding the Great Depression, according to the University of Virginia website.

Burnham was responsible for introducing changes to the American cities of Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco and Washington D.C., seat of the American government.

Common to these cities, including Baguio is the way their road systems are laid out to surround a core city district. Like Baguio, Burnham redesigned these American cities using three equally functional grids or districts.

Almost all of the Burnham-designed localities have a central park where people promenade, a government center like Washington’s Capitol Hill or Baguio’s City Hall compound looming large over its downtown area, and a row of residential areas.

Burnham Park and its lake are the city’s most recognized facilities, next to the government center and the area where the presidential mansion stands.

In Time for the Centennial

Officially chartered in 1909, Baguio celebrates its centennial next year. By 1948 its original population of 489 residents in 1903 had grown to 29,262. Nearly 100 years later, local architects and urban planners are busy studying how much of the city’s development template could still be applied to an urban renewal campaign for a city population that hit 183,000 in 1991 and to just under 300,000 after 2005, according to Mayor Reinaldo Bautista Jr.

At the start of a month-long housing summit sponsored by the city government, architects of the Saint Louis University and the University of the Cordilleras tackled practical elements of the Burnham Plan for residents who hope to enforce urban reforms before Baguio turns 100 years old on Sept. 1, 2009.

Details of the Burnham Plan are now outdated by a century of urban growth and decay, says Bonifacio de la Peña, dean of the SLU College of Architecture and Engineering. But the foundation of the Burnham Plan could still be used for its neighboring towns in Benguet and to help correct the problems Baguio has already suffered, he says.

For example, a few subdivisions that have sprouted around Tuba and Sablan towns in Benguet have little regard for the geological hazards in their areas and have barely enough space for green zones, says Robert Romero, an architect.

In the original plan, Burnham had helped introduce the idea of green zones in the United States. The Filipino architects say they hope that exporting parts of the Burnham Plan to the towns of La Trinidad, Itogon, Sablan and Tuba could also revive a proposal to wed them with Baguio into a metropolitan sharing unit called BLIST (the acronym stands for the towns).

Foreign experts revisited the Burnham Plan in 1991, a year after Baguio was almost wiped out by the earthquake of July, 16,1900. They helped design a new urban renewal plan called the Baguio-Dagupan Urban Planning Project (BDUPP) for Baguio to guides developers in shaping BLIST.

Although the outcome was probably the most comprehensive plan for Baguio, it was never pushed. Quarrels over political jurisdiction between the city and the Benguet town governments have been blamed for abandoning BDUPP.

Last week, the housing summit discussed the Burnham Plan again, although participants focused instead on Burnham’s commonsensical ways. Romero suggests that developers use a cluster-based design for subdivision development to free more areas for tree parks. In the design, home lots encircle a central market area.

He says the principle has elements of Burnham but is also inspired by indigenous Cordillera communities, where homes encircle a common trading center.

“Because these settlements (encircle a central district), it encourages cooperation. And if certain groups of people want to live apart from the rest, their grouped community would not break the circle,” Romero says.