A HUNDRED years after the 1905 Burnham plan for Manila, the nation's capital has a population 15 times the 800,000 souls he projected as ideal for the city. In 2015, close to 25 million will live within the influence of Metro Manila. Coordinated physical planning is a necessity for survival but such planning needs the teeth of regional-sized and wide-scoped governance. Metropolitan Manila is the only large urban central city in Asia not managed by a strong metropolitan authority.

	Urban sprawl is the definitive physical characteristic of Metro manila, but the city of the future can be a kinder, cleaner and safer place.

Containing urbanization is half the battle. The other is retooling the city to accommodate the naturally increasing internal population. This means high-density, high-rise housing must be accepted as the main paradigm, much like Hong Kong and Tokyo. This also means adapting concepts like co-location of facilities — parks that double as school playfields, police and civil services in parking garages and underneath infrastructure. Ditto with drastic interventions like reboulevardization — bringing back service lanes, and trees to tame dangerous high-speed traffic in certain sections of the metropolis and to make districts friendly to ground-level business and social life.

Needed too are creative solutions to site-specific situations in the metropolis such as what to do with large government estates now ringed by urban density-the Quezon and Mental Institutes, the University of the Philippines, the military camps, the QC triangle, even the NAIA, the only international airport in all world cities located within metropolitan limits). Also required is rational solid waste, wastewater, and infrastructure maintenance program that is not just post-disaster in nature.

The metropolis has to be more compact and efficient in housing its population. New housing estates can be built, for example, as towers attached to the malls that ring EDSA. Metro Manila has to provide easy access to work, leisure, and recreational spaces and balance the disadvantages of dense life with enough open green space in the form of proper parks. The concept of eminent domain should be used to consolidate enough land for these public parks; Burnham's allocation of four large city parks — each about half the size of Central Park in New York — should be resurrected.

As the Germans say, Stadluft mach frei (City air makes you free)! At least it should, because urban life is supposed to offer a cornucopia of opportunities. Metro Manila in 2015 is full of possibilities-the air itself could be cleaner if we switched to natural gas for fuel, finally banned all jeepneys and tricyles, and took to buses and trains. Travel time should be monitored as a gauge of efficiency metrowide to ensure nothing is more than 40 minutes away. Housing would be available for all in estates that have schools, health care, and shops nearby. The cityscape would be greener with more open space, compulsory street tree planting, and strict billboard control. Culture and the arts would come back within conserved heritage buildings or centers located within a given size of community or district (as malls are). Access within these districts would be provided by actual sidewalks. There would be proper pedestrian crossings and bridges, adequate lighting at night, and no floods, piles of uncollected garbage or cell-phone snatchers to worry about.