Jun 1, 2006

crossed signals

"wake up and smell the smoke!"

"protect our roads! stop opression!"

is it just me or are these messages totally bewildering? the first one, i sorta get. but the second, hard as i try, i just couldn'tfigure out.

perhaps i should explain...

these messages are printed in big bold black letters in white tarpaulin. they're posted along the streets of the Loyola Grand Villas, the streets which are part of the short-cut from marikina to quezon city (usually referred simply as the tumana shortcut).

i did see one other tarpaulin but i can't remember the words (the message was too long) but i captured a sense of LGV residents fighting against the use of their streets as detour/shortcut/ alternative to motorists travelling from marikina to UP/balara/katipunan.

the first message must mean that residents should be more active in fighting against the public use of their streets due to the pollution from numerous vehicles of non-residents. i would guess that this same message is posted in other parts of LGV.

but who's the advocate? the homeowners' association? then why not make it clear who the message is for and who the message is from? why would they post it in streets where non-residents can read it? is there some sort of a trick here that i don't get?

the second message got me really confused. what would road protection have to do with oppression? do the residents of this posh subdivision feel that the public use of their streets result to their oppression? the logic escapes me, i'm afraid.

i have nothing against exclusive subdivisions who restrict non-residents from entering their streets for security reasons. for over 7 years i lived in a subdivision that allowed non-residents to use their streets as shortcut for a minimal fee -- a win-win situation, if you ask me (although collecting fees is a great temptation to the corrupt and thats another issue altogether).

i just couldn't understand the point of these messages. would someone please enlighten me?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

AHAHAHAHAHAHA tanungin ko kakilala ko sa lgv kung ano ba talaga un.. hahahaha.. typical slef-centered, emotionally unstable elitists whove spent too much time in antiseptic bubbles. please dont say im a hypocrite. haha. please? i AM trying.. :D

carlo

Anonymous said...

i was meaning to post something angsty smashing with my sparkling wit but naunahan na ko.

anyway, with my backgwound in architecture, i'd like to share some of what i know (or what i think i know). being that LGV is privately owned, they can close off the entire subdivision from the entire world for all they care and nobody can do anything about it. but if the road (government-owned) was there before the development, and the developers weren't able to buy it from the government (which is hard, if not impossible, to do, considering our third world government invests in infrastructure rather meticulously -and rarely-), then that's pretty much all they can do: take to the streets. or rather, take their sanitized anonymous tarpaulined complaints to the streets!

actually, it doesn't have to be an entire road. the road may be property of LGV, but if there's infrastructure (such as a bridge -which i believe is present there-) there that's government-owned, and LGV occupies the entire strip of land that allows access to the bridge, then they should provide a right-of-way. :)

anyway, i think that more than just the eyesore, or the "pollution" or the threat to security with living alongside people from the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum, i believe it's also the guilt: the bitter taste of their french bread whenever a tuyo-smelling peasant passes by their tables. the rich like to believe that they are the only ones alive.

it's everywhere, ynseng. do you believe that planners and architects are even hired to physically (=architecturally) isolate the poor from the rich? in France, for example, there was this urban planner Rem Koolhaas (dunno if i got the spelling right) who proposed to section off part of Paris (i think) and sink it below sea level (supposedly "not underground"), build a wall around it and relocate all the slums there, away from the beautiful boulevards of paris. and have you checked out the colorful brooklyn facade (read: fake wall-houses) covering the slum area facing that road that connects riverbanks to libis? what does that tell you?

yun lang. sana may nakuha ka sa kin na hindi mo pa masyadong alam. hehehe! share ko lng.