Peter Wallace, chairman and CEO of the Wallace Business Forum, made the pronouncement on Tuesday as he spoke before the 51st General Membership Meeting of the Pampanga Chamber of Commerce and Industry Inc. (PamCham) held at the Grand Pavilion of the Fontana Leisure Parks here as guest of honor and speaker.
“I’m suggesting to you that Clark-Subic become the new capital of the Philippines,” Wallace said as members of the chamber and their guests gave him a resounding applause.
“As you know better than I do, Clark and Subic have all the necessary attributes to be able to do it,” he said, citing the Clark International Airport (CIA). “Most of which is there and it doesn’t need too much to make it bigger and better.”
He said Subic’s deep water as well as its large and well-protected harbor is also ideal for a seaport.
“Up here in Clark, you have plenty of land that can be developed so it can be done and it’s above sea level so it makes a lot of sense to decentralize out of Manila up to here and maybe make this the BPO center of the Philippines – the Silicon Valley or the Bangalore of the Philippines or Asia,” Wallace said.
He labelled Baguio, Boracay, Makati, BCG and Filinvest as “cities of the past” because of their intersecting roads which he described as obsolete. “They have a piece of land, two streets crossing each other, you have one going under the other and overpass turning around,” he said.
Wallace said no inner roads should be less than four lanes and major roads should be eight lanes. But that means “planning for it now while you can while it’s not too late.”
Wallace said the great cities of the world have one thing that stands out and that’s beautiful large parks like Central Park in New York or Hyde Park in London, and the park in Sydney. “They are beautiful, they are places to relax and they are places where the green helps to take the carbon dioxide out of the air from all the cars and busses,” he said.
“We got greedy people here and they take away all the parks and put high rise buildings unless somebody stops them. You should try to make sure you stop them because if you want this place to develop, it’s gonna have to be controlled, it’s gonna have to be done in the proper way,” he explained.
Wallace described Metro Manila as one of the densest cities in the world and it is still growing with the worst traffic on earth.
He said Manila is also the second most at risk from climate change amongst all the cities in the world. He said “Manila will be underwater with one, two or three meters because Manila is at sea level with an open ocean which is rising and you can’t stop that.”
“There is flooding up here because of rivers that are blocked and you unblock that but not in Manila,” he noted.
“So we have to move out of Manila. It’s growing and growing almost 5 million workers coming in and not enough roads, no railways,” he said.
Wallace said in Clark and Subic, the time to build is now. “Now is the time to build underground railways all over this place. You don’t want trains on the ground you want them underneath because that’s what all the great cities of the world have done,” he pointed out.
He explained that digging underground is now easier to do because of the big machines that dig tunnels.
PamCham Vice President Pruds Garcia of Mekeni Foods Corp. introduced Wallace during the event. Others who were present were Chairman Emeritus Levy P. Laus, Vice Chair Rene G. Romero, and President Jess S. Nicdao who made the welcome remarks.
