Who Gets to Imagine a City?

The trees along Quirino Avenue were the kind of thing people learned to live with before they learned to notice them.

Along Quirino Avenue, the trees not only offered shade. They made the street habitable. They dulled the violence of the heat. They gave pedestrians a small pocket of mercy in a city that often treats walking as an afterthought. People stand under trees because the sun is unbearable and because, in Manila, shade is sometimes the nearest thing to dignity.

What remained were stumps, tarpaulins, and the uneasy sense that something had already been decided somewhere far from the people most affected by it. More than 225 trees have already been cut down along the route of the Southern Access Link Expressway, or SALEx, with permits allowing up to 617 trees to be removed. Among them was a 50-year-old narra tree, a living thing that had outlasted many of the policies and personalities now deciding its fate.

And then there is the familiar language of development, which always arrives sounding sure of itself. A project has a route, a permit, a mandate, a replacement ratio, and an approved scheme. Trees become numbers. Old trees become manageable losses. A 50-year-old narra becomes one more item in a ledger, and the argument is made that seedlings will be planted elsewhere, as though ecological life were a kind of accounting trick, as though a mature tree and a sapling belong to the same category because both can be counted.

This is where the public’s anger starts to make complete sense. It is not sentimental, though it is often dismissed that way. It is not a refusal of roads or attachment to greenery for its own sake. It is a recognition that people know what these trees were doing for them, and that they were never truly asked what they wanted to keep.

Consultation is not a decorative democratic ritual, something to be performed after the decisions have already been made. It is the point at which a city remembers that it is made of people before it is made of concrete. It is the point at which a project stops being a private victory dressed up as public good. When consultation is missing, the result is not only environmental damage. It is a kind of civic humiliation. Residents are made to watch the place they live in being altered without their voices ever having the force to matter.

There is something especially bleak about this happening a week before World Environment Day, a date meant to remind governments and communities that environmental protection cannot be treated as an optional, sentimental concern, something to be invoked when convenient and set aside when capital needs a corridor. Environmental conversations are often framed through distant scales. They revolve around emissions targets, climate agreements, biodiversity indicators, and sustainability metrics. These discussions matter, but they can sometimes make environmental issues feel abstract, as though they exist somewhere far from daily life.

The Quirino trees remind us that environmental questions are often intensely local. They emerge on familiar streets. They shape the places people move through every day. They determine whether communities feel that public spaces belong to them or merely exist around them.

The hardest part of the usual defense is how quickly it pretends the future has already been settled. Seedlings will be planted. Offsets will be made. The loss will be compensated. But anyone who has stood under the noon sun in Metro Manila knows how thin that promise is. A replacement plan is not shade for today. It is a deferred promise, and in a warming city, deferred promises are often how harm is disguised.

The language of official approval often makes everything sound clean, legal, and final. But cities are not spreadsheets. They are lived in by vendors, students, commuters, elders, tricycle drivers, workers with no choice but to go outdoors, children who inherit the heat because adults keep calling this progress. The real cost of tree cutting is not only measured in environmental terms. It is felt in the body. It is the sweat running down a back while waiting for a jeepney. It is the headache that comes with standing on a sidewalk that used to be cooler. It is the quiet knowledge that the city has once again decided that comfort will remain unevenly distributed.

Development is supposed to enlarge what is possible for people. When it requires the erasure of the very things that make daily life bearable, it deserves more than legal justification. It deserves scrutiny. It deserves the question that was not asked early enough. Why was this route chosen this way? Who was consulted? Who stood to lose? What was treated as expendable? Why do the people who bear the heat, the dust, the traffic, and the floodwater so often enter the discussion only after the cutting has begun?

That is the grief underneath the issue. Not only that trees were felled, though that is already enough. It is that the city keeps being imagined from above, by people for whom a tree is an obstacle and shade is a line item, while the people on the ground are expected to adapt, absorb, and move on. But they are the ones who live with the aftermath. They are the ones who know that a livable city is not measured by how quickly a skyway can rise, but by whether a person can cross a road without feeling punished by the sun.

The stumps along Quirino Avenue look like a record of something that should not have been made so easy to erase. What remains now is not just a question of accountability, though accountability is necessary. It is a question of imagination. Whether development in this country can still be shaped by the people who live under its consequences. Whether consultation can be treated as a real obligation, not an inconvenience. Whether trees and the shade they offer can be understood as part of the public inheritance rather than as wasted space waiting to be cleared.