The Iloilo we are building may have no room for the Iloilo we remember

There is a particular kind of sadness that comes from returning to a place you remember and discovering that the place still exists only in your memory. The street is still there, the neighborhood still carries the same name, and people still give directions using the same landmarks, but something essential has changed because the ordinary things that once made the place feel familiar have disappeared. A house becomes a commercial building, an open lot becomes a development, a small store becomes a larger establishment, a quiet street becomes a busy road, and a familiar corner that once required no explanation suddenly needs a new name. This is what development can do quietly because it does not always destroy a city in one dramatic act, but can gradually replace the ordinary pieces that once made the city recognizable to the people who grew up in it.

Iloilo is developing, and I do not think development itself is the enemy. A city needs schools, hospitals, businesses, housing, transportation systems, public facilities, technology, employment opportunities, and infrastructure capable of supporting a growing population. Recent developments make that growth visible, including the planned National University campus in Iloilo, which provincial officials discussed with NU and SM representatives this September; the university has described the campus as “Soon to Open.” The question, therefore, is not whether Iloilo should develop — of course it should — but whether we have become so accustomed to defining development as building something new that we have forgotten to ask what should remain.

Every generation inherits a city that was already being changed by the generation before it. The Iloilo of my childhood was not the same Iloilo experienced by my parents, and the Iloilo experienced by today’s children will not be the same Iloilo we know now. This is normal because cities are living things, constantly changing through migration, commerce, politics, technology, transportation, and the ambitions of their residents. But change becomes troubling when the city becomes so eager to replace what is old that it stops recognizing the value of what is ordinary.

We are very good at celebrating what is coming. We announce new campuses, new commercial spaces, new roads, new buildings, new investments, new businesses, new infrastructure, and new opportunities, and there is nothing wrong with being excited about these things. A new university campus can mean more educational opportunities, more students, more employment, and another contribution to Iloilo’s position as an education hub. But every announcement of something new should also make us ask a quieter question: What was here before this?

That question is not an argument against progress. It is an argument for memory. Before a development becomes a rendering, a construction site, an opening ceremony, and eventually a familiar part of the skyline, the land already has a history, whether that history is formally documented or simply carried by the people who lived around it. There may have been houses, gardens, small businesses, trees, informal gathering places, family routines, neighborhood friendships, or childhood memories that never appeared in an architectural plan but nevertheless constituted the social life of the place.

This is the part of urban development that rarely appears in glossy presentations. Developers can tell us how many square meters a project will occupy, how many jobs it will generate, how many people it will serve, and what facilities it will contain. Government officials can tell us about investments, taxes, economic activity, accessibility, and long-term development goals. But none of these measurements can easily capture the value of a place where somebody learned to ride a bicycle, where neighbors used to sit in the afternoon, where children played before smartphones became dominant, or where a family spent decades building a life.

I sometimes worry that we have become too impressed by the word “new.” New is automatically associated with better, while old is often treated as something that needs to be replaced, renovated, relocated, or preserved only if it is sufficiently beautiful to photograph. Yet cities are not museums, and neither are they construction sites. They are accumulations of human experience, and their character comes precisely from the coexistence of different periods, different architectural forms, different communities, different memories, and different ways of living.

The problem is not that new buildings appear. The problem begins when the new becomes the only language a city knows. When every empty space becomes an opportunity for construction, every old building becomes a potential redevelopment site, every neighborhood becomes a commercial prospect, and every road becomes a corridor for faster movement, the city begins to lose the irregularity that gives it personality. A city can become more efficient while becoming less memorable.

This is particularly dangerous in a place like Iloilo because our identity is not located in a single monument. It exists in streets, houses, markets, plazas, churches, schools, riverbanks, neighborhood stores, food traditions, old businesses, public spaces, and the accumulated habits of generations. Some of the most important places in a city are not necessarily the ones that appear on heritage lists. Sometimes they are the bakery where somebody bought bread every Sunday, the bookstore where a student discovered a favorite author, the restaurant where a family celebrated birthdays, or the small shop where generations of residents knew the owner by name.

These places are easy to dismiss because they look ordinary. That is exactly why they matter. Grand monuments tell us what a city considers historically important, but ordinary places tell us how people actually lived. When ordinary places disappear one by one, the city can retain its famous landmarks while losing the everyday geography of memory.

I have always found it strange when people speak about heritage as though it begins only when a building becomes old enough to deserve a plaque. Heritage does not begin with a government designation. It begins with repeated human use, with stories attached to places, with generations recognizing a particular corner, doorway, tree, street, market stall, or building as part of their collective experience. Official recognition is valuable, but the absence of official recognition does not automatically mean that a place has no cultural value.

This is why preservation should not mean freezing Iloilo in the past. Nobody seriously wants a city where nothing changes, where businesses cannot expand, where young people have no new opportunities, and where infrastructure cannot respond to contemporary needs. The challenge is much harder and much more interesting than that because the task is to develop without becoming amnesiac. We need to learn how to build the future without behaving as though the past is simply an obstacle standing in the way.

The planned National University campus is a useful example of this tension. Its development promises additional educational opportunities and strengthens Iloilo’s already significant role as an education center, while recent reporting describes the campus in Mandurriao as part of the city’s continuing expansion of higher education. That is a legitimate and potentially valuable development, but the larger urban question remains relevant: as Iloilo adds new institutions and commercial spaces, how do we make sure that the city around those developments remains humane, accessible, historically conscious, and connected to the communities already there?

The same question applies to roads. We build roads because people need to move, businesses need to transport goods, and cities need connectivity. But every road project also changes how neighborhoods are experienced because it can alter traffic patterns, pedestrian movement, property values, noise levels, commercial activity, and even the relationship between residents and their surroundings. A road is never merely concrete and asphalt because it reorganizes human behavior. The faster we move through a place, the less time we may have to notice the place itself.

There is an irony in the way cities pursue speed. We build roads so people can get somewhere faster, and then we celebrate the increased mobility as progress. But sometimes the cost of moving faster is that we stop seeing what we are passing. The old house becomes a blur, the small shop becomes invisible, the tree disappears behind a concrete wall, the neighborhood becomes another stretch of development, and the city gradually loses the visual and emotional markers that once allowed people to say, “I know where I am.”

Iloilo’s growth also raises questions about who benefits from development and who pays the social cost. A new commercial center may create jobs and provide services, but it can also increase traffic and alter the character of surrounding communities. A new campus can expand access to education, but it can also contribute to changing land values and the transformation of a neighborhood. A new road can improve connectivity, but it can also make a once-quiet street noisier or more difficult for pedestrians.

None of these consequences automatically make development good or bad. They simply remind us that development is never neutral because every project changes relationships between people and places. The language of progress often emphasizes what is added, while the language of memory asks what is displaced. We need both languages if we are going to understand what is actually happening to Iloilo.

There is another problem with our obsession with development: we sometimes confuse construction with improvement. A building going up is visible, measurable, photographable, and politically useful because it provides an immediate symbol of activity. Preservation is much quieter because a building remaining standing does not produce the same dramatic image as a groundbreaking ceremony. A tree that is not cut down does not receive the same attention as a new landscaped development.

But cities are also improved by what they choose not to destroy. Sometimes progress is a building carefully retained, a street made safer without erasing its character, or a market improved without eliminating the people who depend on it. Sometimes progress is a heritage structure adapted for contemporary use instead of demolished, or an old tree protected because someone understood that its value cannot be recreated simply by planting another one. Sometimes progress is leaving enough empty space for people to breathe.

This is why I am wary of the phrase “unused space.” From a developer’s perspective, an empty lot may represent unrealized economic value. From a child’s perspective, it may be a place to play. From a neighborhood’s perspective, it may be where people gather during emergencies, where vendors temporarily operate, where community events happen, or where residents simply experience a little openness in an increasingly dense environment.

A city obsessed with maximum economic use eventually begins to treat every empty space as a problem. Every vacant property becomes an opportunity, every narrow street becomes a candidate for widening, every old structure becomes a potential redevelopment site, and every quiet neighborhood becomes a possible commercial district. At some point, we have to ask whether a city can become so economically optimized that there is no longer enough room for the informal, the accidental, the communal, and the unprofitable.

This matters because memory is rarely efficient. Memory attaches itself to places that would look insignificant on a development spreadsheet. We remember the shade of a tree, the sound of a particular street, the smell of a bakery, the shape of a staircase, the old sign outside a store, the color of a wall, the route we walked to school, or the corner where we waited for someone who was always late. These details may have no monetary value, but they are part of the emotional architecture of a city.

When those places disappear, something happens that cannot be fully repaired through documentation. We can photograph a building before it is demolished, write an article about it, record interviews, archive old photographs, or create a digital map, and all of these things are important. But documentation is not the same as preservation because a photograph of a place is not the place itself. Memory can be archived, but the physical experience of encountering a familiar place cannot always be reproduced.

This is why I think the question “What are we losing?” should accompany every serious conversation about urban development — not because every old building must be saved, not because every neighborhood must remain untouched, and not because the past should automatically defeat the future. The question matters because it forces us to acknowledge that every act of construction is also an act of selection. When we decide what to build, we are also deciding, directly or indirectly, what will disappear.

The city has already been making these decisions for decades. Some decisions were necessary, some were beneficial, some were controversial, and some were probably made without anyone realizing what would eventually be lost. The problem is that urban memory has a delayed reaction. We often understand the cultural value of a place only after it has disappeared. By then, the argument for preservation becomes painfully simple because we can no longer preserve what is no longer there.

I do not want Iloilo to become a city where every generation has to explain itself by saying, “That used to be here.” That sentence is becoming one of the quietest indicators of urban transformation. It is what we say when a familiar restaurant disappears, when a house is replaced, when a neighborhood changes beyond recognition, when a market is relocated, when an old theater is demolished, when a bookstore closes, or when a tree-lined street becomes another commercial corridor. It is a sentence of memory, but repeated often enough, it becomes a description of cultural loss.

There is a particular danger in allowing nostalgia to become the only language of resistance. Nostalgia can romanticize the past, ignore its inequalities, and make every change appear destructive simply because it is unfamiliar. The Iloilo we remember was not perfect, and we should not pretend that every old structure, old business, or old neighborhood represented a better way of life. The point is not to preserve everything; rather, it is to become more deliberate about deciding what deserves to survive.

That requires something more sophisticated than simply opposing development. It requires planners, developers, government officials, cultural workers, historians, architects, business owners, residents, educators, and communities to talk about cultural memory before construction begins. It requires asking not only what a project will contribute economically but also how it will affect the identity, accessibility, social relationships, and historical continuity of the place. It requires treating cultural impact as something that deserves serious attention rather than as an afterthought once the design has already been finalized.

Iloilo already has planning frameworks that recognize heritage conservation alongside development, including designated heritage areas, district centers, commercial sub-centers, infrastructure corridors, and other forms of planned urban growth. The challenge is not simply whether plans exist; the harder question is how consistently their principles survive contact with actual development pressures. A city plan can identify heritage as important, but the real test comes when preservation competes with money, convenience, traffic, construction schedules, and the desire for something newer.

Perhaps what we need is a different definition of progress. Progress should not mean that the old Iloilo disappears quickly enough for us to prove that we are modern. Progress should mean that a person can see evidence of the past and the future standing beside each other without one automatically destroying the other. Progress should mean that a new campus can rise while nearby communities remain connected to their histories, that commercial growth can happen without erasing every ordinary place, and that infrastructure can improve without making the city less recognizable to the people who call it home.

The Iloilo we remember should not become an exhibit. It should remain part of the living city. Heritage should not be something we visit only when tourists arrive, nor should memory be reduced to old photographs posted during anniversaries and heritage celebrations. A city becomes culturally alive when its past continues to influence how people use its streets, buildings, markets, public spaces, stories, and institutions.

I want Iloilo to grow, but I want it to grow with a memory. I want new universities, new businesses, better roads, improved infrastructure, stronger public services, and more opportunities for young people, but I also want us to become more demanding about what must not disappear in the process. I want our children to inherit not only a richer city but a city they can still recognize through the stories, places, streets, trees, buildings, markets, and ordinary corners that connect them to the generations before them.

Because a city can become richer while becoming poorer in memory. It can become taller while becoming less rooted, more efficient while becoming less intimate, more commercial while becoming less communal, and more modern while becoming strangely unfamiliar to the people who have lived there all their lives. The real danger is not that Iloilo will change because it must, but that we will wake up one day and discover that everything we kept calling progress required us to surrender the very things that made Iloilo worth developing in the first place.

The Iloilo we are building will inevitably be different from the Iloilo we remember. That is not necessarily a tragedy because cities, like people, are supposed to change. But if every generation builds by clearing away what the previous generation knew, then eventually there will be nothing left for the next generation to remember except photographs. And perhaps that is the question we should ask before we celebrate the next groundbreaking, the next road, the next campus, the next commercial complex, or the next tower: when we finish building the Iloilo of tomorrow, will there still be enough of the Iloilo we loved for someone to recognize it?

Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as faculty-in-charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office and as secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.