What does an Ilonggo child see when looking at Iloilo?

When we say that Iloilo is a livable city, I sometimes wonder what exactly we mean by livable and, more importantly, for whom. Adults tend to measure a city through things that make sense to adults: business districts, restaurants, hospitals, schools, shopping malls, traffic flow, property values, tourism numbers, public infrastructure, and new developments. We celebrate the city when another building rises, another establishment opens, another road is improved, or another award recognizes Iloilo as a desirable place to live. But if we want to know what kind of city Iloilo really is, perhaps we should stop looking at it through the eyes of adults for a moment and ask a much simpler question: What does an Ilonggo child see when looking at Iloilo?

A child does not see the city the way an urban planner sees it. A child does not immediately notice zoning classifications, investment figures, property developments, road widening, business permits, or the language of economic growth. A child sees whether there is somewhere safe to walk, somewhere interesting to sit, somewhere to run, somewhere to read, somewhere to ask questions, somewhere to play, and somewhere to simply exist without having to buy anything. A child sees the city at eye level, and sometimes that perspective exposes things adults have become too accustomed to ignoring.

Take the sidewalk, for example. For an adult, a sidewalk may simply be a strip of concrete beside a road, something to step on while going from one destination to another. For a child, however, a sidewalk can determine whether walking to school feels safe or frightening, whether a parent can push a stroller, whether an elderly grandparent can move comfortably, or whether a family must step onto the road because parked vehicles have occupied the pedestrian space. A city that cannot consistently protect the space where children walk should be careful about calling itself livable.

I often think that one of the most revealing ways to understand a city is to walk through it with a child. Suddenly, the things adults ignore become impossible to ignore, including broken pavements, motorcycles occupying pedestrian spaces, speeding vehicles, uncovered drainage, tangled wires, excessive signage, missing crossings, narrow walkways, and streets designed primarily around automobiles. A child does not need a lecture about pedestrian infrastructure to understand that a road is dangerous because the body instinctively knows when there is nowhere safe to stand. The city teaches the child its priorities through every sidewalk, crossing, curb, traffic light, and street corner.

Then there are the parks. We often celebrate public parks because they make cities look more attractive, provide spaces for recreation, and contribute to tourism and urban beautification. But a child does not care very much about whether a park looks good in an official photograph if there is nowhere to climb, run, imagine, discover, or gather with other children. A park should not simply be a decorative space that adults admire from a distance; it should be a place where children are allowed to be noisy, curious, physical, imaginative, and alive.

This is where Iloilo’s many public spaces deserve to be examined from a different perspective. We have invested in esplanades, plazas, promenades, heritage areas, landscaped spaces, and other places that contribute to the city’s public character. But public space should be evaluated not only according to how beautiful it looks or how many visitors it attracts, but also according to what kinds of human activity it permits. If a child can only enjoy a public space by being accompanied by an adult who is prepared to spend money nearby, then we should ask whether the space is genuinely public or simply adjacent to consumption.

A city designed around consumption teaches children a particular lesson. It tells them that entertainment happens inside malls, that comfort is purchased from cafés, that recreation requires entrance fees, and that leisure is something attached to commercial activity. There is nothing inherently wrong with malls because they provide important economic and social spaces, especially in a tropical city where people seek shade, cooling, food, and entertainment. But if the mall becomes one of the few places where children can safely spend time, then the problem is not that malls are too successful but that genuinely public alternatives may not be sufficient.

Iloilo has an extraordinary cultural inheritance, yet I wonder how much of that inheritance is actually visible to the child walking through the city. Heritage buildings can become background scenery when children are never invited to understand the stories behind them. A century-old structure may be beautiful, but beauty alone does not communicate memory. If we want children to grow up caring about heritage, we need to give them opportunities to encounter heritage as something living, understandable, and connected to their own lives.

Imagine a child walking through Jaro and seeing the old buildings, the cathedral, the plaza, the streets, the market, and the layers of history surrounding the neighborhood. What does the child understand from that landscape? Does the city tell the child that these places matter because they carry stories, or does it simply present them as obstacles to traffic, opportunities for commercial development, or picturesque backgrounds for photographs? A heritage building becomes meaningful to a child when the city gives that child a reason to care about what happened there.

Museums should also be part of this conversation. A museum that feels intimidating, overly formal, or disconnected from children’s experiences may preserve objects without necessarily creating curiosity. A child should be able to enter a museum and feel that the city is speaking directly to them through artifacts, photographs, stories, sounds, images, and questions. The best cultural spaces do not merely tell children what happened; they make children wonder what might have happened, who lived here, who was excluded, who created something, who resisted, who remembered, and why the story still matters.

The public library presents another test of livability. We often discuss libraries as places for books, but a library is also a place where a child can discover that knowledge belongs in public spaces and does not always have to be purchased. A child who has access to a welcoming library learns that curiosity is legitimate, that questions deserve answers, and that there should be places in a city where one can spend time without being required to buy something. If Iloilo wants to cultivate generations of readers, researchers, artists, scientists, writers, and citizens, then its libraries should be treated as essential civic infrastructure rather than optional cultural amenities.

Markets tell children a different story about the city. In a market, a child encounters food, language, labor, negotiation, tradition, smell, sound, livelihood, and the complicated relationship between producers and consumers. The market is one of the places where a child can see that the city is not simply composed of offices, malls, restaurants, and government buildings because it is also sustained by people who wake up early to sell vegetables, fish, meat, fruits, cooked food, household necessities, and countless other things. A city that protects and improves its markets teaches children that ordinary labor deserves dignity.

Traffic, meanwhile, may be one of the most powerful teachers of all. Children learn very quickly that streets belong primarily to vehicles because they see adults waiting for cars to pass, crossing between traffic, holding their parents’ hands tightly, and sometimes choosing longer routes because the obvious route feels unsafe. They learn that speed is often more important than pedestrian comfort and that the person inside the vehicle has more power than the person walking beside it. If this is what a child repeatedly experiences, then the city is quietly teaching a civic lesson about whose movement matters most.

We should be especially careful about the lessons hidden in ordinary infrastructure. A curb tells a child whether wheelchair users and people with mobility difficulties were considered in the design. A pedestrian crossing tells a child whether walking is recognized as a legitimate form of transportation. A public toilet tells a child whether bodily needs are considered part of public life. A drinking fountain tells a child whether public spaces can provide basic necessities. Even a bench communicates something because it tells people whether they are allowed to stop, rest, observe, and remain in a place without having to spend money.

Public art has a similar role. A sculpture, mural, installation, monument, or community artwork can become a child’s first encounter with the idea that a city can express itself creatively. But public art also raises a difficult question: whose stories are represented in the city, and whose stories remain invisible? When children look at the monuments and artworks around them, they are already beginning to construct an understanding of who matters in their community. Public art is therefore not simply decoration because it participates in the construction of collective memory.

This is particularly important in a city with a strong cultural identity. Iloilo has stories that extend far beyond the familiar narratives repeated in tourism campaigns and official celebrations. There are stories of workers, fisherfolk, farmers, women, indigenous communities, migrants, children, artists, vendors, educators, religious communities, and ordinary families whose experiences have contributed to the city. A child should encounter a city complicated enough to include many voices because civic imagination becomes impoverished when children are given only one polished version of where they live.

Perhaps this is why I am increasingly interested in children’s perspectives even when I am not talking about children’s books. Children are among the most honest urban critics because they have not yet fully learned which inconveniences adults are supposed to accept. They will ask why a sidewalk is broken, why a building is abandoned, why there is nowhere to play, why they cannot enter a certain place, why the river smells a particular way, why cars are allowed to occupy pedestrian spaces, or why a beautiful old building is being neglected. Adults often answer these questions with complicated explanations, but sometimes the child’s question is already the more important one.

“What is this place for?” is a profoundly political question for a child. It can be asked about a park, a plaza, a library, a museum, a street, a market, a heritage building, or even an empty lot. The answer reveals who the city was designed for and what kinds of behavior the city considers valuable. If a space is designed primarily for vehicles, then the answer is transportation; if it is designed primarily for commerce, then the answer is consumption; if it is designed for public gathering, then the answer becomes community.

This brings us back to the word livable. Livability should not be reduced to whether a city has good restaurants, attractive developments, convenient shopping, functioning hospitals, universities, or growing businesses. These things matter, but livability also concerns whether people of different ages, abilities, incomes, and circumstances can participate meaningfully in urban life. A city cannot be fully livable if children, elderly people, persons with disabilities, pedestrians, cyclists, informal workers, and low-income families experience the same streets and public spaces very differently from those who have access to private vehicles and commercial spaces.

Iloilo’s children also deserve a city where boredom is possible. That may sound like a strange demand in an age obsessed with entertainment, but boredom can be productive because it gives children time to observe, imagine, invent games, talk to one another, and discover their surroundings. If every safe and comfortable space requires organized activities, adult supervision, digital entertainment, or commercial spending, children lose opportunities for spontaneous interaction with the city. A truly child-friendly city should have places where nothing particular is required of a child except being there.

There is also something deeply democratic about giving children public spaces. A child who can sit in a plaza without buying anything, read in a library without being rushed, walk along a safe sidewalk, visit a museum without feeling unwelcome, play in a park, observe public art, or explore a market is learning that the city belongs to them too. This is important because citizenship begins long before a person is old enough to vote. Children learn belonging through physical experience, and they learn exclusion just as quickly.

When children are pushed into private spaces, the city becomes fragmented. The wealthy child experiences one Iloilo through private schools, gated communities, cars, malls, clubs, and controlled recreational spaces, while another child experiences Iloilo through crowded streets, public transportation, informal settlements, public schools, markets, and limited access to recreational facilities. They technically inhabit the same city, but they are not necessarily experiencing the same city. Livability that depends heavily on household income is not a particularly convincing form of livability.

This is why urban development should be discussed not only in terms of what we build but also in terms of what children are allowed to experience. A new road may improve traffic but make walking more difficult. A commercial development may create jobs but reduce public space. A beautification project may make a plaza attractive but remove the informal activities that made it useful. A heritage project may restore a building beautifully while disconnecting it from the communities that once gave it meaning.

Development always involves choices, and children eventually inherit the consequences of those choices. They inherit the streets we design, the parks we protect, the rivers we clean or neglect, the buildings we preserve or demolish, the libraries we fund or ignore, and the public spaces we make accessible or exclusive. Adults may think of these decisions as technical matters, but children experience them as the physical conditions of their lives. The city we build today becomes the childhood memory they carry tomorrow.

Iloilo therefore needs to ask a different set of questions when evaluating its future. Where can a child walk alone safely, or at least walk with reasonable protection from traffic? Where can a child spend an afternoon without spending money, encounter art without needing a ticket, discover history without feeling bored, and enter a library without feeling that the place was designed for someone else? Where can children encounter the river, the market, the heritage districts, the plazas, and the neighborhoods not merely as scenery but as places that belong to their understanding of the city?

These questions may sound simple, but simple questions can expose complicated priorities. We can spend enormous amounts of money creating impressive structures while overlooking the small things that determine whether a child can actually use a city comfortably. We can celebrate another development project while ignoring the sidewalk outside it. We can build beautiful public spaces while failing to ask whether children, elderly residents, and persons with disabilities can reach them safely.

Perhaps the most revealing test of Iloilo’s future is therefore not what an investor sees when arriving in the city, nor what a tourist photographs during a weekend visit. Perhaps the better test is what a 10-year-old child notices while walking through the city with a parent, a teacher, a grandparent, or a group of friends. Does the child see a city that invites curiosity, movement, discovery, imagination, and belonging, or does the child see traffic, walls, restrictions, commercial spaces, broken sidewalks, and places where adults repeatedly say, “You cannot go there”?

I want an Iloilo where a child can recognize the city as something more than a backdrop to adult life. I want children to know that a plaza is theirs, that a library is theirs, that a museum is theirs, that the sidewalk belongs to them as much as it belongs to the person driving a car, and that heritage is not merely something adults protect after they have finished making decisions about it. I want them to encounter enough public space, culture, history, nature, art, and community to understand that a city is something people collectively create and continuously negotiate. Most of all, I want them to grow up believing that they have a right to ask whether the city is working for them.

Because perhaps the most important question about Iloilo is not whether it is livable. The more uncomfortable question is who gets to live it comfortably. If a city is beautiful but difficult to walk through, developed but difficult to access, culturally rich but culturally intimidating, prosperous but unequal, and full of public spaces that feel inaccessible to children, then we should be honest about the limits of our definition of livability. A city worthy of its children should not merely ask them to adapt to the Iloilo adults have built; adults should also be willing to redesign Iloilo according to what children deserve.

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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.