Federal Foreign Minister Dr. Guido Westerwelle,

Foreign Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand, Dr. Surapong Tovichaikul,

Mayor Klaus Wowereit of the City of Berlin,

Senator Cornelia Yzer of the Berlin Ministry of Economics, Technology, and Research,

Ambassador VolkerSchlegel, President of the Asia Pacific Forum,

Distinguished guests,

Ladies and gentlemen.

            It is a great privilege and pleasure for me to be able to come to Berlin at this time and join you in this forum of the Asia Pacific Weeks 2013 on smart cities.

            I would like to pay tribute to the hard work put in by Ambassador Volker and his team at the Asia Pacific Forum, Senator Cornelia Yzer and the Berlin Ministry of Economics, Technology, and Research, and everyone else who had a hand in executing this project.

            Let me also convey my appreciation to our energetic and efficient Ambassador, Maria Cleofe Natividad, and her team at the Philippine embassy in Berlin, for making sure I would not miss this date.

            Having served as CEO of Makati, our premier city in the Philippines, for over 20 years before I became Vice President, I am even more deeply appreciative of the recognition you pay to our city in these Asia Pacific Weeks.

            Given my official responsibilities as chairman of the Philippine Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council, I take a profound interest in anything and everything related to housing, land use, urban planning and development.

            In this job, I am expected to build 3.6 million homes to fill a multi-year housing backlog. But one just cannot put in houses here and there in an urban setting, without reshaping the total environment. One must think of building homes that contribute to the building of smart cities.

            The concept of smart city is a relatively new one, but it is well understood. It relies much on the interplay between physical capital (meaning hard infrastructure) and intellectual and social capital, meaning the availability and quality of knowledge, communication and social infrastructure.

            Wikipedia looks at the smart city as a strategic device to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework, and to highlight the growing importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs), social and environmental capital in profiling the competitiveness of the cities. It is not the same as the more technologically-charged digital or intelligent city, but quite close.

            Smart cities and even smarter villages are indispensable to the building of a smarter planet. And, given all the environmental challenges we face, this is what our generation and this millennium need to build---a smarter planet. It is the best gift we could present to the next succeeding generations who will inhabit our planet after us.

            The environmentalist’s and urban planner’s critique of many of today’s cities is that they do not seem to reveal much of our intelligence. What they seem to show is the shortsightedness of the planners and the builders----something we should now correct.

            We are supposed to be more intelligent than ants, but it looks like we could learn from ants. As Sir Crispin Tickell, the warden of Green College of Oxford and author of “Climate Change and World Affairs,” points out, “If the ants can work out the rightsize, character and function for their cities, we should be able to do the same for ours.”

            This should result, he says---and here he quotes the world famous architect Richard Rogers, who is known not only for designing the George Pompidou Center in Paris and Lloyd’s of London but also for large scale master planning in Shanghai, London and right here in Berlin---this should result, he says, in “a dense and many-centered city, a city of overlapping activity, an ecological city, a city of easy contact, an equitable city, an open city, and not the least a beautiful city in which art, architecture and landscape can move and satisfy the human spirit.”

            Wherever we are today, we face the same challenges—greenhouse gas emissions, urban sprawl, human-induced climate change, degraded natural environment, etc. None of these admit of easy solutions. We need to learn from each other---and we need to learn from each other’s successes, failures and mistakes.

            I am here to learn from your successes, and you could learn from our failures and mistakes. I am sure it would be a fair and highly profitable exchange.

            Through the leadership of Mayor Wowereit, the City of Berlin has been known to promote the most active collaboration amongst the world’s cities in addressing common challenges not just within the context of the Asia Pacific Weeks, but above all within the ambit of EU and ASEAN cooperation.

            We are quite eager to profit from your experience. At the same time we are equally eager to share with you our own.

            As the longest serving mayor and CEO of Makati, now the Philippines premier financial district, I learned three things:

            First, cities are for people to live in, play, go to school, work, and develop lasting bonds with family, friends, and community. Even in the poorest of cities, this requires prioritization of basic services. In Makati, we had to make sure that every Makati resident had an equal access to education, health services, and employment opportunities.

            To make the city internationally competitive, we computerized all operations of the government, with emphasis on the requirements of business, which has made the city, the seat of all the foreign diplomatic establishments in the country, also the headquarters of all the country’s top corporations.

            Second, cities connect to other cities, and this connection become seven more necessary as shared problems multiply. In a metropolis like Metro Manila, which is a cluster of sixteen cities and one municipality, the daily challenge of traffic congestion, infrastructure integration, informal settlements requires coordinated action.

            Third, as even the most developed countries are finding out, government cannot go it alone. Public-private partnership, with civil society chipping in, is the new model. Government needs strong partners from the business community and the private sector, just as the latter needs the prudential presence of government in many of its endeavors. I am sure some of our most distinguished architects and urban planners like Mr. Palafox and Mr. Coscuella, who are taking part in this celebration, will confirm this view from their end.

            In fact, based on this type of cooperation and synergy, we are now working on a sustainable development plan for Metro Manila that will create a new urban core for the metropolis in Makati and Taguig. This will draw on the experience of other cities in the world in meeting the various challenges of urbanization, including urban housing, disaster preparedness, risk reduction and management, etc.

Quite instructive and helpful to us are the experiences of our own neighbors: Thailand, with its low-cost pre-fabricated homes implemented through public-private partnership; Hong Kong, with its subsidized public housing; Saigon with its walkable mixed-use neighborhoods; Jakarta, with its innovative partnership with Deutsche Post and UNDP for its disaster preparedness program.

            We have much to do, and much to learn from each other. This is why aside from asking all of you to come and visit us in Makati, I really have no words with which to thank you for making it possible for me to be here.

            Maraming salamat po.

            Danke schoen!

            Mabuhay and good afternoon.