Birthdays of cities, if they have one, don't normally merit a mention in the news, and when they do, they are nothing more than occasions packaged for tourists.
Like Kolkata's, until the city disowned Job Charnock as its founder and declared it doesn't have a birthday. But when Makati in the Philippines turned 333 on June 2, I thought I shouldn't let the event pass unnoticed.
Makati deserves a special mention because it's probably Asia's only privately developed urban settlement that grew to become a major city and eventually a nation's commercial capital.
There are other cities in the Philippines that are older. Cebu is 482 years old, Manila 432. But Makati is unique because it appeared from nowhere. It used to be part swamp and part grassland, where nobody lived and only cattle and horses grazed.
Not knowing what to do with it, the Spanish rulers sold the property to a private Spanish businessman, who sold it to another, who sold it to yet another, until the 1,650-hectare hacienda finally came into the folds of the Ayalas, the powerful Spanish business group that gave the Philippines its first distillery, its first commercial bank, its first insurance company, and, as it turned out, also its first modern city.
The Ayalas turned the area completely around. They built the infrastructure, the services, the housing, the utilities and the offices that made Makati, by the 1950s, a showcase of urban development unmatched anywhere in Asia.
Even in 1970, the year of my first visit to the Philippines, there was nothing in the region to equal the grandeur of Ayala Avenue, lined on both sides with sleek, mid-rise (high-rise then) office buildings standing neck to neck to form a spectacular canyon of modern architecture.
The avenue was then called the Wall Street of the East, and it truly was. It drew companies and financial institutions from all over the world, and for newcomers in the Philippines there wasn't a more coveted address.
The Ayalas wanted to develop Makati as an integrated residential and business community adjoining Manila. The experiment started in 1931 with the creation of Forbes Park, a cluster of gorgeous Spanish-style bungalows, set on spacious, wooded and beautifully landscaped lawns, which became the haunt of the Philippines' rich and famous.
My first encounter with Forbes Park was overwhelming. It used to be called Millionaires' Village then. There were two Forbes Parks actually and each had high compound walls surrounding it, with armed sentries guarding its gates.
Inside was a different world. The roads were quiet and leafy, the lawns, smooth and manicured, had no boundary walls. The houses stood surrounded by huge, canopied narras (the Filipino teak) and mahoganies, and enormous driveways led to wooden and wrought iron doors of many shapes and sizes, in the perfect Spanish style. Hardly any people moved around.
It was a little eerie. The whole place was steeped in unbroken silence and I wasn't used to it.
Over the years, other 'villages', or walled compounds with private security, followed -- San Lorenzo, Bel Air, Urdaneta, San Miguel, Magallanes and Dasmarinas -- and a whole new lifestyle evolved in Makati of bungalow living in a sophisticated urban setting.
It was a concept new to Asia -- that of planned sub-divisions where greens and open spaces had precedence -- and was quickly copied in other countries.
The Ayalas also introduced Asia to the idea of organised shopping-and-entertainment complexes within a city. When the Makati Commercial Center opened for business in 1956, complete with American-style supermarkets and department stores, shops and boutiques with glamourously dressed windows, speciality restaurants, cinemas and huge open car parks with neatly marked bays, it was well ahead of its time. It heralded a totally new commercial culture that, to this day, no visitor to Manila wants to miss.
Although its municipal administration has now passed into public hands, Makati remains a city overwhelmingly driven by the private sector and still dictates the character of urban living in the rest of the country.
If Glorietta, with a cobweb of skywalks in the heart of the Makati Commercial Center, sparkles like a star, Rockwell Center, Makati's newest sensation, dazzles like the sun. This 15.5-hectare complex of residential condos, shopping malls and office buildings on the Pasig River, with landscaped spaces and pedestrian-friendly walkways, is so modern that it could be mistaken for 21st century USA.
And beyond Forbes Park, in Fort Bonifacio, on the site of a former US army base, is rising a modern, technologically advanced and environment-friendly Global City that world-renowned planners and architects are designing from the ground up. It will be dedicated to the information technology industry.
Though Makati has just lost control of Fort Bonifacio to nearby Taguig, which, by the way, was 416 last April, its influence on this mega-project is all too obvious.
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