I am dedicating my column today to my favorite Davao City Planning and Development Officer, Mario Luis “Louie” Jacinto, who passed away last October 14, 2026.
His wife, Tita Malou, shared on her Facebook page what Tito Louie wrote before he passed: “When I die, do not mourn for me.” Because he has “lived a good and magical life,” a life with “humility, strength of character, and constancy of purpose.”
Although my heart breaks because Tito Louie was not just a colleague, but a good friend to me and my mom, I will not mourn as he asked. I will instead celebrate his life of service to the city we both love by reflecting on how we should design Davao City based on what I learned from Louie Jacinto.
When I attended the opening of Davao Design Week (DDW) 2026 last October 8, 2026 at La Herencia Davao, I actually thought of Tito Louie because he would have loved it. He loved interacting with diverse citizens of the city and listening to their ideas. He told me that the key to a good plan is to first ask who designs it and for whom. The first, non-negotiable step, he said, is a binding commitment to collective, diverse participation.
DDW’s goal was “to engage Davaoeños in co-designing regenerative projects and practices” by fostering “cross-sector/transdisciplinary collaboration” using the “bottom-up approach.” Co-designing, regenerative, collaboration, bottom-up. All of Tito Louie’s favorite words. And mine, too.
When I first read DDW’s concept note drafted by my high school classmate, Marion Descallar, and shared by DDW’s event lead Mark Seng, I got so excited that kindred spirits who are also very smart and talented people have joined forces to take a pro-active approach in designing our beloved city.
I was happy that I saw Ivan Cortez, the current City Planning and Development Officer, at DDW and actively participating in the town hall forum. When a participant asked where she could pitch an idea she has to the city government, Ivan did not hesitate to respond: “You can bring it to me directly.” And there I felt the spirit of Louie Jacinto in action (Ivan worked with Tito Louie and trained under him). That’s the city planning office I remember so fondly — a planning office that is open and happy to co-design and collaborate with its citizens.
DDW reminded us that we need more public consultations that must be more than informational briefings. They must be structured as deliberative forums where barangay residents, farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, women, youth, and informal settlers sit alongside engineers, ecologists, heritage experts, and economists. Not as spectators but as co-designers.
Digital platforms can expand reach, but they cannot replace the patient, barangay-level dialogue that builds trust and surfaces local knowledge. The standard should be simple: no major development project moves forward without documented, community-validated consent, particularly on ancestral domain lands.
DDW also emphasized how Davao must treat its green spaces and agricultural lands as critical infrastructure. Regenerative agriculture and circular economy models offer a way forward. The city can scale models being used by existing farms in the city by protecting prime agricultural areas from conversion, providing training and market support for regenerative farmers, and integrating organic waste composting into barangay-level waste management.
DDW also highlighted that heritage must be the connective tissue of this new urban vision. Davao’s identity is not found in its malls, but in its sari-sari stores and old streets, its indigenous villages, and its layered cultural history. Heritage walks, adaptive reuse of historic structures, and the formal designation of heritage zones can anchor local economic revitalization while reinforcing a sense of belonging.
I miss the Davao City of my childhood where we had 15-minute neighborhoods. The organizing principle around the 15-minute neighborhood is a polycentric city made of complete neighborhoods where most daily needs — groceries, healthcare, schools, fresh food — are within a short walk or bike ride.
We also need to bring back that Davao culture of “concerned citizens” who call radio programs to complain about their absent barangay captains and corrupt local officials, who organize consumer groups to protest against abusive multinational corporations, who walk in without formal invitation to city council sessions bringing their proposed draft ordinances.
We used to design and build our city together. Now we leave most of the work to different committees and offices that work in silos. The transport people do roads. The environment people do trees. The waste people do trucks. Nobody talks to each other and the city ends up with a widened highway with utility poles in the middle of the added lane and a compost facility nobody can walk to. That’s not planning.
It’s time we merge them. A street design that is walkable because it’s breathable because it’s circular. Same drawing. Same conversation. Same budget line. And it must involve the entire community.
Davao’s tagline is “Life is Here.” A city designed for vehicles pushes life to the margins. A city designed with its people — all its people, across every discipline and every community — puts life back at the center. The tools are already on the table — the Streetscape Ordinance, the footpath policy, the bike plan, the circular waste strategy. What’s missing is the will to stop treating walkability, breathability, and circularity as separate checklist items and start treating them as the same conversation.
The key words are integration and conversation. We need to create a venue, a platform, a mechanism where our planners and decision makers can have these regular conversations with our citizens. We must all be talking with each other often and integrate our plans.
I remember we used to have a very lively and dynamic City Development Council (CDC) where civil society actively participates in the planning process and in the implementation and monitoring of every project as well. Let’s bring that back. A CDC meeting that is only composed of government representatives is not actually people’s participation in the planning process, it is only a department heads’ meeting where everyone just nods in agreement for fear of retaliation. Where’s the fun in that? Let’s hear other voices and encourage healthy dissent.
As the message of Davao Design Week says: “We design better when we design together.” As citizens who love our city, let’s stop waiting to be consulted and start showing up to co-design. Bring your grievance, your memory of how your street used to work, your knowledge of the water, your fear about what gets lost. Bring your anger if you have it — anger is data.
Our City Planning and Development Officer said you can bring them all directly to him. Maybe he can host a regular town hall meeting for Davao’s concerned citizens as well. The table is open. Let’s build this city together. Louie Jacinto would be so proud.
