2024-08-23
28 分钟Good journalism can have an effect on our cities’ quality of life. In this episode, we speak to a media company in the Philippines aiming to make Manila livable. We also visit a new waterfront park near the Port of Los Angeles and flick through the pages of Monocle’s mobility special issue. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello and welcome to the Urbanist, Monaco's program all about the built environment.
I'm your host, Andrew Tuck.
Coming up, it made the persons with disability groups feel powerful that they could actually get in a room with these officials and make their case known.
We're in the Philippines to see how good journalism can push the needle towards better livability in our cities.
Then we head to Los Angeles to see how a new park has reconnected Wilmington residents with their waterfront and given those living next to the busiest container port in North America, a respite from the hustle and bustle.
And we flick through the pages of Monocle magazine's recent mobility special too.
That's all coming up over the next 30 minutes right here on the Urbanist with me, Andrew Tuck.
We here at the Urbanist, for obvious reasons, would like to think that effective and evocative journalism can have a real physical effect on our cities.
That's why we were so excited to learn about a new initiative from Rappler, the Philippines leading digital media company called Make Manila Livable.
The idea aims to improve quality of life in Philippine cities through a collaborative effort from journalists and communities across the country.
Monocle's Asia editor, James Chambers recently caught up with Pierre Renarda, Rappler's Community Lead, to find out more about what this new initiative aims to achieve.
Make Manila Livable is really a collaboration between journalists in Rappler and civil society groups on the ground who are advocating for issues on livability.
So we have groups we've partnered with who are very concerned about bikers rights, for example, or housing rights, open spaces, air pollution, disaster resilience in cities.
So all of these issues are really linked by livability, except that a lot of Filipinos don't really think of livability as an all encompassing issue.
We usually think of it in terms of individual issues.
And so this is the first time that really a newsroom is embracing this as a beat almost and really linking up with grassroots groups, neighborhoods, communities to report about issues that they deal with on a daily basis.
As you said, people don't associate Manila with livability.
It's normally floods, traffic congestion, pollution.
Why did you decide that now is the right time to do this?
We realized that a large part of our audience in Rappler were young Filipinos, so Gen Z millennials.