Building the confidence to reimagine Metro Manila

I still remember the hush of the Aldwych library at 11 p.m., my only companions the low hum of fluorescent lights and the reassuring creak of ancient floorboards.

- ANNA MAE YU LAMENTILLO

Back in Diliman in Quezon City, as an evening student at the Malcolm Hall - College of Law, I was accustomed to the evening chorus of jeepneys winding through University Avenue, the lively banter of street vendors outside the campus gates, and the ever-present sense of urgency as communities pressed against infrastructure that was never quite enough. There, every conversation was a negotiation over access—how to reach the nearest clinic, how to find secure housing, how to create space in a city built for everyone else.

In London, I found myself alone at a long desk, surrounded by towering stacks of architecture journals and planning treatises, wrestling with questions I’d never dared to ask back home: Could I, a product of Metro Manila’s sprawling patchwork, learn to design coherence? Could I translate ideas from ivory-towered texts into real change for the people I left behind?