The City Planning and Development Office (CPDO) has completed the digital twin of 23 out of the city’s 128 barangays that aims to audit and map out structures and natural covers.
CPDO head Donna Tabangin said the city’s technical personnel will help in the audit and mapping of the barangays to complete their digital twins.
The digital twin program of the city government is aimed at auditing and mapping structures and natural covers in barangays to determine if they have exceeded their respective carrying capacities.
She said once the city government’s team completed the audit in a barangay, the results will be turned over to concerned officials for them to conduct public consultations with constituents on the ways that will be adopted to move forward.
Under the digital twin process, color codes are assigned to single-use structures and buildings that are used as apartments or transient houses, commercial and institutional, and overplayed with the existing natural forest cover and open spaces to determine the areas considered to have exceeded the prescribed density and carrying capacity.
The digital twin of the city’s barangays will also help in identifying the structures that have been constructed without building permits to make way for the owners to legitimize the existence of the structures.
Tabangin said during previous public consultations conducted in some barangays, some residents signified their willingness to secure building permits for their structures but their problem is the absence of titles over their properties.
She recommended for the city government to adopt certain policies that will allow owners of structures constructed without building permits to execute the appropriate affidavit of undertaking for their compliance to the same within a reasonable period of time to pave the way for the reduction of the more than 41,000 structures that have been built without permits.
The city government is committed to completing the digital twins of the city’s barangays in the next several months so that the concerned barangay officials can conduct consultations with their respective constituents.
Tabangin admitted the initial assessment of the density of the barangays show a lot have already exceeded the required density in their places that have an impact on the state of their open spaces. – PIO release
