There is something fundamentally limiting about the way we talk about the Pasig River. For decades, we have spoken of cleaning it, rehabilitating it, saving it, and, more recently, beautifying it. All are necessary. But these words also reveal how we have come to see the river: as a problem that needs to be fixed rather than an asset waiting to create value.
Perhaps it is time to ask a different question. What if we treated the Pasig River not simply as an environmental concern, but as productive national infrastructure?
That change in perspective matters because the Pasig River is one of the few assets in Metro Manila capable of creating environmental, economic, social, cultural, and urban value at the same time. It cuts through the country’s political and economic center, connects Manila Bay and Laguna de Bay, passes through important commercial districts and historic communities, and touches the lives of millions of people.
Yet for much of modern Metro Manila’s development, we have behaved as though the river was an inconvenience.
This was not always the case. Manila grew around the Pasig. Long before highways, expressways, and railways determined how the metropolis moved, the river connected people, goods, settlements, and commerce. Communities developed along its banks because proximity to the river meant access. Trade depended on it. Some of the country’s most important historical districts emerged because of it.
Then Metro Manila effectively turned its back on the river.
Roads became our primary development corridors. Buildings increasingly faced streets rather than waterways. Industrialization transformed parts of the river into convenient channels for waste. Informal settlements grew in areas where formal urban planning had failed. Eventually, the Pasig stopped being viewed as an artery of metropolitan life and became something closer to a boundary, a drainage system, and an environmental liability.
We have paid heavily for that neglect.
Government and civil society have spent decades trying to reverse it. There have been rehabilitation programs, relocation efforts, wastewater interventions, ferry services, riverbank improvements, and, more recently, renewed efforts to create public spaces along the Pasig. These initiatives deserve support. A river cannot become economically productive if it remains polluted, inaccessible, or unsafe.
But cleaning the river should be the beginning of the strategy, not its ultimate objective.
As part of my doctoral studies in Public Policies and Management at the Lyceum of the Philippines University, under the guidance of Dr. Bethzaida Mary Joy N. Dela Cruz, I recently had the opportunity to examine the Pasig River as a policy challenge and prepare a memorandum addressed to the President. The exercise required looking beyond the familiar questions of pollution, rehabilitation, and beautification and asking what government ultimately wants the river to become.
As I worked through the policy problem and possible recommendations, one realization kept returning: we may be underestimating the Pasig River because we continue to look at it primarily through the lens of rehabilitation.
The larger opportunity is regeneration.
Rehabilitation asks how we repair what has been damaged. Regeneration asks what new value we can create after we repair it. That distinction became, for me, the more interesting public policy question. If government is already investing political attention, public resources, and institutional effort in bringing the Pasig back to life, then success should not end with a cleaner and more attractive river. The objective should be to convert that environmental recovery into lasting economic, social, cultural, and urban value.
Consider mobility. Metro Manila has one of the most difficult transportation environments of any major Asian metropolis, yet a natural transport corridor already runs through its center. The Pasig River Ferry Service has demonstrated the possibility of water-based transportation, but ferry transport should not exist merely as an alternative people remember when the roads become unbearable. Properly integrated with rail, buses, jeepneys, pedestrian networks, and commercial districts, the river could become a genuine component of metropolitan mobility.
The same river can create economic value along its banks.
Around the world, waterfronts that were once industrial, polluted, or neglected have been transformed into productive urban districts. Singapore’s river cleanup became part of a much larger transformation of its urban environment. Seoul reclaimed the Cheonggyecheon from infrastructure that had overwhelmed it and turned the waterway into a major public space. Other cities have similarly demonstrated that waterways can support tourism, commerce, mobility, recreation, heritage, and property development.
Metro Manila should not simply copy these models. Our institutions, density, communities, economics, and social realities are different. But these experiences demonstrate an important principle: environmental recovery and economic development do not have to compete with each other. Done properly, each can make the other more sustainable.
Imagine parts of the Pasig becoming genuine economic corridors where ferry terminals connect naturally with commercial centers; heritage districts become living destinations rather than neglected relics; restaurants, cultural spaces, markets, and small enterprises populate carefully planned riverfront areas; parks and pedestrian corridors give communities access to the water; and private development contributes to maintaining the environmental quality that makes those investments valuable in the first place.
That is shared value in a very practical sense.
Businesses benefit because attractive, accessible, and environmentally healthy waterfronts create commercial opportunities and property value. Communities benefit from jobs, mobility, public spaces, and economic activity. Government benefits from investment and potentially stronger local revenues. The environment benefits because maintaining the river becomes economically important rather than merely a regulatory obligation.
There is, however, an important warning.
Turning the Pasig River into an asset must not mean turning it into real estate for the privileged.
Urban regeneration has a familiar danger. Government improves an area, private investment follows, property values rise, and eventually the communities that lived there before the transformation can no longer afford to remain. A beautifully rehabilitated Pasig that simply transfers value from poorer communities to wealthier investors would be difficult to describe as successful regeneration.
The people living and working around the river must therefore be participants in its transformation, not obstacles to it.
This means deliberately thinking about livelihood opportunities, affordable housing, access to public spaces, community enterprises, transport connectivity, and the role of local governments. Riverfront development should create opportunities for small entrepreneurs alongside large developers. Heritage should not become decoration. Communities should not become scenery. Public access to the river must remain genuinely public.
There is another challenge, and perhaps it is the hardest one: governance.
The Pasig River does not respect political boundaries. It flows through multiple jurisdictions and intersects with the responsibilities of national agencies, local governments, environmental regulators, transportation authorities, infrastructure agencies, private property owners, businesses, and communities. Everyone has a stake in the river, which also means responsibility can easily become fragmented.
One agency can clean it. Another can operate transport. Another can regulate development. Local governments can manage their respective riverbanks. Private developers can build individual projects. But without a common economic, environmental, and social vision, we risk producing attractive pieces without creating a functioning whole.
The Pasig therefore needs to be understood as one interconnected economic, social, and ecological system.
This may ultimately require the biggest change in how we measure success. We tend to count what government does: garbage removed, kilometers rehabilitated, structures cleared, ferry passengers carried, parks constructed, or projects completed. Those indicators matter, but they mostly measure activity.
We should also measure value.
Has river regeneration created livelihoods? Has river transport reduced travel time? Has new investment been generated? Has economic activity increased without pushing vulnerable communities out? Have heritage assets been restored and made economically sustainable? Has biodiversity improved? Are surrounding communities safer and more resilient? And perhaps the simplest measure of all: do people actually want to spend time beside the Pasig again?
Those questions change what success looks like.
There is symbolism here as well. The condition of the Pasig has long reflected the condition of Metro Manila itself: enormously productive yet poorly coordinated, historically rich yet frequently neglectful of its heritage, surrounded by economic value yet burdened by inequality, capable of extraordinary transformation yet too often accustomed to accepting dysfunction.
Perhaps that is why restoring the river matters beyond the river.
The opportunity before us is not simply to make the Pasig cleaner or prettier. It is to demonstrate that environmental restoration can generate economic opportunity, that infrastructure can create social value, that private investment can coexist with public access, and that development does not always have to choose between growth and inclusion.
For too long, Metro Manila developed with its back turned to the Pasig River.
Maybe the next chapter of the metropolis begins by turning around and facing it again.
Because the real measure of the Pasig River’s rehabilitation will not ultimately be how clean its water becomes, how beautiful its esplanades look, or how many kilometers of riverbank we redevelop. It will be whether Filipinos once again find economic, social, cultural, and e nvironmental value in the river.
The Pasig River does not have to remain a problem we keep spending money to fix. It can become an asset that continues to create value.
