As the capital goes, so goes the country.

Cities define the quality of human development.

By their sheer economic base, urban centers set the pace for socio-economic progress.

And so they are the convenient yardstick for measuring the  development of other local government units.

In fact, the history of nations can often be understood through the success of its cities. More than seats of power, they are the economic growth centers.

They host the biggest learning centers, attracting the brightest of minds. Being hubs of socio-economic mobility and opportunity, cities have motivated rural-to-urban migration. Undoubtedly, cities are centers of innovation.

The State of Asian Cities Report for 2010 - 2011 of UNESCAP and UN-HABITAT states that in the Asia-Pacific region, 42.2 percent of the population now live in urban areas. With the transformation of Asian cities from manufacturing and production hubs to centers of knowledge economies, innovation appears to be a fundamental challenge for urban stakeholders, given the need to transform, align, and develop human capital and to build the infrastructure to accommodate development.

This may not be too much of a challenge for a city-state like Singapore. But for the urbanizing nations of Southeast Asia, not to mention the least urbanized countries, the challenges have remained substantial.

Given that one out of two Filipinos residing in the Philippines now live in cities, the country clearly belongs in the urbanizing category. Philippine cities are fulfilling their roles as economic engines of growth. In 2003, cities contributed approximately 73% of the country's total economic output.  

But urbanization also poses challenges. Urban poverty, for one, almost always accompanies the rapid population growth in urban areas. In Metro Manila cities, more or less 25% of the population live in the slums. These are challenges because the demands of the urban population in terms of infrastructure and services may be higher than what can be sustainably addressed by city governments. The Housing and Urban Development Council also said that compared to the cities of other countries, Philippine cities are underperforming.

The HUDCC outlined some of the major problems: Cities are presently lagging in terms of addressing their housing requirements. Traffic in Metro Manila clocked in at an average 12 kilometers an hour, much slower than its Jakarta and Bangkok counterparts that clocked in respectively at 26 kilometers per hour and 21 kilometers per hour. Urban competitiveness is also hampered by the numbers of procedures involved in starting a business. Despite reforms, the Philippines dropped three notches to 144th out of 183 countries in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Survey 2010. Only Laos and Cambodiatrailed behind the Philippines.

Many causes have cited regarding this state of affairs. There is, of course, a general imbalance with regard to the technical capacities of cities.Moreover, despite the relative autonomy enjoyed by all local government units, they still do not possess sufficient influence to shape the policies that affect them, particularly those emerging from the national government. The limits in the term of the political leaders of cities, exemplified by the three-year and three-term election cycles, also hamper the strategic and long-term initiatives to address urbanization.