“The early work the Canadian Urban Institute did with you on economic development in the Philippines, including the manual testing, made an early contribution to the country’s local economic development framework that has emerged over the past few years and is now promoting an explosion of collaboration between local governments and their private sector. I still see your red UN manual on people’s desks all over the world [see Trousdale et. al., 2005]  You share so much credit for the changes we’ve seen.”

Andrew Farncombe,
Director of the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI)’s International Division, 1994-2014
April 2014 e-mail

Andrew was in charge of implementation of the planning work in the Philippines I was involved in over the years. It was encouraging and gratifying to hear that our planning work is being successfully carried out by Andrew, his CUI colleagues and local partners in the Philippines.

Also based on our work together, Andrew commented:

  • Guimaras (an island province of the Philippines) now has a successful agri-tourism circuit and is “one of the emerging tourism destinations of the country” (see McDaniels and Trousdale, 1999).
  • Boracay Island, a beautiful destination under much development pressure, “heeded your warnings on carrying capacity limitations [albeit] in absurd and ironic ways”(see Trousdale 1999).
  • Finally, “Iloilo City is unrecognizable these days, and after being exposed to good … ideas and training, has a major restoration effort underway in the historic downtown, a waterfront revitalization effort that is seeing a Vancouver-type ‘seawall’ being built along the Iloilo River and new public spaces along the ocean front in the downtown peninsula. Iloilo is also the bike capital of the country, with the mayor being so influenced that he is rolling out the country’s first comprehensive urban bike network…”

We want to congratulate Andrew for an impressive 20 years at CUI, and thank him for his updates which help inspire us to keep working hard and innovating.

We are trying to study and learn more about how projects are actually implemented after the planning work is completed — Did you work with EcoPlan in the past? How is your project implementation going? Get in contact with us by email and let’s catch up!

William Trousdale

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