All Green Lights for Clark Green City
CLARK, Pampanga—The Clark Green City is continuously materializing as firms start to bid for the engineering design of the road networks of the master planned urban development here in Pampanga, according to the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA).
The BCDA recently announced that 11 private companies have already responded to the bidding for the road design of some 45-kilometer streets that will make up the main roads of the Clark Green City. The state-owned agency added that the winning bidder would also be the firm to design the Clark Green City Business Center. “This will send a strong signal to encourage prospective locators to start investing in Clark Green City,” says BCDA President and CEO Arnel Paciano D. Casanova in a press statement.
Earlier in June, 16 top companies attended a pre-bid conference hosted by the BCDA to invite them to bid for the 288-hectare land that the agency has put up for initial development. The development will be a 50-year joint venture where 45% will be owned by BCDA and the other 55% by the winning firm. Some of the companies who attended the conference were Ayala Land Inc., Century Properties Inc., Filinvest Land Inc., and Megaworld Corporation.
Support from the Congress
Just last March, the Philippine Congress passed a resolution (House Resolution 116) expressing their support for the development of the Clark Green City. Cong. Cinchona Cruz-Gonzales, chairperson of the House Special Committee on Bases Conversion said that Clark Green City “will showcase what the country can offer in terms of urban planning and sustainable development.”
Clark Rail Bidding
Also last March, the BCDA announced its plan to bid out the Clark Rail Transit System sometime at the last quarter of 2015. BCDA the Clark Rail Transit System, that will run 82 kilometers between Malolos, Bulacan and Tarlac City, to be a joint public and private venture that will “serve as the backbone for the movement of goods, services, and people to and from Manila, Clark Green City, Clark International Airport, Clark Special Economic Zone, and Tarlac City,” says Cassanova.
The Clark Railway is an extension of the North-South Commuter Railway that was already approved by President Benigno S. Aquino, III in February of this year.
Based on BCDA’s plan, the Clark Green City will allot some 100 hectares of land for the city’s transport hub, including the Clark Rail depot.
Clark Green City Design
In February this year, BCDA named Aecom (architecture, engineering, consulting, operations, and maintenance) as the winning firm in the design competition for the 9,450-hectares of the Clark Green City. Cassanova said that Aecom had a design that balanced both nature and economic vibrancy.
Clark Green City, envisioned as an “international business hub of the Southeast Asian region”, is a project of the BCDA located at the Clark Special Economic Zone. The 35,000-hectare land, which is half the size of Metro Manila, will be converted into an “environmentally sustainable, socially inclusive, culturally relevant, and technologically integrated” urban city. Clark Green City will be more modern and is a hundred times bigger than the already progressive Bonifacio Global City (BGC) in Taguig.
The first phase of the project will include an initial 1,300-hectares of land that is perceived to generate almost P60B of investments that will come from local and international companies. Once completed, the fully developed Clark Green City is expected to generate P1.57T revenues annually and will create 925,000 jobs.
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