Digital Twin for 23 Baguio barangays completed

The City Planning and Development Office (CPDO) was able to complete the digital twin of some twenty-three out of the city’s one hundred twenty eight barangays purposely to audit and map out existing structures and the remaining natural cover within their respective areas of jurisdiction.

City Planning and Development Officer Arch. Donna R. Tabangin stated that the city’s technical personnel will be busy this month to help in the audit and mapping out of the barangays to complete the digital twins of the city’s barangays.

The digital twin program of the city government is aimed at auditing and mapping out the existing structures and natural cover of the barangays to ascertain whether or not the city’s barangays have exceeded their respective carrying capacity.

She disclosed that once the city government’s team shall have completed the audit of the structures and natural cover of a certain barangay, the results are turned over to the concerned barangay officials for the conduct of the necessary public consultations with their constituents on what will be 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 that are considered to have exceeded the prescribed density and carrying capacity.

Further, the digital twin of the city’s barangays will also help in identifying the structures that have been constructed without the required building permits to make way for the owners of the said structures to secure the necessary permits to legitimize the existence of the same.

The city planning and development officer claimed that during previous public consultations conducted in some barangays in the city, there were some residents who signified their willingness to secure building permits for their structures but their problem is the required titles over their properties.

She recommended that the city government 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 building permits.

The city government is committed to compete the digital twins of the city’s barangays in the next several months so that the concerned barangay officials will be able to conduct the required public consultations with their respective constituents to ascertain measures and strategies that could be implemented to address the density issues in their areas of jurisdiction.

She admitted that the initial assessment of the density of the barangays show that many barangays have already exceeded the required density in their places that have an impact on the state of the open spaces in their areas. – Dexter A. See