NEWS

By Maggie Wang | Grist | January 8, 2025

New Clark City is being built from scratch to withstand extreme weather. Will it be a beacon of hope or a greenwashed illusion?

Ted Aljibe /AFP via Getty Images

The highway approaching New Clark City is wide — four lanes each way in places — but carries little traffic. Newly installed streetlamps, powered by sunlight, dot the median. Construction equipment and recently finished buildings rise ahead, where the Philippine government is building a metropolis designed to withstand the threats of a hotter, less predictable world.

Once completed in 2065, this climate-resilient city, which has already attracted nearly $2.5 billion in investment, could teem with 1.2 million people and serve as a backup capital should Manila, about 70 miles to the south, be incapacitated by disaster.

Metropolitan Manila, one of the world’s most densely populated urban area, lies on a floodplain vulnerable to rising seas and violent typhoons. New Clark City, on the other hand, sits between two mountain ranges, land chosen for its ability to withstand extreme weather. The plan includes commercial and residential neighborhoods, public transit, and ample green space. Although most official functions will remain in Manila, some government agencies will move north.

“New Clark City is the first smart, green, resilient metropolis in the Philippines,” said Lucky Niño Baula of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority, or BCDA, the government entity leading the project. Joshua Bingcang, the agency’s president and CEO, has an expansive vision of the city’s role: It will, he hopes, “help with nation-building and create space for economic development.”

New Clark City is one of many urban experiments being planned in response to climate change. But unlike, say, the floating community in South Korea called Oceanix or Saudi Arabia’s wall-like “linear city,” which as designed would be 105 miles long and just one-eighth of a mile wide, New Clark City is based on a technologically viable plan. Yet the Philippine project has challenges of its own, and some of its biggest promises may not fully materialize. There are questions about its ability to withstand a climate catastrophe, for example, and about how many people will want, or be able, to move there. Other major infrastructure projects elsewhere in the country cast doubt on the government’s stated commitment to resilient and inclusive development.

But what troubles some critics most is New Clark City seems to prioritize the desires of a few over the needs of many. It stands on land taken without consent or compensation from the Indigenous Ayta people, and a dearth of affordable housing risks creating a haven for elites rather than a place where all can enjoy the benefits of the country’s growing economy.

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