While dearly, duly elected public officials are keeping their eye on the calendar leading to 2028, urban planner Jun Palafox is celebrating his company’s 36th anniversary and sending out their “Postcards from the Future” circa 2050 through 2100.

Minus a crystal ball, Jun is looking at the country of his birth as a “first-world country with a first-world economy, a plan and design through visionary, inclusive, and sustainable development.” Sounds like a tall order especially if you’re a pessimist rather than an optimist. The next generations would do well to be hopeful, rather than skeptical. For saying that, I affirm that yes, you could say I am an optimist, too.

For example, I wish for more trees to green the earth, even though I’m already blessed to live in a city that has comparatively more land and space for gardens, parks, tall trees with lush foliage, plus climbing vines and flowering plants.

As an architect of buildings and public spaces, Jun is looking at “more than 100 million Filipinos living in cities by 2050.” Will those cities be flood-prone or, dare we hope, flood-free? Twenty-five years of teaching, educating, pleading with the people to take care of the environment – what if they continue to refuse to be afraid of their garbage coming back to hit them?

To support a rapidly increasing population, the country will need, in the architect’s words, “100 new, sustainable, smart, resilient, inclusive, livable cities.” One could hope that those adjectives include the mindset of a people who will be more caring about their own environment, refusing to throw garbage like sofas and refrigerators into the river and sinking dead bodies to the bottom of the lake.

Palafox and company are optimists, but they need to be, in their line of work. What about us? I would say that ordinary folks like us need to be even and ever more optimistic than architects, for the sake of our children and their children, who will inherit the future. Architects design our living spaces, but we live in them, work and play, and pray in them. First world or third world, it is necessary to raise children with a sense of hope, without which it would be the same as depriving them of their dreams.