DAVAO CITY—The Mindanao State University (MSU) in Marawi City and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) have requested for a cultural mapping of this city by the scenic Lake Lanao, the identification of existing or damaged cultural sites of which may be incorporated in the rehabilitation of the city.
Augustinian priest Harold Ll. Rentoria, commissioner for cultural heritage of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), said the MSU main campus and the ARMM Bureau of Cultural Heritage recently approached him to conduct the cultural mapping of the city, saying that this may helped restore heritage sites that were destroyed during the May-October 2017 battle against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-linked terrorists.
Rentoria said the mapping would be conducted soon to catch up also with the drawing up of the comprehensive plan to reconstruct and rehabilitate the city of 200,000 residents. Many of these people are still staying in temporary shelters, evacuation centers and homes of relatives across Lanao del Sur and surrounding cities of Iligan and Cotabato.
The target of the mapping are heritage sites, commonly those structures not less than 50 years old, “which are either old houses and buildings, churches and mosques and other culturally shared structures.”
“The heritage sites are either recognized and respected by the locales, or they were ignored or taken for granted by local residences,” Rentoria said. The NCCA has done random mapping of places across the country and has known of the existences of centuries-old structures as also being noted by local governments in their notes of requests for mapping by the NCCA.
“There are also mosques and churches in the Moro areas that needed mapping,” Rentoria added.
In the case of Marawi City, the cultural map would hope to catch up with the rehabilitation plan.
“But we would also like to know from the Task Force Bangon Marawi on which kind of rehabilitation works would be applied: Is it the entire city or the part of the city that was destroyed by the siege.”
Rentoria said he would officially sit in the board of directors of the Task Force Bangon Marawi soon.
So far, he added, it would not be difficult to persuade rehabilitation bodies to include rehabilitation of heritage sites, saying that it was done in many previous reconstructions of places. The cultural mapping was earlier requested by the Marawi City government in 2016, and the NCCA met with them in 2017.
The same request was also sent by the governor of Maguindanao last year, but the siege in Marawi City has affected the security situation in the province also, which forced the mapping to be suspended, he said.
Now, the province would also like to proceed with the mapping.