FESTIVAL SUPERMALL MOUND PROMONTORY

Filinvest Land Incorporated (FLI), one of the country’s top land developers, expanded and upgraded an existing shopping mall complex, the Festival Supermall, located in the southern part of Metro Manila. The mall features a scenic landscape of terrains and flats, and right at the heart of the mall's green landscapes was a proposed mound promontory. The promontory is a naturally-cut slope with average facing angle of 70 degrees. A visit to the site was first conducted in the first quarter of 2015. The top portion of the mound was planned to be used as a small park and as a viewing deck. In this, to protect the cut slopes of the mound promontory against possible erosion due to rainfall and surface runoff, FLI required a slope protection system.

After several discussions with FLI engineers, Maccaferri’s robust erosion protection geoblanket (MacMat R) has been approved for the project. Due to the required dimension of the proposed park and viewing deck on top of the mound promontory, cut slopes were maintained at 70 degrees. Also, subsurface drainage systems were incorporated in the design, and were left buried underneath the MacMat R to camouflage with the natural green environment. Besides its constructability and being a cheap alternative to other erosion control systems, another distinct advantages of MacMat R are its ability to be fitted to slope geometry requirements because of its size and flexibility, and its ability to promote vegetation in the slope due to its moisture-retention capability during the dry season, whilst serving permanently as an erosion protection material.