Evicting Slums, ‘Building Back Better’: Resiliency Revanchism and Disaster Risk Management in Manila

Abstract

This article examines how the politics of managing global catastrophic risks plays out in a stereotypically ‘vulnerable’ megacity in the global South. It analyses the disproportionate impact of the 2009 Ondoy floods on Manila's underclasses as a consequence of the failures and partial successes of twentieth‐century developmentalism, in the course of which the Philippine state facilitated a highly uneven distribution of disaster risk. It argues that the selective interpretation and omission of facts underpinned a disaster risk management (DRM) strategy premised on the eviction of slum dwellers. Through the lens of aesthetic governmentality we analyse how elite and expert knowledge produced a narrative of the slum as the source of urban flood risk via the territorial stigmatization of slums as blockages. We also show how the redescription of flood risk based on aesthetics produced uneven landscapes of risk, materializing in the ‘danger’/‘high‐risk’‐zone binary. This article characterizes the politics of the Metro Manila DRM strategy by introducing the concept of resiliency revanchism: a ‘politics of revenge’ predicated on the currency of DRM and ‘resiliency’, animated by historically entrenched prejudicial attitudes toward urban underclasses, and enabled by the selective interpretation, circulation and use of expertise.

Futures of Crisis, Futures of Urban Political Theory: Flooding in Asian Coastal Megacities

“…It is perhaps because of these differences in context that the researchers of these three studies chose intriguingly different theoretical tools to conduct their analyses, reflecting both differences in the dynamics under study and the different objectives of the authors of the articles. Alvarez and Cardenas (, this issue) find a combination of Ulrich Beck's concept of the risk society and postcolonial theories of informality helpful in framing the Metro Manila context, in which a powerful elite discourse that focuses on the culpability of the ‘illegal’ poor has backed anxious efforts on the part of the state to assert engineering approaches to flood mitigation. They explore how the modernist impulse to ‘discipline the future’ plays out in the intensified marginalization of informal settlements that are viewed as obstacles to this mega‐infrastructural agenda.…”

Climate Disruption and Planning: Resistance or Retreat?

“…In an effort to try to address risks to people living in highly vulnerable areas, many governments and planners conclude that the answer lies in relocating people out of the highly exposed areas and resettling them to other locations in the city. Time after time, in urban plans or municipal operations the solution of resettlement of people from informal areas of the city is put forth, for example, in metro Manila following the 2009 Ondoy floods (Alvarez & Cardenas, 2019), or in Jakarta where the flood risk management plan proposed the relocation of thousands of people from flood prone areas (Octavianti & Charles, 2018). In Karonga, a small town of 50,000 in Northern Malawi, relocation from high risk areas is one of the town's key planning strategies (Malawi Government, 2013) However, resettlement as a strategy for addressing climate-related risk in urban areas is proven to be flawed.…”

Perception of Disasters and Land Reclamation in an Informal Settlement on Reclaimed Land: Case of the BASECO Compound, Manila, the Philippines

“…Disaster risk reduction approaches that cannot cope with growing urban complexitiessuch as population dynamics, economic needs, and intensifying hazards due to human interventions-could compound existing vulnerability (Takagi et al 2014;Miller and Douglass 2016). Evicting informal settlements with the pretext of building resilience does not address underlying societal factors that create impoverished communities in the first place (Alvarez and Cardenas 2019). Implementing infrastructure solutions such as land reclamation as disaster prevention strategies, but not addressing socioeconomic issues, may result in higher levels of poverty that are unable to counteract future hazards (Douglass 2016).…”