Abstract
The Philippines is argued as the only Southeast Asian country where informal settlers’ communities have been self-organized and produced discernible impacts on the country’s urban policies. As one of the high risk countries, fifty percent of the country’s informal settlements are located in danger and disaster-prone areas. However, informal settlement upgrading has not reached its significance in disaster mitigation and community resilience building. At the national level, on-site upgrading is not established in disaster risk management or climate change adaptation strategies, which explains the lack of strategic approaches for local implementation. Metro Manila serves as a suitable backdrop in this sense to study informal settlement upgrading under the condition of high risk and rapid urbanization with a high civil society engagement. This study investigates the underlined reasons why upgrading strategically falls short in addressing disaster mitigation and community resilience building. Theoretically, it questions what on-site upgrading is about. Empirically, two hazard-prone informal settlement communities within Metro Manila are examined with their different risk profiles, community development needs and resilience priorities. The core issues of upgrading are, therefore, differentiated at the settlement level with communities’ innate socio-economic and eco-spatial features over time. Meanwhile, the paper heightens the necessity of tackling on-site upgrading at the settlement level and articulating settlements’ spatial correlations with the city development, so as to sustain upgrading outcomes. In addition, this study attempts at setting up a range of scenarios conditioned with COVID pandemic fallout. It endeavors to provide another facet of how to deal with adaptation and resilience. This includes the urgent strategy shift in the housing sector and its financial sustainability, innovative mechanisms to manage uncertainty and risks, lessons for post-COVID planning, etc.
Highlights
The traditional spatial planning approach tries to spatially separate hazards and vulnerable land-uses [1,2]
The majority of Filipino participants of the Resilient Upgrading Online Workshop on October 8th were those who have been stakeholders of this research over the last two years. They represent multi-level government bodies from the Philippine national agencies (e.g., National Economic and Development Authority, National Housing Authority, Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board, Social Housing Finance Corporation, Department of Public Works and Highway, Philippine Statistics Authority, Philippine Volcanologist and Seismologist), and Metro Manila Development Authority and three Local Government Units
Development Plan 2017–2022 to Local governmental Units” (LGUs) given their endeavor for their socialized housing programs
Summary
The traditional spatial planning approach tries to spatially separate hazards and vulnerable land-uses [1,2]. We will promote measures for strengthening and retrofitting all risky housing stock, including in slums and informal settlements, to make it resilient to disasters, in coordination with local authorities and stakeholders”[6] The National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) estimated that there were 2.8 million informal settlers, or 556,526 informal settler families (ISFs), living in Metro Manila Out of this number, 104,000 families are occupying areas identified as danger zones, such as railroad tracks, garbage dumps, canals, rivers and creeks and other flood-prone areas. 104,000 families are occupying areas identified as danger zones, such as railroad tracks, garbage dumps, canals, rivers and creeks and other flood-prone areas Many of these ISFs live in houses made of light materials, and are vulnerable to natural disasters besides evictions [12]
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