Unequal geographies of risk in the city: 'Everyday' embodiments and strategies of resistance in Metro Cebu, the Philippines

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The Philippines is one of the most disaster-affected countries in the world and considered especially vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. As a reflection of growing international awareness and concern for these issues, the 2030 Development Agenda marks the first time that climate change has featured explicitly in a global framework, with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 calling on countries to 'take urgent action to control climate change and its impacts'. Pre-emptive planning to address the vulnerability of cities, in particular, to climate-related hazards is also gaining traction internationally, as evidenced in SDGs 9, and 11 on urban resilience and disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) and UN-Habitat's New Urban Agenda which recognises climate change and DRRM as emerging urban development challenges. In the Philippines, as elsewhere, community-based (CB)DRRM has become a core orthodoxy informing intervention, especially in urban poor areas. However the extent to which this form of 'bottom-up' risk governance has actually enhanced the engagement and accountability of the state in meeting the needs of the urban poor has yet to be critically assessed. Attention to the causes and consequences of gendered and classed participation in CBDRRM has also been largely neglected. These, I argue, are important points of inquiry to ensure that communities (and women in particular) are not left to shoulder the bulk of the burdens for 'building back better', shrouded in a language of participation, empowerment and resilience. My research makes an important contribution to how these complex issues are understood and addressed, shifting the focus away from dominant techno-scientific appraisals of exceptional risks and hazard mitigation, towards the everyday realities and perspectives of those most exposed and vulnerable to these events, yet typically excluded from policy conversations. I reveal how encounters with risk and disaster are gendered, and argue that these gendered riskscapes (rather than the commonly projected myth of 'women's free time') help to explain feminised patterns of participation in CBDRRM in the Philippines. I also identify a relationship between land tenure and housing insecurity, and disasters, wherein disasters are being used opportunistically to evict informal settlers. These dynamics, I argue, extend to the realm of disaster risk governance, where labels of risk and vulnerability are subjectively ascribed to urban poor communities to legitimise state-driven demolitions under the auspices of 'pro-poor development' and 'disaster proofing' the city. By drawing attention to the gendered and classed embodiments of risk and risk management, and to how resilience-building and climate change adaptation agendas are manipulated to serve elite interests and displace the urban poor from the city, this project raises important questions about what urban climate justice and sustainable urban development look like, and how they should be achieved. In this fellowship I will develop publications and organise workshops/conferences to communicate my PhD findings to academic and non-academic audiences, offering a counter narrative to techno-scientific appraisals of risk and pejorative depictions of the urban poor, and seeking to advance more nuanced interdisciplinary debates around the gendered and classed implications of urban resilience and sustainable development agendas. Early on in the fellowship, I will also conduct follow-up fieldwork in Cebu to see how the Mega Cebu urban development plan has been progressing following the 2016/17 post-election administrative reshuffle, and to get an update from key respondents in the community on urban poor engagement in or efforts to contest these processes.