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

Alvarez, Maria Khristine; Cardenas, Kenneth; (2019) Evicting Slums, ‘Building Back Better’: Resiliency Revanchism and Disaster Risk Management in Manila. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , 43 (2) pp. 227-249. 10.1111/1468-2427.12757. Green open access

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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.

Type: Article
Title: Evicting Slums, ‘Building Back Better’: Resiliency Revanchism and Disaster Risk Management in Manila
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12757
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12757
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: flooding, flood mitigation risk, management expertise, evictions, resilience, revanchism, Metro Manila Philippines, urban theory
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Development Planning Unit
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10176842
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