Chapter 4 (Re)Locating the ‘Danger Zone’: Post-Disaster Planning and Class-Based Displacement in Tacloban City, Philippines
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Abstract
Both the humanitarian response to super-typhoon Haiyan and the recovery and rehabilitation plan for Tacloban City have undermined the rights of low-income groups to live in the city. To better understand why humanitarian agencies largely supported the government’s plan to move ‘informal’ coastal dwellers out of the city, the chapter examines the practice of participatory planning and application of expert knowledge in the post-disaster recovery and reconstruction phase. Instead of a thoroughgoing analysis of the deeply complex problem of landlessness and poverty in the Philippines, it shows that humanitarian actors and state agencies relied on a simple, apolitical discourse of risk and vulnerability and developed a plan for a modern and safe city that had little support among poor coastal dwellers.