Posted: March 12th, 2023

Urban disasters op-ed

For this assignment, you will write an op-ed that makes recommendations for how the city ought to manage environmental risk and disasters in Bogota (landslides). Length of approximately 800 to 1000 words. APA style, single spaced. See word document for all instructions. 

Urban Op-ed

For this assignment, you will write an op-ed that makes recommendations for how the city ought to manage environmental risk and disasters in Bogota (landslides). Length of approximately 800 to 1000 words. APA style, single spaced.

Your op-ed might address the following questions: How should the city approach disaster management? What or who should be the priorities of the city? How can the city ensure safety for everyone from urban disasters? What factors should be taken into consideration in the city’s disaster management planning? You do not have to directly answer these questions. They are just prompts.

The term “op-ed” refers to a thoroughly researched commentary, opinion piece, or reflection published in a newspaper, journal, or other periodical. Very often writers use op-eds to urge action on the part of political leaders or fellow citizens and, thus, must be very well informed about the matter in question. Publications often solicit op-eds from those whose expertise or experience give them authority to comment on a particular issue, but many advocacy organizations also submit uninvited op-eds in hopes of influencing policymakers or the public.

INSTRUCTIONS

Review relevant course materials and find 3-5 relevant additional sources (e.g. news articles, policy reports, or academic papers, but with emphasis on peer-reviewed sources.)

Review these op-ed-writing guidelines as well as the sample op-eds below to get a feel for the genre. Not all op-eds are the same, but most of them share in that they are brief, direct, and evocative if not also persuasive in tone.

https://www.theopedproject.org/oped-basics

With those guidelines in mind, write a well-informed, persuasive op-ed that calls for policy changes and/or other actions by political leaders and/or fellow citizens. Keep in mind that you are aiming to convince the reader with a well-reasoned argument, not appeal exclusively to emotions. Keep in mind, too, that the most effective op-eds are typically those offering direct, specific comments or proposals rather than those envisioning broad, “pie-in-the-sky” societal transformations. That said, don’t hesitate to be bold and visionary if you can support your position.

REQUIREMENTS

1. Because published op-eds do not usually contain bibliographies, you should use journalistic attributions (e.g., “According to a study by scientists at Harvard University, …”) and hyperlinks within the text of your op-ed

2. Be sure to include a separate References List with complete information on your sources. This would not be published with an op-ed, and is just for me to use when grading.

3. Your op-ed should illustrate engagement with at least one of the assigned readings for this lesson.

Sample Op-Ed 1 LA Times:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-04-11/reefs-wetlands-mangrove-coastline-defense-restoration

Sample Op-Ed 2 East Asia Forum

https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2021/11/04/financing-asean-disaster-management-and-resilience/%C2%A0

Sample Op-Ed 3 UNDRR

https://www.undrr.org/news/raising-climate-finance-alone-not-enough-it-must-also-target-disaster-prevention

RELEVANT COURSE MATERIALS

https://rioonwatch.org/?p=51579

Zeiderman, A. (2012). On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá. Environment and Planning A, 44(7), 1570-1588

Alvarez, M. K., & Cardenas, K. (2019). Evicting slums,‘building back better’: Resiliency revanchism and disaster risk management in Manila. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(2), 227-249

Environment and Planning A 2012, volume 44, pages 1570 – 1588

doi:10.1068/

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On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá

Austin Zeiderman §
Anthropology, Stanford University, Main Quad, Building 50, Stanford, CA 94035, USA;
e-mail: austin.zeiderman@gmail.com
Received 28 May 2011; in revised form 18 October 2011

Abstract. How does risk become a technique for governing the future of cities and urban

life? Using genealogical and ethnographic methods, this paper tracks the emergence of

risk management in Bogotá, Colombia, from its initial institutionalization to its ongoing

implementation in governmental practice. Its specii c focus is the invention of the ‘zone

of high risk’ in Bogotá and the everyday work performed by the oi cials responsible for

determining the likelihood of landslide in these areas. It addresses the ongoing formation

of techniques of urban planning and governance and the active relationship between urban

populations and environments and emerging forms of political authority and technical

expertise. Ultimately, it reveals that techniques of risk management are made and remade

as experts and nonexperts grapple with the imperative to bring heterogeneous assemblages

of people and things into an unfolding technopolitical domain.

Keywords: risk, security, cities, urban governance, environment, hazards, Bogotá, Colombia

Introduction

In this paper I examine the emergence of risk as a technique of urban planning and governance
in Bogotá, Colombia. This local story offers insight into a general pattern in which the
informal settlements that predominate in cities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, along
with the populations inhabiting them, are brought into novel governmental frameworks.
It also refl ects a broader phenomenon, whereby techniques of risk management and other
mechanisms of ‘securitization’ are emerging across a range of apparently disparate domains
in both the global North and South as essential elements of ‘good governance’. According
to Hodson and Marvin (2010, page 31), the rise of “urban ecological security” represents
“a paradigm challenge to our conventional understanding of contemporary urbanism”.
To understand these widespread transformations, this paper bridges the gap between the
fi eld of urban studies and the literature on the political technologies of risk and security.
The city of Bogotá provides an especially good vantage point from which to examine how
risk becomes a technique for governing the future of cities and urban life.

Between 1950 and 2000 the population of Bogotá exploded from just over 700 000 to
about 7 million (DANE, 1957; 2005). Much of this population growth took place in the
southern half of the city and led to the growth of informal settlements on the mountainous
urban periphery. By some estimates, this region of Bogotá is one of the largest agglomerations
of urban poverty in the world. When the municipal government began conducting technical
studies of environmental hazards in the late 1990s, the highest concentration of families
in ‘zones of high risk’ was in this area (Morales, 2005). In fact, over 50% of the 10 715
properties located in risk zones in 2008 were in Ciudad Bolívar—the largest and poorest of
Bogotá’s twenty localities (Camara de Comercio de Bogotá, 2007; Poveda Gómez, 2008).

§ Address from 1 July 2012: LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton
Street, London WC2A 2AE, England.

1571 A Zeiderman

The imperative to relocate families from ‘zones of high risk’ has focused on this area: from
2004 to 2006, 90% (1239) of the households resettled by the government were from this
locality alone (Caja de la Vivienda Popular, 2006).

How did the poor in Bogotá come to inhabit landscapes of risk? This situation can be
understood in at least two ways. The fi rst is what I would call the ‘received narrative’.(1) Since
the mid-20th century, hundreds of thousands of peasants from the Colombian countryside
have migrated to the capital city, either seeking economic opportunity or having been
displaced from their land by paramilitaries, guerrillas, or the army. Whereas peasants had
once been embedded in the social institutions of rural areas, such as the Catholic Church and
the hacienda, they have become increasingly uprooted in the past half century as economic
restructuring and political violence radically transformed the country. Upon arriving in large
numbers in Bogotá, they fi rst settled in rented rooms in centrally located tenement housing
(inquilinatos). But as the existing housing supply quickly ran out, they began to gravitate to
the hillsides of the city’s southern periphery.

From as early as the 19th century, these lands have been exploited for construction
materials. Tunnels and quarries were dug into the deforested slopes in order to extract the
gravel, rock, and sand that would be used for building the physical infrastructure of central
Bogotá. Once these resources diminished, however, urbanizadores piratas (pirate urbanizers)
began to appropriate territories, subdividing them into small plots and selling them without
legal title. Heavily mined, and therefore unsuitable for most other uses, these lands were of
low economic value. Meanwhile, the demand for affordable property in the city was growing
rapidly, and the state had neither the interest nor the ability to regulate it; in fact, politicians
often permitted ad hoc urbanization in exchange for popular support. Settlers then built
their own dwellings using rudimentary construction materials and techniques on what was
already precarious terrain. As the story goes, these settlements were fated from the outset to
be exposed to risk.

This narrative is used to explain the dynamics of 20th-century urban development in
Bogotá. Highlighting economic, demographic, and geographic factors, it critically examines
the production of urban environmental inequality. Accurate as it may be, however, this
explanation unwittingly projects onto the past a way of conceptualizing space and population
that is a more recent invention; it historicizes everything but the key category of concern:
the ‘zone of high risk’. Risk thus appears as a physical characteristic of the urban landscape
that precedes the studies, maps, and plans that initially brought risk into being as a technique
of government. We are, therefore, left with the impression that Bogotá’s unequal landscape of
risk was inevitable—as Davis (2006, page 121) puts it, “very poor people have little choice
but to live with disaster.” According to this line of thinking, risk becomes, as for Davis,
“poverty’s niche in the ecology of the city”.

The tenet of critical urban studies that supports this account is irrefutable: the social
production of space is, indeed, a deeply uneven process (Smith, 2008). There is no doubt that
the poor in Bogotá are disproportionately exposed to the devastating effects of environmental
disasters, such as landslides and fl oods. Throughout the informal settlements of Ciudad
Bolívar, evidence of erosion, subsidence, and contamination are material signs of the
structural inequality that constitutes the urban periphery. But while treating risk as an unfair
burden suffered by the disadvantaged may be necessary, it is insuffi cient. For in Bogotá’s
‘zones of high risk’, the very factors that enabled slums to exist are now the reason for their
removal. Risk is no longer the “Faustian bargain”, as Davis calls it, that the poor must accept

(1) Discussions of the dynamics mentioned here can be found in urban histories of Bogotá (see Mejía
Pavony, 2000; Palacios, 2006).

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On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá 1572

in order to secure housing: as the municipal government relocates vulnerable populations to
protect them from environmental hazard, risk is now the logic underlying their displacement.

As a result, I fi nd it necessary to invert the argument formulated above. Rather than
investigating how the poor came to inhabit landscapes of risk, I ask: how did ‘zones of high
risk’ come to inhabit the territories of the poor? By placing these zones in question, we see that
before the 1990s risk did not exist in Bogotá—at least, not as a technique for governing specifi c
spaces and populations in the city. By approaching ‘risk’ ethnographically, we can analyze the
processes through which it is made into an object of governmental intervention. This enables
us to think critically not only about the production of unequal geographies of vulnerability,
but also about emerging attempts to ameliorate them. The literature on political government
is helpful here, as it offers tools for examining the diversity of ways in which risk becomes
central to governmental assemblages at specifi c historical junctures, and to what effect.(2) The
brief ethnographic section that follows, as well as the more extensive one that appears later,
both offer highly representative, albeit fragmented, insights into the making of risk in Bogotá.

The map of risk

It is a slow afternoon in the offi ce of the Caja de la Vivienda Popular. Everyone has just
returned from lunch and is passing time until the steady stream of visitors starts up again.
The ‘Caja’, as most people call it, is the branch of Bogotá’s municipal government that,
since 2003, has managed a housing resettlement program for families living in zonas de alto

riesgo, or ‘zones of high risk’ (fi gure 1). Its offi cial duty is to protect the lives of populations
vulnerable to environmental disaster, such as landslide and fl ood, by relocating them
elsewhere. I am chatting with the social workers, architects, and lawyers who manage the
day-to-day operations of the Caja’s fi eld offi ce here in Ciudad Bolívar—the poor area in the
mountainous southern periphery of Bogotá, where the majority of these zones are located.
Although the Caja’s headquarters are in the city center, the location of this offi ce allows it to
serve as the hub of the resettlement program for the many households undergoing relocation.
And yet it is not merely a place where policies developed elsewhere are put into effect. It is
a key site in which Bogotá’s ‘zones of high risk’ are produced—that is, where techniques of
government are made and managed on an everyday basis.

We are discussing a recent political scandal when two women, both resettlement program
‘benefi ciaries’, arrive holding a newspaper clipping advertising houses for sale. Although the
Caja is responsible for relocating ‘at risk’ populations, it relies on the initiative of benefi ciaries
to manage their own resettlement. These women have been searching for housing to purchase
with the subsidy guaranteed to the population living in ‘zones of high risk’, and they believe
they have fi nally found ones that suit their criteria. Before they can proceed, however, their
selections have to be approved by the equipo técnico, the technical team, according to a strict
set of norms, of which the risk designation of the new property is perhaps the most elemental.

One of the Caja’s architects, Ana María, takes the paper and looks at the address:
“Unfortunately”, she says, “these properties are in a zona de alto riesgo”. In a patient
pedagogical tone, Ana María offers to explain. Rising from her chair, she shifts attention
towards a map hanging on the wall (fi gure 2), which shows the streets of Ciudad Bolívar
shaded over in green, yellow, and red to indicate low, medium, and high risk. Ana María
fi rst points to the two properties, which are in a yellow zone (medium risk). But her fi nger
then slides up the map an inch higher, stopping at two red lines just north of the street on

(2) The literature on the political technology of risk is too extensive to cover comprehensively here.
For key works, see essays by Robert Castel, François Ewald, Daniel Defert, and Ian Hacking (in
Burchell et al, 1991); by Nikolas Rose, Thomas Osborne, and Pat O’Malley (in Barry et al, 1996);
many articles in Economy and Society, especially volume 29(4) on confi gurations of risk (see also
Baker and Simon, 2002; Ericson and Doyle, 2003).

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1573 A Zeiderman

Figure 1. [In colour online.] Bogotá’s zonas de alto riesgo (zones of high risk) (source: Dirección de
Atención y Prevención de Emergencias).

Figure 2. [In colour online.] Map showing risk areas on the offi ce wall in the Caja de la Vivienda
Popular (source: photograph by author, 2006).

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On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá 1574

which these two houses are located. “These red lines”, she explains, “are seismic faults where
earthquake damage can be severe.” Ana María, regardless of the map, pronounces these
properties “high risk” and, thereby, disqualifi es them.

As I discuss below, calculative predictions of disaster risk in Bogotá—that is, which
neighborhoods are designated ‘zones of high risk’ and therefore subject to relocation—were
made initially in the late 1990s, and the more general process of institutionalizing risk as
a technique of government in Colombia began in the previous decade. Yet, as Ana María
demonstrates by her simultaneous reference to and adjustment of the map, these ‘zones
of high risk’ are not always fi xed—neither ‘out there’ in the fi eld, nor here in the offi ce.
Although this encounter took place in 2006, before risk designations became the exclusive
domain of the architects and engineers of the Directorate for Emergence Prevention and
Response (DPAE), the entangled relationality of these designations persists. Risk remains a
technique for rendering the uncertain future actionable in the present, and yet it is continually
reconfi gured in the everyday practice of urban governance.

Formations of government

These observations recall recent shifts in paradigms of urban planning, development, and
governance, which assert that cities and their environments should be managed according
to the rationality of risk (Zeiderman, 2008). In both the Global North and South, it is
common for cities to be governed through probabilistic calculations of potential events, from
fi nancial crises and terrorist attacks to disease outbreaks and natural disasters (Hodson and
Marvin, 2009). Increasingly relevant are Foucault’s (2007) 1978 lectures, Security, Territory,

Population, and their emphasis on the rise of ‘security’ as a technology of power that governs
spaces and populations through predictive calculations of the probability of future events.
But we must revisit how ‘security’ is understood if we are to account for the technopolitical
process of governing the uncertain future of cities and urban life.

In these lectures Foucault examines the emergence of security as a key technology of
power in France. Unlike sovereignty and discipline, which prohibit and prescribe, security
mechanisms insert their object of concern into a series of probable events whose likelihood
of occurring in the future can be calculated in the present and then managed according to
an average considered optimal or acceptable. Foucault illustrates the working of these three
distinct, yet overlapping, political technologies—sovereignty, discipline, and security—
in the domain of health. While lepers in the Middle Ages were excluded from the general
population by juridical mechanisms, and the plagues of the 16th and 17th centuries were
controlled through disciplinary techniques, the problem of smallpox in the 18th century was
tackled according to the logic of security. In this last case, statistics were used to calculate the
probability of infection across the population and, based on these calculations, decisions to
vaccinate were made. It is at this moment, then, that we see the emergence of what Foucault
calls the “absolutely crucial notion of risk”. In contrast to sovereignty and discipline, both
of which would have tried to eliminate the threat and protect the population from infection,
these inoculation practices calculated the likelihood of contracting or dying from smallpox
within population groups. And these calculations revealed that the population was distributed
spatially into “zones of higher risk” and “zones of lower risk”.

Shifting to examples of food scarcity and town planning, Foucault demonstrates a
“similar evolution and more or less the same type of transformations” (2007, page 10) in other
domains. However, Collier (2009, page 95) shows that, in his 1978 and 1979 lectures, Foucault
is moving away from epochal proclamations whereby one technology of power replaces
another and towards historically specifi c analyses of how juridical, disciplinary, and security
techniques are “recombined” and go through processes of “reactivation and transformation”.
This approach, I propose, can be furthered by examining the processes through which security

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1575 A Zeiderman

mechanisms are reassembled in the everyday practice of government. A certain reticence to
analyze governmental practice should be noted in Foucault’s method: by “art of government”,
he clarifi ed, “I did not mean the way in which governors really governed” (2008, page 2;
cf Rose et al, 2006). However, given the fundamentally uncertain and temporal nature of risk
management, I argue that what governors do is of central importance. Thus I follow Collier
et al (2004, pages 5–6) in emphasizing both the “forms of reasoning” and the “practices”
with which experts bring threats into frameworks of technical intervention. This, I will argue,
reveals techniques of government to be dynamic spaces of entangled relationality between
governors and the populations and environments they seek to govern.

One objection to this approach might be that it confl ates ‘risk’ in the technical sense
with what Ewald (1991, page 202) calls its meaning in “everyday language” (ie, danger
or peril) and, thus, renders it analytically unproductive (cf Lakoff, 2007). Most scholars of
risk agree with Ewald’s view and respect the strictly technical defi nition: risk is a modern
technique for statistically calculating the likelihood of future events, bringing them into
the realm of individual or collective decision making, and mitigating their adverse effects
through processes of economization and distribution (cf Çalışkan and Callon, 2009; Hacking,
2003). This has enabled scholars to differentiate risk with clear analytical rigor from a range
of related techniques (eg, precaution, preparedness, preemption, enactment) used to govern
future uncertainty (cf footnote 2; Anderson, 2010; Collier, 2008; Ewald, 2002; Lakoff, 2007).
A contribution of this paper, however, is to heed Callon’s caution about “impos[ing] risk
as an analytic category” (Barry and Slater, 2002, pages 288–289) by resisting the urge to
compare every case of risk governance to a preexisting technical defi nition. Thus, I focus
here on attempts to harness risk reasoning to specifi c social and political problems and, in
the process, bring together diverse governing practices and assessment techniques, many
of which do not conform to the analytical category of risk.(3) By subjecting governmental
practice to ethnographic scrutiny, it is possible to see how ‘risk’ comes to mean, and can be
mobilized to do, different things.

My approach also requires examining Foucault’s treatment of space. Geographers note that
Foucault’s initial emphasis on the spatial problem of the town wanes in the 1978 lectures, to
such a degree that, as Elden (2007, page 32) points out, “territory is marginalized in Foucault’s
story.” Others have urged us to remain focused on the production of space (Crampton and
Elden, 2007). But Foucault (2007, page 20) makes a critical point about spaces of security:
“The specifi c space of security refers … to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal
and the uncertain, which have to be inserted within a given space.” He calls the space “in
which a series of uncertain elements unfolds” the “milieu”, which denotes a set of “natural”
and “artifi cial” givens. This is the fi eld in which security intervenes according to probabilistic
estimates of events, which are produced as much by the multiplicity of individuals who make
up the population as by “the materiality within which they live”. What Foucault does not
do is describe how the space in which security intervenes (the “milieu”) comes into being.
Hence, my interest in the ‘zone of high risk’ in Bogotá as a technique of government that aims
to intervene upon spaces and populations that are themselves active and in motion.

This implies that we ought not to treat urban populations and environments as inert,
passive objects upon which governments either do or do not act. Rather, the city can be
understood as a hybrid assemblage of humans and nonhumans, at once natural and social,
made up of dialectical relations between living and nonliving things. This terrain has been
most thoroughly explored by urban political ecologists, especially those with a keen interest
in science and technology studies (Farías and Bender, 2010; Heynen et al, 2005; Monstadt,
2009). With reason, they have found water to be especially good to think with and have

(3) For a related approach to policy mobility and mutation, see Peck (2011) and Peck and Theodore (2012).

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On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá 1576

built theories around concepts such as ‘hybrid’ or ‘cyborg’ urbanization (Gandy, 2004; 2005;
Swyngedouw, 2006). By extending their insights to what is assumed to be the most inert,
stable, and inactive aspect of cities—the surface over which everything else appears to move
and fl ow, the very ground on which the city is built—we may recognize urban populations and
environments as more than mere objects or outcomes of governmental technique. Ultimately,
this will allow us to describe more faithfully how such techniques actually work.

The governmentalization of risk

Before discussing the emergence of ‘zones of high risk’ in Bogotá and then turning to
their ongoing formation, I will show how risk was governmentalized on a national level.
Colombia is a country plagued by violence, where security has become the dominant logic
by which state, territory, and population are understood. Despite popular conceptions of
‘state failure’, in the past two decades Colombia has become seen as an exemplary site
of innovation in approaches to governing insecurity. On the one hand, its government has
advanced a militaristic approach to controlling territory, establishing sovereignty, and
defeating ‘narcoterrorism’. On the other hand, Colombia has witnessed an elaboration of
governmental programs employing techniques of risk management whose aim is to protect
life against a broad range of threats—from violent crime to natural disaster. The emergence
of a broad range of security mechanisms refl ects a shift in how the state seeks to govern
potentially hazardous futures.

For most of the 20th century, however, the dominant logic governing the Colombian
state’s approach to disasters was emergency response (Ramírez Gomez and Cardona, 1996,
page 256). As in other Latin American countries, the role of the state in managing disasters
was complemented by the Red Cross Societies, which provided humanitarian aid to victims
in the aftermath of catastrophic events. Most disaster management took place at the local
level, however, since municipal fi re brigades were ultimately responsible for attending to
calamities. It was not until 1949 that Colombia established a national policy for handling
large-scale public emergencies. Following the assassination on 9 April 1948 of the populist
political leader and presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, and the ensuing popular revolt
that wreaked havoc and left much of Bogotá in ruins, the Colombian government signed an
agreement with the Red Cross to create a semipublic parastatal organization, the Socorro
Nacional de la Cruz Roja, which would thereafter be responsible for managing operations
of emergency response on a national scale (Ramírez Gomez and Cardona, 1996, page 264).

The burden shifted from the Socorro Nacional de la Cruz Roja in the 1960s when Latin
American countries, infl uenced by the US Agency for International Development (USAID),
began creating agencies of civil defense. Adhering to national security policy, these offshoots
of the military were given the mission of establishing ties with the civilian population in
the interest of combating the ‘internal enemy’. The threat of political subversion posed by
local communist movements motivated these agencies to respond to disasters of accidental
or non-human origin in order to prevent social and political instability (Ramírez Gomez and
Cardona, 1996, page 265). These were the entities that came to the aid of the Colombian
city of Popayán following the 1983 earthquake there—a disaster understood primarily as a
problem of rescue, recovery, and reconstruction. In contrast, two catastrophes that converged
in November 1985—the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano that killed over 25 000
people and the guerrilla siege of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá—precipitated a shift towards
anticipatory logics of risk management.

The National Plan for Disaster Prevention and Response affi rms that a transition occurred
at this moment:

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1577 A Zeiderman

“ The general policy of the Colombian state has been, since 1986, to consolidate and
incorporate the mitigation of risks and the prevention of disasters in the socioeconomic
development process of the country” (DNPAD, 1998, page 21).

Disaster risk management has gone in and out of political favor since the mid-1980s and
it would be a mistake to see its emergence as a linear process. But it is clear that, from this
moment onward, the Colombian state would be obligated—legally, politically, and morally—
both to respond to emergencies after they occurred and to plan and govern the national
territory according to calculations of risk. The 1985 volcanic eruption and guerrilla attack
were quite different catastrophes, and yet together they were instrumental in solidifying risk
management as a technique of government in Colombia.

The linkage between diverse security threats was not new in 1985, however. As mentioned,
the responsibility of civil defense agencies to protect the nation against foreign and internal
enemies implied the imperative to respond to natural disasters. President Belisario Betancur
exemplifi ed this approach to disaster management in 1983 when he assured survivors of the
Popayán earthquake that the Army would soon arrive to ensure that subversive elements did
not create disorder and social instability. However, the events of November 1985 brought
about a new connection between human and nonhuman dangers. It was believed that the
likelihood of the ‘political’ threat of armed insurgency and the ‘physical’ threat of natural
disaster were both known to be high, and yet no action was taken. Whatever the source of
catastrophe in the future, response alone would no longer be suffi cient.

Nevertheless, a boundary separating political–military threats from those of a technical–
civilian nature would soon be drawn. When Colombian disaster policy had been limited to
emergency response, the same entities aided in rescue, recovery, and reconstruction, whether
the event was a bomb explosion or a seasonal fl ood. But once risk management became the
imperative, the job of collecting, analyzing, and acting upon prognostic information about
threats was divided between national security agencies on the one hand (eg, the Ministry of
Defense, the Army, the Administrative Department of Security) and technical organizations
on the other (eg, the National Directorate for Disaster Prevention and Response, the Red
Cross, the National Institute of Geological Study and Mining). Despite their institutional
disarticulation, however, both disaster risk management and national security would thereafter
share a commitment to rationalities for governing the future through predictions of threat and
calculations of risk.

President Betancur, who was heavily criticized for his handling of the events of November
1985, was succeeded in 1986 by Virgilio Barco. In seeking to rectify the crisis of political
authority and technical expertise that had plagued his predecessor, and recognizing that doing
so demanded a future-oriented approach to disaster management, President Barco summoned
a select group of experts. As one of these experts later recalled, Barco told them:

“ Look, I don’t want a Ruiz to happen to me. I don’t want what happened to Betancur
to happen to me. I don’t know anything about this stuff. You guys, watch what you’re
doing” (interview notes, 19 August 2009).

Following Barco’s plea, the National Offi ce of Emergency Response (ONAE) was created in
late 1986 with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (Ramírez
Gomez and Cardona, 1996, page 271).

In 1988 the Colombian government created a National System for Disaster Prevention
and Response (SNPAD), which sought to integrate risk-management planning on a national
scale, as well as with local-level institutions of government (Congreso de Colombia, 1988a).
A sense of urgency was evident in Representative Darío Martínez Betancourt’s plea for
Congress to approve its creation:

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On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá 1578

“There are numerous events that could lead to death and that threaten the life and tranquility
of Colombians. Colombia is a country of extremely high risks (un país de altísimos riesgos)”
(Congreso de Colombia, 1988b).

Once the SNPAD was adopted, the Colombian state was thereafter obligated to maintain an
information system that would locate risks throughout the country, develop the techniques
necessary to detect and measure them, and communicate this information (Congreso de
Colombia, 1988a). Scientifi c authority for studying and mapping risks was then distributed
among a handful of government agencies according to their particular areas of expertise—
geology, hydrology, meteorology, etc (Presidente de la República de Colombia, 1989).

The objective of creating a national system for risk management took on greater urgency
as another series of events transpired during its initial planning phases. In March 1988
the Ruiz volcano was again threatening; another volcano, Galeras, began to show signs
of activity; and in August of the same year a period of intense rainfall caused deaths and
serious damage in nearly 400 municipalities, mostly along Colombia’s Atlantic coast. In
the immediate aftermath of these events, legislation was passed giving ONAE the added
responsibility of ensuring that disaster prevention regulations for ‘zones of risk’ would be
part of all future development plans (Ramírez Gomez and Cardona, 1996, pages 271–272).
In addition, the same offi ce would be obligated to establish regional and local committees
of disaster prevention and response, and to administer the execution of studies to identify
areas in which “neither human settlements nor buildings should be located” (Presidente de la
República de Colombia, 1989).

Risk management then became a technique for governing Colombia’s cities in 1989, when
Congress reformed urban policy and obligated every municipality with more than 100 000
inhabitants to formulate development plans (Congreso de Colombia, 1989; see also Pecha
Quimbay, 2008, page 86). Although it was a move in the direction of decentralization, this
law nevertheless determined the basic criteria for how cities throughout Colombia would be
legally bound to govern themselves. Contained within these regulations was the imperative
that urban governments establish an inventory of vulnerable human settlements by calculating
their exposure to fl ooding, collapse, landslide, or other unhealthy living conditions. And if
localized mitigation projects were not possible, municipal authorities would then be required
to move forward with the relocation of the inhabitants of what would thereafter be designated
‘zones of high risk’ (zonas de alto riesgo).

By this point, the division between political–military and technical–civilian threats had
been codifi ed in the legal and policy frameworks governing emergency response. Upon
its initial creation in 1984, the National Disaster Fund could be applied to “catastrophes”
caused by “artifi cial or natural phenomena of great intensity or violence; unique or repetitive
unfortunate events; diseases or medical conditions of an epidemic nature; and acts of hostility
or armed confl ict of a national or international scope that effect the population” (Presidente
de la República de Colombia, 1984; 1989). However, the 1989 law which brought the fund
into operation replaced the term ‘catastrophes’ with “situations of disaster, calamity, or those
of a similar nature” and limited its application to “fl oods, droughts, frosts, hurricane winds,
earthquakes, tidal waves, fi re, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, landslides and technological
risks in declared disaster zones” (Presidente de la República de Colombia, 1989). Likewise,
the 1988 law creating the SNPAD also defi ned ‘disaster’ in such a way as to limit its scope:
it became “the grave damage or alteration of the national conditions of life in a determinate
geographic area, caused by natural phenomena or by catastrophic effects of the accidental
actions of man” (Congreso de Colombia, 1988a). With the shift of emphasis from response
to risk, the legal and policy framework underpinning disaster management in Colombia
divided the world of potential threats and emergencies into those with human and nonhuman
cause.

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1579 A Zeiderman

This would be the fi rst time that risk, as an object of scientifi c study and governmental
concern, would enter the juridicopolitical apparatus in Colombia. However, this was not the
result of national events alone. The UNDP had sent recovery aid to Colombia after the 1985
Armero disaster and was actively involved in the initial creation of the ONAE in 1986 and
1987. The infl uence of the international community intensifi ed when the General Assembly
of the United Nations proclaimed in 1989 that the 1990s would be the “International Decade
for Natural Disaster Reduction”. With this declaration, the UN directed development agencies
“to pay special attention to fostering international co-operation in the fi eld of natural disaster
reduction” and, in particular, to assist developing countries in their effort to implement risk
management programs and policies (United Nations General Assembly, 1989). Asserting that
“fatalism about natural disasters is no longer justifi ed”, this UN declaration motivated donor
countries and multilateral organizations to direct resources and expertise toward countries of
the Global South.

The globalization of risk-management policy would continue throughout the International
Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. In the late 1990s the UN instituted an interagency
collaboration called the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), which was
to pursue the initiatives begun in the previous decade. The ISDR partnered with the World
Bank in 2006 to form the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR),
which would provide technical and fi nancial assistance to “high risk low- and middle-income
countries” in order to focus their national development plans on disaster reduction. By 2009
the World Bank was providing Colombia over US $340 million in funding for disaster-
management projects and Colombia had become recognized internationally as a leader in
this fi eld (GFDRR, 2009, pages 224, 229). While the coinciding catastrophes of 1985 created
an initial opening, the rise of risk management as a governmental imperative in Colombia
refl ects a more general shift in ways of thinking about and acting upon disasters, development,
and governance on a global scale.

The ‘zone of high risk’

This section zooms in from the previous one to focus on the formation of the ‘zone of high
risk’ in Bogotá—a city now recognized internationally as a ‘model city’ for its achievements
in social inclusion, citizen security, mass transit, and public space as well as for its advances in
the management of disaster risk. The story begins in late 1987, when the Bogotá City Council
created the Fund for Emergency Prevention and Response. This fund was dedicated to
fi nancing a comprehensive disaster-prevention program based on studies of zonas de riesgo,
or ‘zones of risk’ as they were initially called (Consejo de Bogotá, 1987). Shortly thereafter,
in 1989, the Colombian legislature enacted a broad reform of urban government, which
obligated every municipality with a population of over 100 000 to maintain an inventory
of zonas de alto riesgo, or ‘zones of high risk’, and to begin mitigation work or relocation
programs in these areas (Congreso de Colombia, 1989; Pecha Quimbay, 2008, page 86).
Although this law applied to all cities, the municipal government of Bogotá was one
of the fi rst to implement it. In 1994 Bogotá’s Mayor, Jaime Castro, directed what was then
the Offi ce of Emergency Prevention and Response (Ofi cina para Prevenció n y Atenció n
de Emergencias) to begin analyzing the distribution of environmental risk across the city
(Alcalde Mayor de Santa Fe de Bogotá DC, 1994). A consulting fi rm, Ingeocim, was
hired to conduct these studies and to devise a methodology for calculating risks of a
geophysical nature (Ingeocim, 1998).

The imperative to govern the city as a space of risk extended beyond the domain of
environmental hazards in 1995 when an unconventional mathematics professor and university
administrator, Antanas Mockus, became Mayor of Bogotá in the wake of a barrage of
homicides, political assassinations, crime waves, and bomb attacks. Searching for innovative

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strategies with which to confront problems of urban insecurity, Mockus found inspiration
in Cali, Colombia’s third largest city, and its novel Program for Development, Security, and
Peace (Martin and Ceballos, 2004, page 222). This program was an initiative of Cali’s Mayor,
Rodrigo Guerrero, a medical doctor whose graduate studies in public health had led him to
approach insecurity from an epidemiological perspective (Rivas Gamboa, 2007, pages 157,
180–181). The Mockus administration subsequently adopted a similar strategy in the creation
of a Unifi ed Information System of Violence and Delinquency (SUIVD) in Bogotá. Like its
predecessor in Cali, this system was based on the idea that outbreaks of crime and violence
could be treated like diseases of unknown origin. By collecting and analyzing existing crime
data, the SUIVD sought to identify risk factors that could be used to predict when and where
violence would be likely to occur in the future. Once the spatial distribution of risk factors
was determined, the system could guide a coordinated strategy of governmental intervention
targeting high-risk activities, populations, and neighborhoods.

The violence-prevention strategy that emerged in the mid-1990s in Bogotá paralleled
attempts to map the city’s vulnerability to environmental hazards. Common to both these
efforts was the idea that Bogotá was a space of risks that could be known scientifi cally
and then governed through interventions concentrated in specifi c zones. While it is diffi cult
to assess how either model infl uenced the other, it is clear that at this moment a range of
problems and their proposed solutions could be conceived in similar ways: both governmental
strategies were based upon the imperative to protect the life of the population against a range
of threats. Although this imperative had coalesced in the aftermath of the two catastrophes
that coincided in November 1985, it was a decade later that Mayor Mockus brought it to the
forefront of urban policy in Bogotá (Rivas Gamboa, 2007, pages 180–181). Even as social–
political threats were separated from technical–physical ones, protecting life by intervening
in high-risk zones would be as common to debates surrounding crime and violence as to
concerns about natural disasters.

In 1998 the studies of environmental risk in Bogotá were completed. The consulting
fi rm, Ingeocim, had measured threats (amenazas) of various kinds—earthquakes, landslides,
fl oods, fi res, and industrial accidents—and mapped their spatial distribution. The term ‘threat’
referred to the probability of occurrence of a given physical phenomenon over a specifi c
period of time. To calculate the threat of landslide (remoción en masa), for example, they
had used GIS mapping techniques, photographic interpretation, fi eld surveys, and historical
data. They broke down landslide threat into three levels—low, medium, and high—and
mapped them accordingly. Ingeocim then overlaid levels of landslide threat with measures
of social and physical vulnerability (eg, housing type, tenure, access to services, literacy,
occupation), which when combined resulted in a ‘total loss index’ (índice de pérdida global)
(DPAE, 1999; Ingeocim, 1998).(4) ‘Zones of high risk’ were those in which the expected
average loss of life, property, and infrastructure in the event of landslide was estimated at
over 62.5% of the total existing in the defi ned area (DPAE, 1999). Based on these studies,
the municipal government then issued risk maps on the scale of the entire city. Priorities
were established for more detailed calculations of risk at the scale of the neighborhood and
individual properties (DPAE, no date). In 2000 these priorities, based on the intersection of
high risk levels and low socioeconomic status, were incorporated into Bogotá’s Master Plan
(Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial—POT). Although further analysis of the data behind the
risk calculations may be warranted (cf Ericson and Doyle, 2004), what I wish to emphasize
is the fi eld of governmental intervention enabled by them.

(4) According to interviews conducted with government offi cials knowledgeable about risk management,
however, ‘vulnerability’ in these studies was predominantly based on physical and not social factors.

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1581 A Zeiderman

Under the leadership of Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, the Master Plan for Bogotá sought to
recuperate public space, improve the distribution of services, construct a mass-transit system,
and regulate urban land use (Pecha Quimbay, 2008, page 100). In terms of housing, it was also
an attempt to address Bogotá’s massive problems of informality and illegality. To upgrade
self-built settlements lacking basic necessities and legal titles, the POT proposed to provide
access to a comprehensive neighborhood-improvement program. However, preliminary
studies had shown that a large percentage of the developed territory of Bogotá was vulnerable
to environmental hazards or was otherwise unfi t for habitation, and this implied the need to
resettle thousands of households (Pecha Quimbay, 2008, page 101). As a result, the plan
adopted Ingeocim’s identifi cation of areas in which landslides and fl oods were likely to
cause major damage and loss of life. Bogotá’s Directorate for Emergency Prevention and
Response (DPAE) was then given the technical responsibility for the ongoing evaluation
and monitoring of ‘zones of high risk’, and the Fund for Social Housing (Caja) was granted
the authority to manage the relocation of populations inhabiting them.

At this moment, the ‘zone of high risk’ enabled Bogotá’s municipal government to
confront the dual problems of insecurity and informality. While risk management had been
a public and political concern since the 1980s, its emergence in the city in the late 1990s
was due to its unique ability to unite the two governmental imperatives dominant at that
time. According to the objective of protecting life against potential threats, central to the
Mockus administration, ‘risk zones’ were a necessary component of the government’s overall
effort to govern crime, violence, and accidents. In terms of regulating urban development and
upgrading settlements lacking basic necessities, key concerns during Peñalosa’s stint at City
Hall, they offered a solution to areas that resisted legalization and formalization. Capable of
adhering to both imperatives, the ‘zone of high risk’ became a technique for governing the
spaces and populations of Bogotá on the cusp of the millennium.

The technical diagnosis

Thus far, risk management in Colombia and the ‘zone of high risk’ in Bogotá have appeared
as established governmental techniques. Although the cartographic representations of these
high-risk zones and their subsequent incorporation into planning regulations gave the
impression that they were static, the problem was, of course, that the topography of the city
was not. And the municipal government always recognized that this was the case; a caveat
accompanying DPAE maps states:

“ The map of landslide threat is of a temporal nature, and therefore subject to conditions
present at any given moment. Since these are changeable through time, the threat levels
could be variable” (DPAE, 2007)

Because of the city’s unstable ground, risk must be monitored on an ongoing basis. Thus,
DPAE created an instrument called the diagnóstico técnico (or technical diagnosis)—
an on-site evaluation conducted by staff engineers and architects. During these visits, which
I describe below, DPAE technicians perform visual inspections and qualitative assessments
both of the inhabitability of the property and of the infrastructure of the neighborhood. The
technicians then recommend immediate action, if necessary, and decide whether the property
should be included in the Caja’s resettlement program (DPAE, no date). As we will see,
this draws DPAE technicians into a series of interactions both with inhabitants of these zones
and with the nonhuman world.

The routine work of conducting a technical diagnosis reveals that risk is not a static
technique of government but, rather, an ongoing attempt to render the uncertain future an
object of offi cial decision making in the present. As highlighted by the map of risk described
above, these techniques are not the exclusive domain of government technicians but, rather,
are constituted by encounters between these technicians and the spaces and populations

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On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá 1582

subject to their authority and expertise. The following ethnographic account demonstrates
that high-risk zones continue to be made and remade in interactions involving government
offi cials, benefi ciaries of their programs, and the urban environment. While this may be
true of risk governance in general, an ethnographic approach illustrates the specifi c ways in
which hybrid assemblages of human and nonhuman agents come together to produce risk
management as a technique of government in Bogotá.

On the ride to the barrio of San Rafael, the two government technicians I am accompanying,
Tatiana and Miguel, explain the purpose of our trip. We are setting out to monitor risk in a
neighborhood that borders the site of a 1999 landslide, which destroyed hundreds of houses
and took several lives. This case of remoción en masa (a geological process, combining
subterranean and surface movement) is the largest in any Latin American city, they say,
covering 110 ha. We pass the Escarpment of San Rafael, which the DPAE regards as the
phenomenon causing this mountain to rise in some places, fall in others, and occasionally
open up to swallow houses into gaping crevices. Over 150 homes were affected by a second
landslide in 2000; 85 more were toppled in 2001; and then, in 2002, a major movement of
earth damaged over 800 dwellings in the same vicinity (DPAE, 2006). Although technical
studies began in 1999, immediately after the initial disaster, and rescue, reconstruction, and
resettlement efforts have been underway ever since, the area was not offi cially declared
a ‘zone of high risk’ until over 1000 properties had been damaged or destroyed (DAPD,
2006). The offi cial boundary of the zone was demarcated in 2004 and, from that moment
on, it determined who would be entitled to the Caja’s resettlement program. However, as
I would soon learn, the boundary of the risk zone—and, therefore, who has the right to
housing subsidies and who does not; who is destined for relocation and who will remain—
must remain fl exible in order to keep up with the shifting ground beneath it.

The truck bumps and grinds up the steep, rutted dirt roads typical of the hillside settlements
that make up the southern periphery of Bogotá. Tatiana points to a vast stretch of empty
land once inhabited by over 3000 families (fi gure 3). She then indicates where mitigation
works will soon begin to protect the neighborhoods surrounding the now evacuated ‘zone
of high risk’ from further damage. Drains will be installed to channel water and retaining
walls will be built to stabilize collapsing hillsides. Before starting work, however, the DPAE
must conduct house-by-house inspections to determine whether the phenomenon causing
landslides in the adjacent area is also threatening this neighborhood. Far from being inert,
the zone’s boundaries must be monitored regularly to keep up with a city in motion.

We are dropped off at the border separating the evacuated zone from a dense settlement of
self-built houses that vary in size, material, and construction. Although some are two or three
stories tall with concrete or brick facades, most are rudimentary, one-fl oor dwellings made of
cinderblock, wood, and tin. As we begin our survey, a middle-aged woman with a small child
passes by and asks: “Are you here to evict us from our houses?” Responding to her perception
of the work that government does here in Ciudad Bolívar, Miguel reassures her: “No, we’re
from the Department of Emergency Prevention and Response and we’re just monitoring
the area.”

Tatiana raps on a window of the fi rst house on our list. A woman answers from behind
a locked door, “Who is it?” Tatiana responds, “Good day. How is everything?” “Very well,
thanks”, answers the woman cautiously.

Looking down at his map, Miguel asks her, “Is this lot number 10, Señora?” Somewhat
tentatively, she responds, “Yes, it’s lot 10.”

“OK, good”, Tatiana says as she begins to explain the purpose of our visit—“We’re
with the Directorate of Emergency Prevention and Response, and we are doing inspections
of the houses on this block. Due to the landslide phenomenon we have behind us”, she says

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1583 A Zeiderman

gesturing toward the ‘zone of high risk’ in the distance, “we need to verify whether you have
recently noticed any cracks in the walls, fl oors, or roof of your house”.

“No, I haven’t noticed anything like that”, the woman answers.
Miguel follows with a further request: “Would you allow us to come in and look around

and maybe take some photographs of the walls and the fl oor? Are you sure that your house
has not been affected recently by any sort of cracking?” The woman hesitates for a moment
before consenting. “I haven’t noticed any cracks or anything like that. But sure, you can come
in if you’d like.”

The three of us enter, glance quickly at the walls, fl oors, and ceiling, take a few photographs
and then leave, thanking her for her time. Tatiana then scrolls down to “Block 2, Lot 10” on
her list and next to it enters: “No apparent effects”.

The rest of our monitoring day goes on like this. We move from house to house, introduce
the purpose of our visit, ask whether the resident has noticed any recent cracking, and then
conduct a brief inspection (fi gure 4). Although occasionally we have to skip properties where
no one is home, many encounters are identical to the one described above. Sometimes,
however, the head of the household is not so trusting and cooperative. On a number of
occasions, we are told bluntly: “No, there’s no cracking here.” And when Tatiana or Miguel
asks permission to conduct a brief inspection, the request is met with abrupt rejection:
“No, at the moment, no.” Perhaps it is simply an inconvenient time—a young mother feeding
her newborn baby, for example. But in many cases there is noticeable hostility. Experience
might lead people to assume that if government offi cials are knocking on doors today, they
will be delivering eviction notices tomorrow. As far as the monitoring goes, however, these
rejections do not pose a problem. Tatiana simply responds, “OK, fi ne, many thanks”, and
marks down on her list: “Entry not permitted. Resident reports no apparent effects.”

Figure 3. [In colour online.] Evacuated ‘zone of high risk’ (source: photograph by author, 2009).

a44283

On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá 1584

I start to get bored, and fi nd myself actually hoping that we will stumble upon something
exciting—a collapsing wall, a falling roof, perhaps a cracking fl oor. And eventually we do. Upon
entering one house, we fi nd fi ssures that to me look serious in the walls of the bedroom and in
the living room fl oor. Looking concerned, Miguel snaps a number of photographs, and then
goes outside to examine the cinderblocks behind the cracking walls. He returns, informing the
residents that their house is in danger of collapsing, but that the problem is due to defi ciencia

constructiva (faulty construction) and not to un fenómeno natural (a natural phenomenon).
As Tatiana makes note of this evaluation on her list and we return to the street, I begin to
wonder how one differentiates between these two types of damage. I ask, somewhat self-
consciously: “How do you distinguish cracks caused by faulty construction from those caused
by movement of the earth?” Miguel patiently explains: “When there are problems with the way
concrete is mixed, you see small cracks between the cinderblocks, telling you the builder did
not use enough cement.” I then look to Tatiana to get her view: “You just know when it’s mala

construcción (bad construction) and when it’s algo natural (something natural).”
We continue on with our technical diagnosis, moving to an adjacent block bordering

the evacuated area. Turning the corner, we stumble upon a mud-fi lled ditch where a water
supply tube is actively leaking. Although originally installed by the utility company, it was
later tapped into by households who were not formally served by it. Water gushes out of a
thin rubber hose, which is most likely the work of the local fontanero—a self-employed
water manager who installs informal connections, regulates fl ows, and fi xes leaks. Miguel
and Tatiana examine the ditch with great concern. In addition to the water escaping from the
hose, the ditch collects and channels rainwater during the wet season, both of which further
destabilize ground already dangerously unstable. Miguel and I follow the seepage to the point

Figure 4. [In colour online.] Diagnóstico técnico (technical diagnosis) in action (source: photograph
by author, 2010).

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1585 A Zeiderman

at which it eventually disappears beneath the foundation of a nearby house, while Tatiana
marks down our exact location. “I’m going to have to alert Rosa”, the gestora local (local
manager) who represents DPAE at the neighborhood level. “She’ll contact the water utility
company and have them come remove the connection and repair the leak.” Thinking we have
fi nally discovered reason to declare this area a ‘zone of high risk’, I ask: “Will this affect the
boundary and therefore who will be relocated?” “No, no, no”, she responds: “we’re looking
for structural damage caused by remoción en masa. Anything beyond that is a different kind
of problem. In fact”, she goes on to explain, “its good that we saw this; it means that any
subsidence in the houses downhill from here is probably attributable to this.” The recognition
that landslides are a more-than-natural phenomenon offi cially justifi es inaction.

The day is fi nally winding down and only one more property remains. Miguel knocks on
the door and the woman who opens it looks at his yellow DPAE jacket and asks with a smile,
“Are you coming to kick me out?” “No”, Tatiana responds, “we’re just monitoring the block
to see if there are signs of movement and we haven’t found any.” “Too bad”, the woman says,
“Ya me quiero ir! I want to get out of here! I’ve been here for two years and I don’t like this
neighborhood. I don’t like living up here on this hillside.”

Still hoping that we will fi nd evidence that the ground beneath her house is unstable, she
invites us to come in and inspect. She guides us from room to room, showing us where the roof
leaks when it rains and where the fl oor is not level—signs, she hopes, that will convince us that
she should be eligible for resettlement. “Unfortunately”, Tatiana informs her, “these problems
have nothing to do with remoción en masa”—the geophysical movement occurring nearby.
With this fi nal inspection our technical diagnosis comes to an end, and the boundary remains
as before.

This is the work that goes into making ‘zones of high risk’. From this, we can see that
these zones have far from inert boundaries conclusively designating the space of intervention
for an established governmental technique. In their efforts to calculate the likelihood of
landslide, government technicians are drawn into repeated interactions with inhabitants
of these areas. In these interactions, expert assessments cannot be disentangled from those
being made independently by nonexperts. Ultimately, such assessments depend on how both
groups engage in the sometimes collaborative, sometimes contentious, process of codifying
the world in terms of risk. The boundaries of the zone might have been expanded to include
these households had Tatiana and Miguel seen things differently, had people reported more
recent damage, had their walls and fl oors cracked in a different way. What we encountered
during our inspections—collapsing houses, bursting water tubes, willing evacuees, and their
recalcitrant neighbors—did not collectively translate into a defi nitive change in the risk level
of the area. From the interactions that took place, data were collected and a decision made.
It may collapse tomorrow, but the neighborhood remains, at least for the time being, outside
the ‘zone of high risk’.

Conclusion

In this paper I have tracked how techniques of risk management work to govern the uncertain
future of cities. This has implications for the literature on political technologies of risk and
security, as well as for the fi eld of urban studies. Bridging the gap between the two allows us to
address the tendency among urbanists to focus critical attention on the production of unequal
geographies of vulnerability rather than on actually existing attempts to ameliorate them
(eg, techniques of risk management). However, given the fundamentally mutable and uncertain
object of these techniques, we must also reconsider how risk is understood. This requires an
analysis not only of the emergence of risk as a technique of urban planning and governance,
but also of the continuous work required of efforts to render the uncertain future the basis for
governmental intervention. This methodological orientation has conceptual consequences,

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On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá 1586

as it raises questions about the degree to which political technologies, such as risk, denote a
stable fi eld of meaning, a coherent set of techniques, or a common phenomenon. Although
an affi rmative response may be possible on the level of governmental rationality, in this
paper I contend that we must recognize the heterogeneous practices that constitute political
technologies of risk management.

Much of this is acknowledged by scholars of risk, and yet their analyses of government
tend to objectify the world being governed as if that world were inert and stationary. An
engagement with urban political ecology draws attention to the relationship of urban
populations and environments with emerging forms of technopolitical authority and expertise.
The people and things subject to techniques of risk management often play an active role
in their own governing—at times complicating, at others facilitating, and sometimes even
inciting governmental thought and action. This recognition leads to a more nuanced view of the
offi cial imperative to protect poor and otherwise vulnerable populations from environmental
hazards. Moreover, it allows us to consider whether explicitly acknowledging the hybridity
of technical and social expertise, the fl uid boundaries separating expert and nonexpert
knowledge, and the entangled relationality between governors and the governed, could lead
to more effective, egalitarian, and equitable approaches to securing urban ecologies. As this
becomes an ever more pressing pursuit—not just in Bogotá, but throughout the world—we
must grapple with the undeniable fact that cities, their environments, and their populations
do not sit still while techniques of risk management are applied to them. Our governments,
as well as those who analyze them, might thus do well to heed the truism that the political
technology of risk always rests on shaky ground.

Acknowledgements. I would like to thank James Ferguson, Thomas Blom Hansen, Nikhil Anand, and
Margreta de Grazia for their helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Ben Anderson
and Peter Adey for organizing the conference panels that led to this paper, as well as for their editorial
work. Two anonymous reviewers offered generous and insightful feedback, which greatly improved the
fi nal product, and Laura Ramí rez contributed key archival research. This research would not have been
possible without the patience and generosity of the DPAE technicians who allowed me to follow them
throughout their daily routines. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of
the Association of American Geographers and the Society for Cultural Anthropology. This research was
funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the Wenner–Gren Foundation.

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© 2019 Urban research PUblications limited

— EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’:
Resiliency Revanchism and Disaster Risk Management in
Manila

Maria Khristine alvarez and Kenneth Cardenas

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.

Introduction
As objects of policy, money and theory, Southern cities often appear through

vocabularies of deficiencies and crises. The exercise of state power, the assumption of
debt and the creation of categories proceed with the invocation of some technically
articulated need––overcrowding, underprovision, poverty. Vulnerability to climate
change has recently emerged as one of these deficiencies: as more poor people move to
and live in underprovisioned coastal and riverine cities, and as sea levels rise and
extreme weather becomes more frequent, we are likely to see more climate-related
disasters. The rapid rise of this narrative had been helped along by recent catastrophic
floods in Southern cities, which have had the effect of rendering visible these presaged
futures in the present. Consequently, it is now in fashion to rank cities based on climate
risk indices, both now and into the projected future; to attribute proximate causes of
urban growth such as conflict, forced migration, or de-agrarianization to the ultimate
cause of climate change; or to pledge billions of dollars toward building ‘resilient’ cities.

As these ideas gain wider currency in the public imagination, in policy agendas
and in infrastructure budgets, we believe it is necessary to contribute to ongoing
discussion about their politics (Cretney, 2014; Evans and Reid, 2014; Biermann et al.,
2016; Allen et al., 2017; Leitner et al., 2018). Specifically, we ask: How and why do some
ways of understanding urban climate risk gain traction over others? For what and to
whose ends are characterizations of urban and climate crises, projects such as DRM and
ideals such as resilience used and abused?

This article is based on the authors’ respective unpublished master’s theses, from which portions of this paper
were derived. The authors wish to thank the participants in this research for their generosity, as well as the two
anonymous IJURR reviewers for their valuable feedback. We also wish to express our gratitude to Jose C. Javier
for producing the map and providing excellent research assistance, as well as to Simeona Martinez, Andre Ortega
and Claudine Alvarez for their inputs.

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ALVAREZ AND CARDENAS 228

We ask these questions––and propose answers for them––in the spirit of
development criticism. The way in which the climate crisis in the global South is being
constructed, and the solutions that are presented to address it, are becoming the twenty-
first-century equivalent of the development project of the twentieth century: a pervasive,
persuasive way of looking at the world, employing similar motifs of crisis and urgency,
casts of Promethean experts and broad swathes of territories and populations ‘in need’.
To draw a final parallel with critics of the development project, we seek to illuminate
how addressing these needs––in this case, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘risk’––are vectors for
power.

We develop our case by re-examining the catastrophic effects of the floods
caused by Tropical Storm Ondoy (international codename: Ketsana) on Manila in the
Philippines, in 2009. It is a story that can and has been told through familiar tropes
of poor urban populations in an underbuilt and mismanaged city, and of a disaster
in the present portending a volatile future climate. We then shift our focus to the
politics that are enabled by these tropes, and how the floods allowed elites to redefine
unwanted landscapes and populations in terms of risk and vulnerability, and then to
justify selective and exclusionary exercises of state power to avert this imagined future.
We develop our argument through an understanding of risk developed by Ulrich Beck
(Beck, 1992; 2009; Beck and Lau, 2005) to reinterpret the disaster itself, the preexisting
landscapes of need that precipitated its uneven effects, and the selective exercises of
violent state power which it justified.

Development as risk conquest, resiliency as risk management
We take Bankoff’s (2001) observation as our starting point––that the development

discourse of the twentieth century, and the vulnerability discourse that renders
significant swathes of populations and territories unsafe, share a dichotomization of
the world into desirable and undesirable states––resilient and vulnerable, developed
and developing––and a unilinear, evolutionary view of social change. Bankoff builds on
development critics, particularly Escobar (1995), to analyse the ideological force of this
discourse: how it has been used to justify technicist intervention in vulnerable societies
to accomplish this process, and how it has allowed Western powers to construct poverty
and inequality as natural backward states, obscuring their own role in creating these
conditions.

We expand upon Bankoff’s research to apply other insights from development
criticism to the study of vulnerability (Esteva, 1992; Escobar, 1995): how the construction
of some societies as backward, the focus on solving the problems of this condition, and
the urgency implied by this task made development an ideal vehicle for implementing
the interests of dominant actors. The parallels and the common lineages are often in
plain sight: much of the work on the impact of climate change and disasters on the
urban South has been framed by the language of policy, multilateral development goals,
or through the process of quantifying climate risk (Kreimer et al., 2003; UNDP, 2007).
Parallels can also be discerned with how moral imperatives are employed in revanchist
politics against unwanted populations and places in cities, for example, ‘sanitation’ in
nineteenth-century Paris (Sibley, 1995), crime prevention in twentieth-century São
Paulo (Caldeira, 2000) or urban ‘regeneration’ in Britain (Slater, 2016).

The ‘risk society’ thesis developed by Ulrich Beck provides a promising
framework for our questions, as it situates an empirical concern for environmental
and distributional issues within a broader theoretical account of modernity and its
unintended consequences. Its core premise is that modernity, as a period of human
history, is defined by seeing the future not as a product of external, often supernatural
forces beyond human control, but rather as being within the domain of human agency.
Inaugurating this period required discerning unknowable, unactionable uncertainties
from knowable and actionable risks. The future presents both opportunities and

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EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’ 229

dangers, and the probabilities of desirable outcomes can be quantified––and thus acted
upon––through the faculties of reason (Beck, 1992: 98; 2009: 4). Modernity could thus
be understood as a project of using reason to ‘discipline the future’ (Ewald, 1991: 207).

Under what Beck refers to as ‘first modernity’, which corresponds to a social
order defined by the modern state, industrialization and science, uncertainties presented
by natural, external forces were gradually eliminated or controlled. But the process of
disciplining the future unleashed new, dangerous forces with no parallels in human
history. These manufactured risks, such as climate change and global economic crises,
undermine the fundamental dichotomies of first modernity, for example, between
nature and society, the national and the global, and facts and values. For instance, climate
change is both a natural and a social issue, manifests itself at local and global scales, and
debates over it are driven not only by science, but also by clashing values (Beck and Lau,
2005; Beck, 2009: 71–76). Some of these manufactured risks are catastrophic risks, with
spatially and temporally unbounded consequences, threatening the very existence of
human society. Yet paradoxically, they remain imperceptible at the level of individual
subjective experience and are only rendered visible within scientific knowledge. They
are therefore ‘open to social definition and construction’ (Beck, 1992: 22–23).

The emergence of these manufactured risks leads to another transformation.
Conquering risk yields to the goal of managing risk, while the pervasiveness and
invisibility of risks lead to fear becoming a dominant attitude (Beck, 2009: 8–9). This shift
defines a transition from industrial society to risk society; from first to second modernity
(Beck, 1992; Beck and Lau, 2005). Within second modernity, the key political issues are
no longer confined to scarcity and the distribution of ‘goods’ (physical products as well
as positive effects), but extend to issues of insecurity and the redistribution of ‘bads’ (i.e.
the negative effects of risks) (Beck, 1992: 22–23). Power is no longer merely a function
of relations of production, but of relations of definition: the ability to define what is and
what isn’t a risk, who is and isn’t responsible for them, what kinds of knowledge render
them visible, what counts as ‘proof’ of risk and their consequences and what forms of
action are to be taken in response to these risks (Beck, 2009: 29–36). Consequently, the
media, science and law become crucial arenas through which risks are understood and
acted upon (Beck, 1992: 22–23).

Recentering risk society in a typhoon-belt megacity
With some dislocation and reworking, we find that Beck’s thoughts provide a

promising framework for understanding the politics of flooding in an at-risk coastal
megacity for three reasons. First, it allows links to be built between resiliency as a
second modern project of risk management and development as a first modern project of
risk conquest: to see the former in terms of its roots in the latter, and to allow arguments
to be developed based on one and then tested to enhance further understanding of
the other. On a global scale, this point is apparent in Beck’s substantive focus on
climate change as a product of industrial society. But it is less obvious at the scale of
a city, and in the context of the global South: can cities that are typically understood
in terms of irrationality––lack of planning, irrational rural–urban migrants, shoddy
infrastructure––be understood in terms of modernity?

We answer this question in the affirmative, based on postcolonial urban theory:
theories of modernity developed elsewhere, including the West, can have purchase
on what is happening in the South. The core premises of these ideas can be accepted
alongside an ability to understand difference and contingency, and there can be intrinsic
value in recognizing the ways in which these ideas are incomplete projects, and how
bringing them into dialogue with the experiences of the global South can enrich
them (cf. Yeoh, 1999; Shatkin, 2007; Roy, 2009). Cast in these terms, the stereotypical
features of the vulnerable Southern city can be reinterpreted in terms of first and
second modernities. Developmentalism can be recast as the form taken by the first

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ALVAREZ AND CARDENAS 230

modern project of risk conquest, applied to the postcolonial developing world; in turn,
the partial successes and unintended consequences of this project can be recast as
manufactured risks.

Manila––and its dysfunctions, as typically understood––serves as a case in point.
It is presently the eighteenth-largest agglomeration in the world (United Nations
Department of Economics and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2015). It is the
primate city of a country in which recent urbanization has been driven by rural–urban
migration, particularly to its peripheries (Jones, 2005; Ortega, 2014; 2016). Its landscape
is defined by polarization of the population according to global-city enclaves and
forgotten, bypassed informality (Shatkin, 2004; Kleibert and Kippers, 2015). Notions
that Manila is ‘overpopulated’ by the urban poor––variously attracted by non-existent
jobs, coddled as vote-banks by corrupt politicians, and taxing the city’s deficient
infrastructure––have wide circulation among the Philippine middle class, news media,
experts and policymakers (Kusaka, 2017).

But seen through the prism of the risk society, the Southern urban crisis is
manufactured: the growth of Manila and cities like it was produced not by irrationality,
but rather by the successes of rational, first modern projects. Late-twentieth-century
population growth can be attributed to improvements in nutrition, sanitation and
immunization; de-agrarianization can be attributed to improvements in productivity
created by the Green Revolution. Meanwhile, Manila’s economic and demographic
primacy involved modernization schemes that favoured it as a site for investment,
namely a debt-driven industrialization and infrastructure spending spree in the
1970s, built by a twentieth-century cast of postcolonial dictatorships, multilateral
development lenders and modernizing technocrats (Bello et al., 1982; Broad, 1988). The
underinvestment in its infrastructure in the decades since can be traced directly to the
collapse of this order from 1982 to 1986 and the focus in subsequent government budgets
on servicing this debt––which, as a failed attempt to discipline the future, can itself be
reinterpreted in terms of the failures of risk conquest, and how these are giving way to
projects of risk management.

It is against this backdrop that the politics of climate change are being played out.
Tropical storms, as well as the floods and landslides they trigger, regularly exact high
human and economic tolls on the Philippines, the country consistently ranking among
the countries at highest risk from both natural disasters and climate change (Guha-Sapir
et al., 2010; Garschagen et al., 2016; Kreft et al., 2016). Owing to Manila’s population size
and density, deficiencies in its infrastructure, and the city’s location on a low-elevation
alluvial plain astride two bodies of water, it is also seen as vulnerable to climate change
effects, such as stronger tropical cyclones (IPCC, 2007; Yusuf and Francisco, 2009;
Muto et al., 2010; Thomas and Lopez, 2015). The characterizations may (and do) reflect
realities––but to draw another lesson from development criticism, what kinds of politics
might this knowledge enable?

Addressing this need brings us to a second reason for drawing from the risk
society framework: it treats the definitional, discursive dimensions of the politics of
risk, particularly climate risk, as an analytical entry point. Among manufactured risks,
climate change stands apart as perhaps the best example of how the politics of risk play
out under second modernity: it is an unintended, manufactured consequence of two
centuries of conquering risk. It is also a catastrophic risk, and one only rendered visible
through expertise. An understanding of the politics of the creation, circulation and use
of expertise, therefore, opens a window onto how the social definition and construction
of climate change takes place, and what forms of political action these enable.

Once again, Manila’s recent history serves to illuminate this point. Two
important forms that this knowledge has recently taken on are the quantification of
risk and vulnerability, and the interpretation of extreme weather events in the present
as presaging future climatic patterns. Based on risk and vulnerability indices, discussed

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EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’ 231

above, and when discerning the signs of a catastrophic future from the present, Manila
and the Philippines have been prominent in the ‘staging’ of both urban and climate
crises (Beck, 2009: 10, 98–100), which locates probable future threats such as climate
change and unruly megacities in the realm of the certain and the present. Our analysis
focuses on how an understanding of the Philippines as a vulnerable society confronting
both urban and climate crises has affected how the Philippine state understands its
population and territory, how it projects its efforts at multilateral development and risk
management, and how its expert construction of disaster risk is rehearsed.

We further refine Beck’s point about ‘relations of definition’ as a dimension of
power under second modernity by pointing out that facts, as adjudicated in the media,
science and law, often depend on aesthetic judgement. Here we draw from Ghertner’s
(2015: 184) notion of ‘rule by aesthetics’––an ‘aesthetic governmentality’ or a ‘mode
of partitioning space’ based on codes of appearance––to argue that the adjudication
of facts that became the cornerstone of DRM policy and interventions relied on an
aesthetics of poverty. Aesthetic governmentality pertains to ordering and governing
space and populations by deploying aesthetic codes based on ‘self-evident facts of
sense perception’ (ibid.: 185). To govern aesthetically is to refer to ‘aesthetic norms’ that
constitute the ‘map-like objectivity of slum unsightliness and unbelonging’ as a grid
for evaluating the nuisance and the dangers of a space or a population (Ghertner, 2011:
288–89; 2015: 185).

Finally, the risk society thesis allows us to understand vulnerability as a distinct
axis of difference and inequality alongside established categories such as class, status,
gender and race. Beck’s thoughts set up questions about insecurity, and the negative
effects of risks, involving its own politics. Inequalities in how risk is distributed is
a distinct form of inequality, alongside (and in addition to) other, more established
forms of inequality. Inequalities in risk, in turn, involve a distinct form of politics.
Viewing the definition and redistribution of ‘bads’ under second modernity enables us
to comprehend lines of inquiry into the politics of risk management, vulnerability and
resiliency that cannot be understood simply in terms of material inequality and gain.
It obliges us to seek out political projects that are not merely permutations of disaster
capitalism, as applied to a changing climate (cf. Klein, 2007; Yee, 2018). At the same
time, it explicitly locates the origins of these politics in the successes and failures of
first modern, goods creation and distribution projects. Therefore, while inequalities in
‘goods’ are distinct from inequalities in ‘bads’, material inequalities do transmute to risk
inequalities. For instance, Manila’s shoddy infrastructure can be traced directly to both
the unintended consequences of debt-fuelled developmentalism and the management of
the 1982 debt crisis. Yet it is the poor who tend to be at higher risk from disrepair––for
example, as they occupy marginal, flood-prone land along waterways and in coastal
areas. As we argue, this marginality extends to the definitional and discursive aspects
of risk.

While we find the vocabulary of the risk society useful, and while we find some
congruence between it and the research agenda of Southern urban studies, there has
been little engagement between the two. Despite Beck’s explicitly global agenda, he
has retained the assumption that the leading edge of modernity remains ensconced in
advanced capitalist societies. While Beck does take examples from the South, he still
epistemologically privileges the West––for example, by presenting conflict between
different ‘risk cultures’ as a conflict between America and Europe (Beck, 2009: 71–76).
Meanwhile, scholarship on risks in Southern contexts tend to be dismissive of Beck’s
theory, given its focus on ‘technological hazards … and the condition of late modernity’
(Wisner et al., 2003: 16–18). We take the view that these issues can contribute to
conversations on the urban South vis-à-vis modernity, and help identify gaps presented
by disasters within Southern contexts for social and urban theory (Arabindoo, 2016;
Saguin, 2017). We draw from the postcolonial urban research agenda to recognize

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ALVAREZ AND CARDENAS 232

the plurality of modernities (Robinson, 2006)––but we also assert that these can be
dysfunctional, repressive and violent in new, plural and often poorly anticipated ways.
The analysis of these tendencies, in turn, require us to use concepts that attune us to
the failures of modernity. Our analysis seeks to apply Beck’s ideas toward this agenda,
i.e. studying the violent forms of second modernity being invented in Southern cities, as
told through the politics of flood risk management in Manila from 2009 to the present.

Ondoy and the floods of 2009: the facts
In the early morning of 26 September 2009, Tropical Storm Ondoy made

landfall 87 kilometres northeast of Manila, with maximum sustained wind speeds
of 105 kilometres per hour. Typhoon tracking and public safety systems initially did
not indicate any cause for undue concern. The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical
and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), the state meteorological office,
placed the areas south of Ondoy’s expected path, including Metro Manila, under Signal
No. 1 (PAGASA and Nilo, 2010). This is the lowest of the Philippines’ four-tier tropical-
storm public warning system, which translates measured wind speeds into predefined
sets of expected storm effects and standardized precautionary measures. In terms of
this warning, an area would be expected to experience winds of up to 60 km/h and
intermittent rains within the next 36 hours: ‘twigs and branches of small trees may
be broken, some banana plants may be tilted or uprooted, some houses of very light
materials may be partially unroofed, [and] only very light or no damage may be sustained
by areas affected’ (ibid.: n.p.n.).

Typhoons are a fixture of the wet monsoon season in the Philippines. An average
of twenty storms enter the Philippine area of responsibility (PAR) annually, of which
eight make landfall (PAGASA, 2009). In 2009, Ondoy was the fifteenth storm to enter
the PAR (Calonzo, 2009) and the eighth to make landfall; Manila had previously been
placed under Signal Nos. 1 and 2, but had experienced no major property damage (ABS-
CBN News, 2009; GMA News Online, 2009). Disruptions caused by a storm of Ondoy’s
strength, such as floods in low-elevation areas and flight cancellations, are considered
normal in the monsoon months in Manila.

But Ondoy brought an unusual amount of rain: PAGASA’s rain gauge in Manila’s
suburbs recorded 455 millimetres of rain within a 24-hour period, equivalent to 150%
of the monthly average rainfall for September between 1993 and 2008 (PAGASA and
Nilo, 2010). This reading broke a record that had stood since 1967 and was subsequently
described by PAGASA’s meteorologists as a ‘180-year return period’ event, scientific
jargon left unexplained albeit frequently used (Government of the Republic of the
Philippines et al., 2009). The downpour triggered unusually high and extensive floods,
and districts with no living recollection of flooding were inundated by waist- and neck-
high floodwaters. As the storm warning system did not include information on rainfall,
it offered no indication of where the floods would hit, how high they would be, and how
fast they would rise. Besides, PAGASA’s capability to accurately forecast the amount of
rainfall had been taken offline when a key radar installation was destroyed in a landslide
(Morella and Agence France-Presse, 2009). Among the worst-hit areas were densely
populated and built-up areas along the Marikina River, which drains the Sierra Madre
range to the east of the city, and the coastline of Laguna de Bay, a lake that is fed by
rivers from the Sierra Madre and doubles as an impoundment basin for Manila’s flood
control works (see map in Figure 1). A subsequent reconstruction of the flooding along
the Marikina River calculated a maximum discharge rate more than twice the previous
record, and a maximum flood height of 9.9 metres (Abon et al., 2011: 1287–88).

By 30 September, 198 out of Manila’s 1,705 barangays (villages) reported floods
affecting a total of 303,104 persons. An additional 1,924,741 persons were affected by
floods in the city’s adjoining regions. Altogether 254,139 persons were temporarily
sheltered in 236 evacuation centres across Manila, for the most part in schools, sports

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EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’ 233

facilities and other state buildings that were ill suited to the purpose (NDCC, 2009a). On
the same day, PAGASA began tracking Pepeng (international codename: Parma), another
storm system (NDCC, 2010). The new storm took a northerly track, sparing Manila its

BULACA

N

MARIKINA
RIVER

PASIG RIVER

MANGGAHAN
FLOODWAY

naturally drains through
Pasig River

drains Marikina River and
Laguna Lake to Manila Bay

RIZAL

CAVITE

LAGUNA

diverts flow from
Marikina River to Laguna Lake

to prevent flooding along
riverbanks

MANILA BAY

LAGUNA LAKE
used as a retention basin

for flow diverted by
Manggahan Floodway

0 2.5 7.5 10 km5

N

FIGURE 1 Manggahan Floodway and associated bodies of water (source: cartography
by Jose C. Javier, reproduced with permission)

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ALVAREZ AND CARDENAS 234

full force. But it developed into a much stronger storm and Signal No. 3 was put into
effect over Manila and most of Luzon shortly before it made landfall on 2 October. At
this point, barangays along Laguna de Bay were still flooded, and water and electricity
had not been fully restored. The two storms exacted a combined toll of 956 dead, 84
missing and 736 injured (Government of the Republic of the Philippines et al., 2011). The
Philippines sustained US $4.38 billion worth of damage and losses, a figure equivalent
to 2.7% of its gross domestic product (Government of the Republic of the Philippines
et al., 2011). In Manila, 241 people lost their lives, including 32 from drowning and 68
from leptospirosis; 14,836 homes were totally destroyed, and an additional 77,144 homes
were partially damaged (NDCC, 2009b).

Discursively constituting Ondoy: the politics of facts, explanations
and action
The devastation wrought by the floods set in motion processes of explanation,

involving meteorologists, geologists, hydraulic engineers, city managers and
architects––and of reconfiguring Manila, motivated by objectives of ‘disaster risk
management’, ‘building back better’ and ‘utilizing the opportunities’ presented by the
disaster. What follows is an examination of these processes, concerning specifically how
a standardized explanation of the disaster emerged; how this explanation attributed
causation and responsibility to specific processes and groups of people and not to others;
and finally, how this explanation became the basis for a specific form of DRM premised
on the eviction of slum dwellers across Manila.

We drew from critical discourse analysis a set of approaches that seek to
understand how power is ‘enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social
and political context’ (van Dijk, 2001: 352). Specifically, we utilized techniques described
by Norman Fairclough (1995: 2003) to examine why some representations of events,
processes and agents were sustained, and why other representations were dropped.
Our analysis begins with a set of seven policy documents, which together comprised
the official discursive framework from which state agencies were expected to define
and manage risks associated with disasters and climate change. We traced how these
policy documents drew narratives from other documents, such as international treaties,
as well as how they were mentioned in other genres of texts. Through this analysis, we
inductively identified a range of other texts, and the body of documents we studied came
to comprise Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (DRRM) plans and frameworks;
urban development laws and policies; internal reports used by state agencies and local
governments; press releases, eviction notices; documents produced by experts for the
Asian Development Bank, the United Nations, and the World Bank; interviews granted
to the media by members of these agencies and experts; and media reports on these
documents. In parallel, we also conducted an analysis of media coverage, primarily
of the period between 2009 and 2013, and held interviews with experts, consultants,
national and local government officials, and evicted residents between 2015 and 2017.
We focus on the discourses around three relationships: between flooding and climate
change, development and resiliency, and building back better and slum evictions.

— Ondoy and climate change: staging a catastrophic future
In Ondoy’s immediate aftermath, two narratives about its relationship with

climate change were advanced. The first was that no conclusive link between Ondoy
and climate change could be drawn immediately: the conditions of its formation were
not abnormal, and conclusions cannot be formed from the single data point provided by
Ondoy (Legaspi, 2009). This was forwarded by Rosa Perez and Rodel Lasco, two Filipino
members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The second narrative painted a much bleaker picture, positing a link between
Ondoy and climate change––either by way of a direct causal connection, or by arguing

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EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’ 235

that Ondoy prefigures the weather of the future. A state meteorologist noted: ‘This could
be again a manifestation of climate change. Due to climate change, we should expect more
extreme weather events like extreme rainfall’ (Calonzo, 2009: n.p.n.). The cabinet
secretary for the environment was quoted as stating: ‘The alarm bells are ringing. This is
climate change. The unprecedented amount of water that we saw over the weekend would
not be the first and the last’ (Dizon, 2009: n.p.n.). Other experts, such as the Southeast
Asia director of Greenpeace, the chief Filipino negotiator at a United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Bangkok, the regional coordinator
for the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), and the
dean of the Ateneo School of Government issued similar comments (Dizon, 2009; Fogarty
and Win, 2009; Fonbuena, 2009; Tubeza, 2009). None of them, however, provided any
evidence to establish this relationship. Two made references to modelling-based studies
that show scenarios of what could happen in the future, but none of these studies utilized
Ondoy as a data point (Fonbuena, 2009; Tubeza, 2009). With only some exceptions, the
proponents of this view could not produce climatological science; the burden of proof
in their contexts were not the same as those alluded to by Perez and Lasco, namely, the
burden of establishing a pattern of extraordinary weather, or of establishing a direct
causal relationship between Ondoy and a hypothesized mechanism, such as high sea
water temperatures. These experts were not necessarily ‘doing science’ when they faced
reporters or the UNFCCC. Instead, they were staging catastrophic global risk for non-
scientific publics by using Ondoy and the flood to bring possible future threats of climate
change into the realm of the actual and the present.

Discursive practices within the news media led to this narrative being picked up
over others and eventually being subsumed into the standardized explanation for Ondoy.
The narrative advanced by Perez and Lasco was initially picked up in three news pieces.
In two of the three articles, the narrative was ‘informationally backgrounded’ (Fairclough,
1995: 106): it was not the subject of the headline, was presented as a dissenting opinion
and was allocated only one paragraph at the end of each text (Ubac and Avendaño, 2009;
Ubalde, 2009). In contrast, the narrative linking Ondoy to climate change was carried
in at least seven full-length articles. It was also the subject of the headlines of these
stories, which were all full-length. A story headlined ‘No debate: deluge due to climate
change’ is particularly notable for denying the existence of alternative narratives and
for consciously adopting a comment made by an interviewed expert as an unbracketed
editorial stance (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2009).

Within a year, this claim––that there was no debate––became a self-fulfilling
prophecy, and the media were presenting experts as unanimous in their opinion on this
matter. In retrospective pieces published on anniversaries of the disaster, the possibility
of climate change being a factor had hardened into certainty, and the individual voices of
interviewed experts had dissolved into pluralized, anonymized ‘experts’ and ‘studies’. An
analysis piece drily noted that ‘a year ago today, [the Philippines] was caught unprepared for
what experts say were the unexpected impacts of climate change’ (Howard, 2010). Two years
after Ondoy, the media warned that ‘studies have pointed out’ that the dangers of flooding

‘have been exacerbated by climate change and severe change in weather patterns (Araja,
2011). These experts and studies, however, remained unnamed; establishing consensus was
merely a matter of attribution, and the relationship between Ondoy and climate change was
resolved through editorial practices rather than through scientific method.

Yet in the years since Ondoy, there has been no research on establishing a causal
link with climate change. As the relationship between extreme weather events and
climate change is studied in terms of trends and not through single events, climatology
will likely remain silent on this matter.1 But through elite opinion and the media, the
floods presaged a volatile and uncontrollable future; in fact, they had become an article

1 See Villafuerte et al. (2015) for recent climatological research on extreme rainfall in the Philippines.

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ALVAREZ AND CARDENAS 236

of faith of what Beck describes as a quasi-religious belief in global risks, a ‘secular
religion of threat’ which demands action (Beck, 2009: 64, 72–73). Ondoy was a ‘portent
of things to come’ (Dizon, 2009); future disaster events would invariably be ‘worse’
(Tubeza, 2009); and something had to be done to prevent this from taking place.

— Development and resilience: rhetoric and practice
The staging of climate change through Ondoy occurred alongside a parallel

development in policymaking. Before Ondoy, an explicit shift in the state’s attitude
toward disaster risk, which emphasized managing and reducing disaster risk as opposed
to merely responding to it, was gaining momentum. This was coded in the official
rhetoric toward disasters based on the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) and was
first elaborated in a document entitled Strategic National Action Plan on Disaster Risk
Reduction 2009–2019 (SNAP––see NDCC, 2009c), drawn up a few months before Ondoy
(Executive Order 888, 2010).

The floods deepened this rhetorical commitment: within one month of Ondoy,
three national-level policy responses were set in motion. Assistance was requested from
development partners at a World Bank–International Monetary Fund meeting for a post-
disaster needs assessment (PDNA). These organizations, in turn, commissioned a study
using a methodology first devised by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America
and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (Government of the Republic of the Philippines et al., 2009).
The Philippine president issued two executive orders for setting up a ‘public–private
reconstruction commission’ mandated with studying ‘the causes, costs, and actions
to be taken … and to seek fresh aid to fund reconstruction’ (Executive Orders 832 and
838 of 2009). Finally, a disaster risk reduction and management bill, which had been in
legislative limbo for nine years, was taken up as priority legislation (Citizens’ Disaster
Risk Response Center, 2010). It was signed into law eight months later as the Disaster
Risk Reduction and Management Act, or DRRM Act (Republic Act 10121, 2010), and the
rules and regulations for its implementation were promulgated on the first anniversary
of Ondoy. This law restructured the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC),
an ad hoc body that would only convene after a disaster, into the permanently staffed
and funded National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC),
which was granted a mandate for formulating and implementing a National Disaster
Risk Reduction and Management Framework (NDRRMF) (Republic Act 10121, 2010).

Two narratives ran consistently through these policies:2 that disaster risks are
being transformed by climate change, and that economic development is inextricably
linked to DRM. An emphasis on the economic effects of disasters, as well as on the
imperatives demanded by DRM, was crucial in developing this narrative and drew on
the mainstays of development discourse: quantification, economic reductionism and the
imperative of action. Beyond these parallels, however, what these texts established was
an equivalency (Fairclough, 2003: 88) between development and DRM: without proper
disaster risk management, development cannot take place; at the same time, managing
disaster risk is development.

Based on its roots in the HFA, ‘adaptation’ and ‘resiliency’ in the Philippine
DRM policy invoked rhetorical sensitivity to issues of exclusion and vulnerability, and
to the inadequacies of an infrastructure-centric approach to disaster risk. A ‘guiding
principle’ of SNAP (NDCC, 2009c: 102–103) ‘requires multi-stakeholder participation …
consultations [as] part of an inclusive and ongoing process that needs to be continued’.
The DRRM Act likewise declared as policy that the state must ‘ensure that disaster risk
reduction and climate change measures are gender responsive, sensitive to indigenous
knowledge systems and cultures, and respectful of human rights’ (Republic Act 10121,

2 NDCC, 2009c: 16, 21-22, 33; Executive Order 832, 2009; Executive Order 838, 2009; Executive Order 888, 2010;
NDRRMF, 2011: 4, 8, 14

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EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’ 237

2010). The NDRRMF described a ‘paradigm shift’ from a technical approach that privileged
‘engineering and technological solutions’ to an approach that promotes ‘non-structural
and non-engineering measures such as community-based disaster preparedness and early
warning, indigenous knowledge and land use planning’ (NDRRMC, 2011). To these ends,
the PDNA recommended ‘in-city’ relocation for the victims of floods, and that ‘participation’
be a central part of this process (Government of the Republic of the Philippines et al.,
2011: 23–24). It also noted that eviction to ‘peri-urban (or rural) areas that does not take
proximity to livelihoods into account has been less than successful worldwide’ (ibid.: xiii).

But to what extent did these ideas translate into how the floods were understood,
and how responses to it were selected? There was strong dissonance between the
language used in these policies and the actions of state agencies, as revealed through
situation assessments, accomplishment reports and media interviews, particularly
in the first four years following the disaster, before the Communication Plan for
Informal Settler Families (ISF) Program led by the Department of the Interior and
Local Government (DILG) was finalized. The solutions that were implemented in this
period reflected neither the recommendations of the PDNA nor the principles of the
commitments made in the policy framework. They did, however, carry echoes of the

‘paradigm shift’ described in the NDRRMF: that the flood, and indeed all disasters, was
not a purely meteorological phenomenon, but also a product of human and social factors.
However, the ways in which these factors were selectively recognized and interpreted
were rhetorically inconsistent, often to unjust ends.

— ‘Building back better’
As in much of Manila’s modern history, the issue of the interpretation of factors

to unjust ends comes into focus through the matter of slum clearance and evictions.
The president ordered the implementation of MMETROPLAN, a World Bank-funded
plan dating back to 1977 to ‘rid Metro Manila of tens of thousands of informal settlers’
(Esguerra and Aurelio, 2009), and began a balik probinsya (return to the provinces) scheme,
which involved giving the equivalent of 60 days’ minimum wage to beneficiary families in
exchange for leaving the city––a scheme that was continued by the next administration
(Bordadora, 2011; Morelos, 2012). In the state’s final report on Ondoy, it listed among its
accomplishments the relocation of 1,286 families from Metro Manila to its outer suburbs
and the transfer of an additional 269 families through balik probinsya (NDCC, 2010).

The narrative that underpinned these schemes was a discursive construction
of Manila’s slum-dwelling poor putting not only themselves at risk, but also putting
the rest of the city at risk. The failure of the Manggahan Floodway, a flood-control
infrastructure project downstream from the Marikina River, is a key narrative in this
regard. Built in the 1970s in response to another flood disaster, it is an emblematic
example of the infrastructure-centric approach to conquering natural hazards that had
been prevalent in the twentieth century. It had been designed to control flooding along
the Marikina River by opening another drainage channel that exited to Laguna de Bay,
diverting water that would otherwise exit through the Pasig River on its way to Manila
Bay (Pante, 2016) (see Figure 1).

But flooding along the Marikina River was evidence of the floodway’s failure––
which experts, in turn, blamed on the slums that had been illegally constructed along
its length. Blaming slums for Manila’s perennial floods has since become an annual
exercise accompanying the arrival of typhoon season: a year after Ondoy, the chief
engineer of Quezon City argued that local governments and the national government
should ‘join hands in driving out informal squatters away from rivers, ponds, canals,
esteros,3 and easements of other major waterways’ (Chavez, 2010). Three years later,

3 While estero literally denotes an estuary, in everyday usage in Manila, the term refers particularly to degraded
streams that are used for sewerage.

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ALVAREZ AND CARDENAS 238

a new administration sought to relocate 104,219 informal settler families living in
‘danger zones’ (personal interview with Oplan LIKAS official, 16 February 2016), and a
new Public Works secretary was quoted as saying that he ‘received instructions from
the President that if push comes to shove, we will have to blast these houses’ (Ubac,
2012). Shortly thereafter, in December 2012, the National Technical Working Group on
Informal Settler Families (ISF–NTWG), an inter-agency committee headed by the DILG,
was formed through a presidential directive (Gamil, 2012; personal interview with
Oplan LIKAS official, 16 February 2016) to implement and ‘hasten’ (ISF–NTWG, 2014)
the removal and transfer of slum dwellers from ‘danger zones’. It centred its efforts on
the 62,590 ISFs along waterways (ICF International, 2014), particularly on the 40,000
families living along the eight priority waterways (personal interview with Oplan
LIKAS official, 16 February 2016) under the Metro Manila Flood Management Project
(MMFMP). The eviction of riparian settlements was carried out under Oplan LIKAS
(Operation Plan Evacuate), a massive slum eviction and resettlement scheme marketed
both as a ‘preemptive’ and ‘voluntary’ evacuation programme and a social housing
programme for Manila’s vulnerable yet undesirable populations. The ‘paradigm shift’
to human and social aspects of risk was thus reduced to offloading blame on informal
settlements. Slums, which carried with them legacies of stigmatized landscapes and
populations, were thought to endanger not only their own residents but the city’s
residents too. As an official of Oplan LIKAS (personal interview, 16 February 2016) put
it: ‘The situation of ISFs is like this: they are the most vulnerable to flooding, but at the
same time, they are also––let’s admit it––they are one of the reasons why unfortunately,
flooding solutions can’t be developed’.

— Slum-as-blockages: eviction as ‘building back better’
Yet throughout the efforts to isolate and address the flooding in Manila in (and

through) its slums, traces of alternative narratives regarding the underlying causes of
the floods, and how the landscape should be altered, could be found. The ways in which
these narratives were dropped while others were carried forward as efforts moved
through different genres of text––from studies and international frameworks to policies,
and then from policies to the landscape, through state action––reveal a preoccupation
with slum removal in implementing flood risk management. The narrative of slum-
as-blockages is crucial to this fixation. In what follows, we elaborate how informal
settlements came to be equated with blockages. Through the prism of ‘rule by aesthetics’
or ‘aesthetic governmentality’ (Ghertner, 2015), we show how the blockages that
mattered and that were made to matter were only those of the slum, simultaneously
ignoring the obstructions of the rich.

— Slum blockages: encroachment, degradation and failed infrastructure
The initial search for explanations of the disaster involved attention to the role

of infrastructure in the origin and extent of the flooding. The Manggahan Floodway
could have either been simply inadequate for the rainfall (Gilbuena et al., 2013) or, by
functioning as designed, it could have contributed to the flooding. Fernando Siringan,
a geologist with the University of the Philippines-Diliman, argued that the design of
the Manggahan Floodway led to increased flood risk along the shores of Laguna de
Bay (Siringan, 2010): it not only displaced excess water into the lake, but its use as an
impoundment basin for waters carrying high silt loads had also led to high siltation
levels in the lake. Rodolfo and Siringan (2006) had previously called attention to the
impact of land subsidence on flood risk. Likewise, other experts had debated faith in
engineering and urban planning: architect and urban planner Anna Maria Gonzales
(2009) questioned the validity of treating the MMETROPLAN, which was merely a
32-page report with rather vague recommendations, as the basis for evictions and
infrastructure projects.

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EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’ 239

Floodway residents were blamed for the disaster. However, they refuted
allegations that the Manggahan Floodway had failed: if it had failed, they reasoned, the
East Bank could have served neither as evacuation site for residents of the lower portion
of the embankment, nor as alternate route at the height of Ondoy (Maningo, 2015: 119).
The embankment, in fact, was turned into a parking lot for the vehicles of residents
from nearby flooded subdivisions (Oplan LIKAS consultant, personal interview, 3
December 2015; East Bank resident, personal interview, 30 October 2015). Traffic also
increased in the wake of the disaster as residents of Greenwoods Executive Village, an
expansive gated community near the West Bank, were directed to the less frequented

‘back exit’ and rerouted to the Floodway service roads. By portraying Manggahan
Floodway as a failure, elite and expert narratives effectively depicted it not so much as
inadequate as fragile––that is, as an otherwise robust infrastructure made fragile by slum
encroachment. However, despite the inundated shanties ‘on top of the water’ (that is,
on the waterways), the Floodway was one of few areas that remained passable as Metro
Manila was brought to a standstill for days.

Alternative explanations and counter-narratives existed, but the notion that
the floods could have been averted had infrastructure simply worked as designed, and
the persuasion that informal settlements were to blame, persisted. The head of the
University of the Philippines’ National Hydraulic Research Center pointed out that
without informal settlements, the Manggahan Floodway would not have overflowed,
as it could have conveyed up to 3,000 cubic metres of floodwaters per second (Sisante,
2009). The general manager of the Laguna Lake Development Authority (LLDA)
likewise declared that the slums had narrowed the floodway from 260 to 220 metres,
reducing storm water flows from the Marikina River to Laguna Lake (ibid.). The
official thus cited riparian slums as blockages, recommending the expulsion of 400,000

‘squatters’ living on the edge of the lake and along the waterways that drain into the
lake to relieve ‘constricted’ drainage channels and solve Manila’s flooding problem
(Morella and Agence France-Presse, 2009). These narratives of slum-as-blockages and
of compromised designed capacities were reiterated elsewhere: by other personnel of
the LLDA (Bongco, 2009), by the Secretary of Public Works (Depasupil, 2009), and by
flood mitigation experts of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (Minoru, 2009).

However, the drainage problems that experts attributed to informal riverine
settlements were neither merely about their location in the water nor about their
encroachment into the water, for the problem of failed infrastructure as well as the
problem of the slum were understood to be fundamentally a problem of the existence
of the slum. This existence materialized not only in encroachment but also in waterway
degradation, which elite and expert knowledges designated to be the cause of the
infrastructure failure. Based on this view, it was not only that informal settlements
constricted waterways and impaired flows; it was also that these unruly spaces
simultaneously degraded waterways, thereby choking drainage channels, disrupting
flows and ultimately aggravating flooding. This simplification is repeated across texts,
notably in a Project Information Document of the MMFMP, the implementation
of which is premised on the clearance of informal settlements (World Bank Group,
2017: 3) and whose main sectors are waste management (51%) and sanitation
(41%) (World Bank Group, 2018). Narratives of blame thus draw on the ‘territorial
stigmatization’ (Wacquant, 2007) of the slum as encroacher and polluter to magnify
the flawed ‘socioecological relationship’ of these spaces to the water (Rademacher,
2009: 516).

Yet, as it turns out, no methods existed to identify, quantify or trace the pollution
load directly generated by riverine informal settlements, as distinct from other sources,
precisely because slums were categorized as indirect polluters (Manila Bay Coordinating
Office personnel, personal interview, 22 March 2016). It is therefore impossible, as
a technical personnel of the Manila Bay Coordinating Office (MBCO) revealed, to

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ALVAREZ AND CARDENAS 240

directly measure the contribution of riparian slums to waterway degradation. This
impossibility is further compounded by the inadequacy of sewerage and sanitation
infrastructure across the capital region. As of the first quarter of 2018, sewerage coverage
by wastewater service providers stands at a meagre 14.5% for the east zone of Metro
Manila, including the province of Rizal, and 16% for the west zone of Metro Manila,
including parts of Cavite (Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System, 2018).
Besides indicating the impoverished state of sewerage in the capital region and some
of its most urban provinces, the low coverage clearly implicates formal, legal and even
elite properties in the pollution and degradation of waterways. Thus, the argument that
littoral informal settlements are the primary source of waterway degradation because
they discharge untreated sewage directly into the water, is in fact applicable to planned
spaces and prime developments too. Only when the scope of degradation is narrowed to
solid waste––as elite and expert narratives of slum-as-blockages are wont to do––does
the blame shift on slums. But even then the volume of untreated sewage stemming
from poor sewerage infrastructure remains a significant component of undifferentiated
blockages and flow impediments.

Experts, however, clung to their certainty regarding the primary culpability
of the slum despite the incongruence between their conclusions and the facts they
themselves produced, disclosed and acknowledged. Foregrounding evidence that
pointed to informal settlers, elite knowledges assembled culpability for waterway
degradation based on the location of the slum (along waterways and on top of the water),
the conditions of habitation (absence of sanitation facilities) and the appearance and
sensory experience of filth (garbage-strewn waters and open defecation). Aesthetic
categories ‘naturalized’ (Rademacher, 2009: 519) the slum as the primary source
of waterway degradation, rendering calculative bases for pollution loads not only
unnecessary but frivolous. Evicting agencies declared scientific studies unnecessary
in ascertaining the primary culpability of the slum for ‘clogging’ waterways (personal
interview with Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission official, 18 March 2016). The
existence of slums alone––of shanties and squatters4 who used waterways as open
sewers––made for compelling evidence (MBCO personnel, personal interview, 22 March
2016). Such brazen declarations uncover the wilful production of ignorance (Proctor and
Schiebinger, 2008; Slater, 2016) that frames public (mis)understandings of waterway
degradation as principally about domestic waste. It suggests that municipal sewage and
solid waste comprise much of the total volume of waste. It displaces the question of
industrial waste and identifies indirect polluters––whose waste cannot be quantified––as
the main agents of waste. The deference of elite and expert knowledges of degradation
to the metric of aesthetics reveals the deeply political nature of measurement, which in
this instance derives from a desire to rid the landscape of a specific source of pollution.
In the absence of inscriptive methods, the sensory simultaneously replaced and
constituted the empirical (Ghertner, 2015). ‘Calculating without numbers’ via aesthetic
governmentality (Ghertner, 2010) enabled the impossible: it rendered the unmeasurable
legible by creating a mechanism for indirect pollution to be unquestionably traced and
unequivocally attributed to an indirect pollution source.

Questions about whether slums were in fact the major source of water
degradation and blockages, and the primary cause of failed infrastructure, remained
open, and may have been unanswerable. But these were foreclosed as soon as the notion
of slum-as-blockages was established as fact.

4 Our use of the toponym ‘squatter’ is meant to remark on certain key informants’ evasive yet subtle dramatization
of the existential difference between legitimate spaces and the slum. Liza Weinstein’s (2014: 8) explanation of the

‘power of words’ and her ambivalent use of the toponym ‘slum’ inspired us to think carefully about our own use of
the terms ‘squatter’ and ‘slum’. Some participants who otherwise used the terms ‘informal settlements’, ‘informal
settlers’ or ‘slums’ reverted to ‘squatter’ to emphasize encroachments by and the undesirability of this specific
sociospatial group.

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EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’ 241

— Elite blockages: paved-over drainage channels, infilled waterways and
obstructed flows
The fixation on eliminating slums equally ignored blockages generated and

aggravated by the informalities and illegalities of private developments and elite
landscapes. Malls, luxury condominiums, gated residential developments and mixed-
use enclaves for Manila’s upper and middle classes have also been built along the
Marikina River and the shores of Manila Bay, in some instances right on the edge of
waterways or directly on top of tributaries. Notably, the Metro Manila Development
Authority (MMDA), the state agency with primary responsibility for Manila’s
development and among the most strident proponents of slum evictions, has in fact
produced knowledge that many blockages were the result of unscrupulous practices
of property developers. These range from filling in natural drainage channels and
altering the course of waterways to create new saleable plots of land, to building security
walls across waterways to enforce the separation of their developments from adjacent
informal settlements (Bagayaua-Mendoza, 2009). In a press release a month before
the Ondoy floods, the head of the MMDA Flood Control and Sewerage Management
Office urged the strict monitoring of property-development construction, citing the
pervasive violation of permits and the unauthorized alteration of approved plans (ibid.).
This information was, however, ignored in the aftermath of the disaster. The search for
explanations, particularly conclusions about blockages as cause, evaded the blockages of
planned developments. And yet these transgressive landscapes posed far more serious
consequences for urban metabolic flows––unlike slums, middle- and upper-class spaces
did not merely encroach on easements and waterways: they consisted of concreted-
over catchment basins, which slowed down water flows and diverted them artificially,
often permanently blocking drainage arteries, impairing drainage and flood-control
infrastructure networks and ultimately increasing the city’s long-term flood risk.

This unevenness is magnified through the preferential treatment of elite enclaves.
Among the most severely inundated areas of Metro Manila were gated communities
built on an escarpment and on the floodplains on the right bank of the Marikina River.
In Pasig City, one of the worst-affected districts of Metro Manila, these were the gated
communities in Barangay Sta. Lucia, an area bounded by the Manggahan Floodway to the
south and Buli Creek to the east. Much of the city remained under water for days, while
two barangays experienced extreme flooding, with flood levels reaching over 1.5 metres:
Manggahan, home to several subdivisions, and Santolan, site of one of the city’s biggest
riverine informal settlements. On the city’s flood susceptibility map, this riverside slum
was demarcated as being highly susceptible to flooding, but so was an affluent portion
of Barangay Sta. Lucia. If flood hazard maps had been informing flood mitigation, and if
homes along waterways, encroached easements, sewer blockages, obstructed drainage
channels and aggravated flood risks had justified the eviction of slums, then this set of
arguments could conceivably be applied with equal if not greater force to elite and middle-
class enclaves. Instead, in the few instances where some action was demanded, residents
were simply advised to vacate their property or dismantle the portions encroaching on
easements (personal interview, Pasig City Housing Regulatory Unit official, 29 March
2016). Furthermore, despite the legal mechanisms at the disposal of local governments
to declare an erring property a public nuisance under the Civil Code, this process is
complex and tedious. It involves declaring the location of the property a flood-prone
area, demonstrating that it obstructs water flow and causes flooding, and proving that it
endangers other people (personal interview, Manila Bay Clean-Up, Rehabilitation and
Preservation Program personnel, 15 March 2016). This due process may be contrasted with
the swiftness with which government adjudicated informal settlements to be the main
culprit of degradation, the major source of blockages or the primary cause of flooding. As
these instances of differential treatment illustrate, evidence and science are invoked and
process and redress are upheld only in defence of elite informality and illegality.

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ALVAREZ AND CARDENAS 242

Uneven landscapes of risk: the ‘danger’/‘high-risk’-zone binary, and the
redistribution of risks and resiliencies
The key to this double standard was the concept of ‘danger zones’ that had been

defined in the 1992 Urban Development and Housing Act (UDHA), which ‘discouraged’
evictions and demolitions, except in situations ‘when persons or entities occupy danger
areas such as esteros, railroad tracks, garbage dumps, riverbanks, shorelines, waterways,
and other public places such as sidewalks, roads, parks, and playgrounds’. The task of
defining the ‘danger zone’ and of demarcating the areas that are ‘danger zones’ came to
the ISF–NTWG, which was formed to expedite the ‘removal’ and ‘transfer’ of informal
settlers living in ‘danger areas’ (ISF–NTWG, 2013). The ISF–NTWG, drawing the
definition of a fundamental DRM category from a clause on eviction and demolition,
made eviction DRM policy. It acted upon the PDNA’s recommendation to ‘build back
better’, but reinterpreted the creation of housing solutions for ISFs, the implementation
of effective land management, and the establishment of a monitoring and sanction
system for local governments in terms of slum removals (Government of the Republic
of the Philippines, 2011: 53–54). These tasks were accomplished through the crucial first
step of defining and declaring informal settlements as ‘danger zones’. ‘Building back
better’ meant demolishing and ridding Metro Manila of its slums––interventions which
the state later rescripted as ‘evacuation’, ‘removal’ and ‘resettlement’ of ‘vulnerable’
populations.

Despite expert declarations of a ‘scientific’ DRM guiding the formulation and
implementation of projects and plans (Pasig City Government and Earthquake and
Megacities Initiative, 2012: 27), flood risk was in fact aestheticized. Inscribing waterways
with danger (Grove, 2014) while simultaneously emphasizing the fragile materiality
and precarious construction of structures in these environments meant that slums and
only slums were in danger. Just as the culpability of the slum for Ondoy in particular
and for floods in general was resolved in terms of aesthetics, adjudicating flood risk
likewise relied on sensory verification: decrepit shanties in ‘dangerous’ environments
commanded a ‘map-like objectivity’ of ‘self-evident facts of sense perception’ (Ghertner,
2015: 185). Deferring to the visual and replacing it for the empirical, as experts did,
encouraged notions of danger as affectively and discursively aesthetic. This in turn
allowed for the designation of ‘danger zones’ to disproportionately emphasize the risks
of encroachment by the poor while diminishing the flood risks generated and aggravated
by elite encroachment. It did not matter that middle- and upper-class homes were also
built on the edges of waterways in flood-prone areas, or that these violated easement,
environmental and planning laws.5 Transgressive formal spaces were not classified as

‘danger zones’, simply because they did not look like they were in danger: the appearance
and materiality of their structures neither evoked a sense of danger nor conformed to
the ‘aesthetic consensus’ (Ghertner, 2015) of danger.

While key informants from local government and member agencies of the ISF–
NTWG acknowledged that these affluent spaces were also at risk, they maintained
that their residents were nonetheless more ‘resilient’ owing to their socioeconomic
background––a view contested by residents of Riverside Village, a flood-prone
subdivision in Pasig City that was submerged during Ondoy (Riverside Village DRRM
officer, personal interview, 9 November 2015). Durable homes and financial resources
indicated greater adaptive capacities to recover from disasters. In this sense, the flood
risk of private enclaves in low-lying, flood-prone areas is minimized by a ‘resilience’
that is understood in terms of the architecture of homes and the social and economic
capital of residents. By this logic, not only are the rich always more ‘resilient’ in relation
to the poor––they are naturally ‘resilient’ too. Conflating affluence with resilience not

5 Article 51 of Presidential Decree 1067 (the Water Code); Article 635 of Republic Act 386 (the Civil Code); and
several design parameters provided in the Implementing Rules and Regulations of Presidential Decree 957 or the
Subdivision and Condominium Buyers’ Protective Decree (Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board, 2009)

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EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’ 243

only displaced techno-managerial formulas and notions of risk––it also differentially
negotiated the flood risks of the poor and the rich. Regardless of whether official hazard
maps demarcated both slums and subdivisions as highly susceptible to flooding, middle-
and upper-class spaces evaded the ‘danger zone’ label, for they were merely regarded as
areas with high flood risk. Crucially, this risk did not portend danger.

This distinction between ‘high-risk’ and ‘danger’ is key to understanding risk
inequalities, because each category implies particular relationships, interventions and
outcomes that create unequal ‘hazardscapes’ based on class (Mustafa, 2005; Collins,
2009; 2010; Saguin, 2017). These parallel categories evoke specific ideas and affects. The
‘danger zone’ label recalls the messy informality and spatial illegality of the vulnerable
poor. Danger was coded according to the visual appearance of the slum (Ghertner,
2011): the decrepit and fragile appearance of shanties in degraded waterways signalled
danger, activating a territorial stigma (Slater, 2016: 23) that justified eviction as a logical,
necessary and humane DRM and urban ‘resilience’ intervention. In contrast, the idea of
a ‘high-risk’ area suggests a neutrality that fails to convey the same urgency of danger,
and therefore demands a nuanced approach to thinking about and relating to risk. It
foregrounds the ‘propriety of property’ (Ghertner, 2012), emphasizes the rights and
entitlements of citizenship and requires a more considerate set of interventions that
are beneficial rather than punitive. Thus, as slums in ‘danger zones’ were demolished,
subdivisions in high-flood-risk areas were invested with ‘resilience’.

Uneven responses to the flood risk for middle- and upper-class landscapes were
framed in terms of rights: the right to private property and the right to a ‘resilient’ city.6
However, the subtext of this framing is that the ‘resilient’ class has the right to remain
in transgressive property and to amass both new and revitalized resiliencies in the
form of improved drainage and flood-control infrastructure. While local and national
government officials argued the obligation of the state to make the city ‘resilient’,
specifically by improving and building vital infrastructure, they cautioned that efforts
to build ‘resilience’ must uphold property rights. This emphasis on the duty of the state
to protect people and property is echoed across government texts––from the DRRM Act,
flood mitigation project documents and resettlement action plans, to eviction notices.
However, evicting certain populations and destroying certain properties while allowing
specific others to remain on the basis of property rights provokes critical questions of
citizenship. As the state drew a boundary between ‘danger zones’ that required eviction
and high-flood-risk areas that merited infrastructural intervention, the mandate of
protecting people and property deepened the divide between ‘squatter’ and citizen: it
clarified that urban citizenship––‘the right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1996), ‘the right to stay
put’ (Weinstein, 2014), and the right to ‘intent to reside’ (Bhan et al., 2014)––is based on
private property.

Flood-proofing Pasig City was guided by this principle. The local government
neither demolished nor evicted gated communities, condominiums or elite enclaves
obstructing waterways. Rather, it built, repaired and upgraded infrastructure. It dug
out and moved drainage lines occupying portions of private land as real-estate firms
retrieved these segments for construction (Pasig City Flood Control official, personal
interview, 27 May 2016). It searched for other possible locations of drainage lines
that may bisect planned developments (ibid.). Put simply, it moved and removed
infrastructure for ‘more valuable’ uses and bodies, as it moved and removed ‘less
valuable’ others.

As 6,171 informal settler families in Pasig City were evicted between July 2011
and February 2016 (Pasig City Housing Regulatory Unit, n.d.) in the name of flood

6 These views were echoed in interviews with participants from Manila Bay Clean-Up, Rehabilitation and Preservation
Program (15 March 2016); the DILG-ISF Project Management Office, Resettlement Governance Team (22 February
2016); the Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission (18 March 2016); the Pasig City Housing Regulatory Unit (29
March 2016) and the Pasig City Urban Poor Affairs Office (8 April 2016).

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ALVAREZ AND CARDENAS 244

mitigation and disaster ‘resiliency’, the local government embarked on a series of
engineering projects. Rivers and esteros were cleared for dredging and desilting works,
as infrastructure was built, repaired, and upgraded: pumping stations, ripraps, revetment
walls and concrete hollow-block fences were constructed along waterways, as drainage
lines were installed and improved. In 2014 alone, 31 flood-control infrastructure projects
were implemented, nine of which were located in gated communities (Pasig City Flood
Control Office, n.d.-a). As of May 2016, it had built more than twenty pumping stations,
a number of them constructed after Ondoy (Pasig City Flood Control Office, n.d.-b).
At the national level, structural interventions under big-ticket infrastructure projects,
particularly the MMFMP and the Pasig–Marikina River Channel Improvement Project,
were implemented by the MMDA and the Department of Public Works and Highways.
Spread throughout the city, these new structural resiliencies directly benefited the
residents of these areas. But the gains accrued to also benefit those who were permitted
to remain and those who were thought to possess the legitimate right to remain.

Besides accounting for the role of infrastructure, the kinds of obstructions along
waterways, and the actions to be taken to ‘build back better’, the one political objective
that remained consistent was not flood risk mitigation; if it had been, then demolishing
wealthier neighbourhoods choking drainage channels, and halting the construction
of developments encroaching upon easements or obstructing waterways, would have
been enacted. Instead, it was the clearance of slums that became the focus of Manila’s
flood-proofing efforts, and indeed, this has proceeded apace, even though the landscapes
created by the evictions and relocations may in fact have exacerbated the risks for
evictees.

An unreleased resettlement study conducted by the Presidential Commission for
the Urban Poor (PCUP) in 2015 surveyed 20 resettlement sites for ‘danger-zone’ evictees,
detailing the risks residents faced in terms of housing, water facilities, education, health
and exposure to geohazards (PCUP, 2015a; 2015b). Despite a commitment to ‘in-city’
relocation, only three new areas were built in Metro Manila; the rest were located in
the suburbs of Bulacan, Cavite and Rizal. All ‘off-city’ housing projects were constructed
using substandard materials, while one resettlement site, San Jose del Monte Heights
in Bulacan, was built near a cliff (PCUP, 2015b). In-city relocation did not escape this
fresh disrepair: two of the three projects were also poorly built. In Paradise Heights
in Tondo, Manila, storm water accumulated in the fifth-floor hallway and drained into
the ground floor, flooding lower-level units (PCUP, 2015b). In the open spaces of new

‘social’ housing developments, in the ‘permanent’, ‘safe’, and ‘decent’7 homes of former
squatters, walls and floors cracked, doors and doorknobs broke, sinks clogged, roofs
leaked, electrical wirings dangled loose. Where there were septic tanks, pipes were
choked, rendering them useless. Earthquake risks either replaced or accompanied flood
risks. Consistent with construction practices of relocation housing in the Philippines,
slum conditions persisted amidst promises of ‘safe futures’. Thus, the relocation of
eligible informal settlers led to the relocation of the slum to the suburbs and to new
urban tenements. Infrastructural deficits, sanitation and sewerage inadequacies and
new housing precarities came to nest in the fragile concrete shells of the new suburban
and vertical slums. The ‘vulnerable’ informal settlers the state ‘re-places’ (Rademacher,
2009) away from danger, only to replace them with linear parks, access roads and ‘flood-
resilient’ infrastructure ultimately do not escape the ‘death zones’ (Ellao, 2013; Dalisay
and De Guzman, 2016) of disaster. On the contrary, their displacement, re-placement
and replacement embeds them further in these deathscapes via the amplification of
existing vulnerabilities (Allen et al., 2017) and the redistribution of disaster risks.

7 The 1SF One Safe Future Program, on which ‘danger zone’ evictions are based, aims to ‘secure the safety of ISF
communities by ensuring the provision of safe and decent housing and instituting community-based disaster
preparedness’ (One Safe Future, n.d.).

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EVICTING SLUMS, ‘BUILDING BACK BETTER’ 245

‘Resiliency’ in Manila: a cosmopolitan moment, or a politics of revenge?
In this article we examined how the politics of managing global catastrophic

risks plays out in a stereotypically ‘vulnerable’ megacity of the global South. We analysed
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,
which saw the Philippine state facilitate a highly uneven distribution not only of ‘goods’
but also of ‘bads’, particularly disaster risk. We argued that the selective interpretation
and omission of facts underpinned a DRM strategy that was premised on the eviction of
slum dwellers. Using the lens of aesthetic governmentality, we demonstrated how elite
and expert knowledges constructed the narrative of the slum as the source of urban
flood risk via the territorial stigmatization of the slum-as-blockages. We also showed
how the redescription of flood risk based on aesthetics produced uneven landscapes of
risk, materializing in the ‘danger’/‘high-risk’-zone binary.

Experiences in Metro Manila attest to the complexities of and tensions inherent
in responding to the demands and political exigencies of climate change and DRM
in deeply unequal, ‘at-risk’ Southern cities. It shows how the urgent humanitarian
business of climate change mitigation, adaptation, DRM and resilience building has
deepened existing inequalities through the ‘necessary’ eviction of 52,254 families across
Metro Manila (National Housing Authority–National Capital Region, 2012; 2013; 2014;
2015; 2016; 2017) and 6,171 in Pasig City alone. As the MMFMP proceeds apace, some
51,965 families across the capital region remain at risk not so much of flood disasters
or climate change, but of dispossession owing to the revanchist politics on which
solutions to climate change and disasters are based. The slum is the theatre where the
threat of climate change in Southern cities is staged. However the ‘vulnerable’ urban
poor are not simply being displaced by rising waters or similar climate impacts; their
displacement is not so much due to the devastation brought about by disaster events––
rather, it is attributable to anticipation and mitigation of crisis and catastrophe. As the
climate crisis plays out in Manila, we see that its casualties are dispossessed rather
than displaced. To confront this crucial distinction is to unveil the active production
of this catastrophic loss of life and home, to acknowledge the weaponization of climate
change against the poor and vulnerable, and to recognize the political expediency
of flooding, disaster, climate risk and ‘resilience’ as a vehicle of exclusionary urban
transformation.

Beck (2009: 57) argued that representations of global risks by the mass media
can have the power of ‘enforcing enlightenment’ by lending a voice to the marginalized.
By rendering global risks visible, the media creates ‘shared involvement and shared
suffering’ (Beck, 2010: 26). But once recurrent Ondoy-type flooding was constructed as
Manila’s almost-certain future, it was used to enact the opposite: to take back the city
from a devitalized, degenerate and undesired social group, which figures elsewhere as
squatter, polluter, encroacher (Bhan, 2009; Ranganathan, 2015), invader (Rademacher,
2009) and nuisance (Ghertner, 2012). Manila’s experience thus presents one possibility
for how revanchist urbanisms can be enacted through the vocabularies of ‘vulnerability’,

‘adaptation’ and ‘resilience’ within and against ‘at-risk’ cities.
Instead of a cosmopolitan moment, what we instead see is the climate-proofing,

resilience-building and disaster-risk-management efforts in Manila as enabling a
resiliency revanchism: a ‘politics of revenge’ unleashed by urban elites against social
groups that undermine their vision of the city (Smith, 1996), predicated on the currency
of DRM and urban ‘resiliency’, animated by historically entrenched stigmatization of
the urban underclass and enabled by the selective interpretation, circulation and use
of expertise. Evictions in the name of ‘beautification’ have long been a feature of life in
Manila, most notably during Imelda Marcos’s attempt to transform Manila into a ‘city
of man’ (Berner, 1997; Lico, 2003). But the language of adaptation, risk management
and ‘resiliency’ has merely allowed this revenge to take on new forms: as a reduction

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ALVAREZ AND CARDENAS 246

of bodies, homes and resiliencies to obstructions to the managed flow of water, or to
vulnerabilities ripe for benevolent intervention.

Here we have identified three components of resiliency revanchism to characterize
the politics of Metro Manila DRM: an urgency demanded by a riskier, more hazardous
future; the discursive enrolment of resiliency toward revenge; and the transmutation
of material inequalities to risk inequality, prior to the disaster and in its aftermath. The
overriding objective of DRM was not to make Manila safe, but to make Manila clean: the
wanton disregard of flood risks generated and aggravated by transgressive middle- and
upper-class spaces, alongside the unequal redistribution of risks and resiliencies along
axes of class, betrays pronounced objectives of safety and draws attention instead to the
wilful intent to expel and dispose of undesired bodies and landscapes.

Maria Khristine Alvarez, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University
College London, 48 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PJ, UK, alvarez.tin@gmail.com

Kenneth Cardenas, Department of Geography, York University, 4700 Keele Street,
Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada, kennethcardenas@gmail.com

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