Generating vulnerability to floods: Poor urban migrants and the state in Metro Manila, Philippines

• Main Authors: Sajor, Edsel E., Resurrección, Bernadette P., Macagba, Sharon Feliza Ann P.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Rural-urban migration > Philippines > Malabon City; Floods > Philippines > Malabon City; Poor > Philippines > Malabon City; Place and Environment; Urban Studies and Planning
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/4242
• Institution: De La Salle University

This chapter examines internal migration in Malabon City, part of the Metro Manila mega-urban region in the Philippines, where low-income migrants occupy risky flood-prone areas. It explores factors underlying settlement in obviously high-risk areas and the resource structure that constrains the urban poor from doing otherwise. The chapter assesses the core orientation of the city's disaster preparedness program, which focuses on relocation of migrants, but with limited attention paid to patterns of mobility and livelihood strategies. Interventions thus fail to prevent relocated poor migrants from returning after flooding episodes or new waves of migrants from occupying vacated spaces. The generation of vulnerability to flooding disasters for poor and low-income migrants continues as an accretive process. This case study shows that vulnerability to flood hazards should not be seen purely as a function of biophysical and geographic variations in exposure to the natural stressor of flooding caused by extreme precipitation.