The ethical turn in urban dispossession: ‘danger zone’ evictions and resilient city making in Manila

Keywords: flooding, disasters, infrastructure, resilience, evictions, housing
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 8

Abstract

This paper examines the production of an ethics of dispossession in floodproofing Manila via a critical discourse analysis of documents related to the Metro Manila Flood Management Project (MMFMP), the main driver and primary beneficiary of riparian slum removals. Using “benevolent evictions” (Alvarez, 2019) and “dispossession through delivery” (Levenson, 2018) as analytical anchors, I probe the constitution of an assemblage of devices that spans techno-scientific logics, welfarist rhetoric, rights-based concessions, and social safeguards. I contextualise the consolidation of these technologies in the flood management agenda, interpret it as an articulation of the revanchist politics of the resilience project, and interrogate how it came to signify contestation by the subjects of resilient city making. Charting these developments demonstrates how the housing struggle catalysed by the dispossessive responses to the Ondoy flood disaster assembled a framework for ‘just’ evictions. Technologies of expulsion cohered into an ethics of eviction that legitimised and facilitated slum clearance in Manila's littoral landscapes. I argue that the production and consolidation of these devices are a consequence of mobilising slum removals as an epistemic starting point rather than as a fulcrum of contention, thereby rendering ‘danger zone’ evictions inevitable. I then trace this epistemological position to the principles of the MMFMP, particularly to its slum-free environmental imaginary of the ‘resilient’ city. In closing, I propose understanding this ethics of dispossession as both a materialisation of revanchism and an expression of the dis- and re-possessive character of the MMFMP’s housing delivery programme, and consider its implications for disaster justice.