Household context and operationalizing urban resiliency objectives. A case study of autonomous household response in Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines.

Rapid urbanization and extreme weather patterns bring permanent threats and put a lot of stress in urban systems around the world. In 2011, the seemingly innocuous tropical storm Washi and its destructive aftermath signaled a new norm for Mindanao. In retrospect, the disaster is triggered by an abnormal natural disturbance and interplay between unmanaged rapid urbanization, better economic prospect, and degraded environmental systems. This study aims to provide empirical data on how narratives of severely affected households dialogued with land-use plan objectives to pursue urban resiliency in CDO post-Washi. New knowledge acquired directly contributes to the knowledge gap of understanding complex process of ideation, translation, and realization of resilience-building measures at household scale. It also potentially provides baseline information towards formulating a collaborative decision-making approach to urban governance. The study is designed to extract special learning by examining unique case scenarios where absence of essential mechanisms resulted to catastrophic impact to life, property, and economy, and presence of underlying factors afterwards that shapes autonomous household response. Autonomous household response draws from household’s own context in relation to various and diverse resilience narratives. Furthermore, households independently pursue resilience building because of perceived notions that interventions of national and local governments addressing issues of risks and vulnerabilities do not respond effectively and in a timely manner. Meanwhile, land-use plan objectives were key policy response in providing institutional and financial arrangements that seek to integrate socio-economic development and environmental integrity. However, objectives do not directly influence resilience decisions at household level. Interestingly, autonomous household response concretely contributes to realizing land-use plan objectives in pursuing resiliency. Pivotal is the capacity of households to integrate learning, find sources of shared meaning, and clarity of desired change. This was reinforced by policy instruments that allow flexible modes of resilience by putting more centrally localized response. Equally important is the active role of CSOs in facilitating household narratives from individual interest to a collective meaning of diverse experience, and bringing these learnings to platforms of government interventions that allowed collective action. Autonomous household response transitioning to a more collective level challenges distribution of decision-making process in framing urban resiliency measures, and can possibly move towards a more collaborative approach. The study only traces households’ perspective and only provides a glimpse of the complex process of building urban resiliency. It would be best to compare results with how other stakeholders ideate and realize own notions of resiliency.