As climate change continues to impact the world, cities are increasingly identified to be at the forefront of addressing the challenges in terms of mitigation and adaptation to reduce, if not reverse, its impacts especially to most vulnerable and at-risk communities in developing regions.
The 2024 World Cities Report highlights the reinvigorated role of urban areas in confronting the climate crisis, especially as sustained urbanization is overwhelming developing countries. But while associated with a number of economic gains such as better standards of living and the growth of the middle class, urbanization offers a different future for the Global South where urban congestion, increased social instability, and depletion of vital resources are some of the risks that cities in the region have to grapple with. These vulnerabilities are amplified by prevailing political and governance constraints that derail implementation of effective climate policy action, especially as urban sustainability discourses are increasingly hijacked by capitalist interests operating in the pretext of ‘sustainable urban futures’. The Philippines, noted for its acute disaster risks environmental frailty, provides ripe case studies on governance dilemmas in promoting urban sustainability as policy actions are advanced within deeply entrenched local political dynamics, prevailing inequities, and social fragmentations.
The panel examines the case of urban sustainability and urban resilience initiatives of major coastal cities in the Philippines and interrogates why, despite sophisticated resilient and sustainable cities agendas, policy failures and exclusions persist. Developed by the Urban Studies Program of the University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies (UP CIDS), the panel assembles different case studies led by young and emerging academics across gender identities that will demonstrate opportunities and pitfalls to building urban resilience and sustainability based on community experiences on the ground, practices of collaboration between local governments and grassroots communities, and multi-stakeholder engagements and urban community solidarity in risk mitigation and adaptation strategies. It highlights the various contestations, tensions, exclusions, and power dynamics and asymmetries prevailing over the blue-green agenda, flood mitigation projects, and resilient coastal infrastructures.