Dr Aaron Opdyke, together with a cross-disciplinary team spanning urban planning, development studies, economics, and civil engineering, has been awarded a Partnership Grant from the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre to investigate how informality is increasingly shaping post-disaster and post-conflict responses in the Philippines. The team includes Associate Professor Paul Jones (Urban and Regional Planning), Mr Benigno (Ninoy) Balgos (Development Studies, Ateneo de Manila University), Associate Professor Acram Latiph (Economics), and Professor Erlinda Yape (Civil Engineering, both Mindanao State University, Marawi).
Adequate shelter is an essential building block of recovery after conflict and disasters — restoring livelihoods, social networks, and sense of place — yet the role of informality in these settings has received far less attention than in development contexts. The project will follow household sheltering pathways for informal settler families, families relocated into government-financed housing, and internally displaced persons hosted by family members, through two comparative case studies: reconstruction following the armed conflict in Marawi City, and the relocation of informal settlements to Bulacan in Metro Manila. Findings will contrast formal shelter interventions with organic patterns of sheltering to better understand the underlying processes that create — and can reduce — risk.