Schools as Community Assets for Place-making in Post-disaster Resettlement: Reciprocal Impacts of Housing and Education Recovery in Tacloban City, the Philippines

While the disaster recovery community of practice supports holistic integration of schools and education with housing and community recovery, post-disaster policies and programs to support housing and education recovery often occur in parallel, and little research has specifically considered the relationship between housing and education recovery. While reducing the disruption of education services after disasters is a global target of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, sheltering needs can interrupt or delay education recovery. School recovery can also shape residents’ decision-making and community and housing recovery. A lack of coordination between education and housing recovery can cause additional impacts for relocating residents and their communities. Drawing on international cases of school and housing recovery, this chapter examines linkages between schools and housing, and schools’ contributions to place-making in the post-disaster resettlement processes in Tacloban City, Philippines, after 2013 Super Typhoon Yolanda. After unpacking the relationships of schools and shelters during the emergency evacuation phase, it traces mutual impacts of education and housing recovery over the multi-stage process of displacement and resettlement in Tacloban, exploring how schools can function as community assets and contribute to developing social capital as part of place-making in new communities of resettled residents, underscoring the importance of integration between the policies and programs in the education and housing sectors over multiple post-disaster recovery phases.