| Land use planning is a critical tool for mitigating urban risks and vulnerabilities and facilitating sustainable development. Regulating and planning current and projected land use reduces vulnerabilities and increases the resilience of cities in responding to emerging climate risks in urban centers. However, land use planning in the Philippines remains severely fragmented and poorly implemented due to the absence of a national land use framework. Another reason is the fragmented creation of comprehensive land use plans by local governments that largely develop and enact their plans in isolation from other localities but are embedded in overlapping political asymmetries and the diverging public and private interests in urban governance. This has resulted in failures and disjunctions in the responses to the integrated and cross-boundary urban risks and challenges that Philippine cities such as Cebu face from flooding disasters, solid waste mismanagement, land subsidence, and water scarcity. This discussion paper examines the challenges and opportunities in integrating urban risks in the formulation and implementation of land use plans in Metro Cebu with a focus on Cebu City and its flood risks. It highlights the case of Cebu City because of its unique governance and spatial context as the urban core of the greater metropolitan area, marked by relatively autonomous coastal cities with a central environmentally protected area. The key challenges to risk-resilient land use planning include incoherence in the scale of jurisdictional accountabilities in planning for metropolitan urban risks, horizontal fragmentations in flood management and land use planning, and limited and constrained public participation in the policy process. The recommendations of this paper are informed and guided by sustainability with a specific lens on an inclusive and just resilience framework. |