Designing with, not over, the bay: Towards a relational public design in post-Yolanda Tacloban

This paper examines how water, people, and governance are designed to coexist in Tacloban City's post-Yolanda recovery, focusing on the contested Cancabato Causeway. Using public sector design and policy assemblage theory, we ask how actors assemble infrastructures, documents, and practices to materialize futures for Cancabato Bay. Combining in-depth interviews, document analysis, and participant observation, we identified three policy assemblages. A technocratic assemblage organizes the bay as a corridor for mobility and investment, proceduralizing participation and equating resilience with new infrastructure. An environmental advocacy assemblage challenges this vision through law, evidence, and environmental justice, yet remains partly constrained by anthropocentric ways of knowing. A fisherfolk-bay assemblage foregrounds everyday practices of living-with-water and hopes for futures shared with the bay. We draw three lessons for public design: it is inherently relational, it must work with multiplicity, and it must treat participation as future-making rather than an end in itself.