Purpose This study examines the perceived drivers of fire ignition and spread in dense urban settlements in Quezon City, the Philippines, comparing how fire professionals and residents account for them. Design/methodology/approach This study draws on 24 semi-structured interviews with 5 fire professionals and 19 residents of two high-density informal settlements. Interviews were analyzed thematically, with professional and resident perspectives on the same hazards compared directly. Findings Fire professionals and residents agreed on the principal physical drivers: electrical failure from grid overloading and unsafe cooking were the main sources of ignition, and combustible materials and restricted emergency access the main drivers of spread. The two groups diverged on cause. Professionals attributed hazardous practices to individual inattentiveness, whereas residents construed them as adaptations forced by poverty and confined space, a divergence that helps explain the limited effect of conventional, negligence-based safety education. Residents also contested the assumed link between dwelling density and spread, attributing it instead to material composition and spatial configuration. Practical implications The spatial conditions that foreclose municipal suppression cannot easily be reversed, so resilience strategy should pivot toward decentralized “soft” infrastructure: behaviorally targeted education, localized early warning and community-held suppression, financed and governed through existing barangay disaster-risk structures. Framing hazardous practice as forced adaptation rather than negligence also favors harm-reduction approaches, which work with residents’ material realities, over punitive enforcement that tends to drive unsafe practices underground. Originality/value This study reframes well-documented fire-risk factors through a “space–risk nexus” in which the spatial saturation of the built environment forces the socio-economic adaptations that become physical fire hazards. The framework shows that this saturation makes standard infrastructure-based fire-safety codes structurally inapplicable, not merely difficult to enforce. Informality, therefore, emerges as a physical condition as much as a legal one, and the analysis indicates that resilience is better served by community-based “soft” infrastructure than by hard-infrastructure retrofits, which would require large-scale displacement in already-saturated settlements.
Pearson et al. (2026) studied this question.