Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of Port au Prince, or the 1556 Shensi earthquake in China with estimates of over
800,000 killed (USG).
Despite the scale of these disasters it could be argued that until recently we
have not fully acknowledged, or even prepared for the possibility of destructive
natural events striking our cities. Certainly most urban places are built to cope
with what appear to be regular events, such as seasonal flooding or weather varia-
tions, but the majority are not equipped to deal with the extreme natural processes
that occur irregularly and cause such extensive damage to property, livestock and
frequently leads to many injuries, deaths and the destruction of livelihoods, which
may take decades to recover. For most of history these events were often consid-
ered to be Acts of God, as punishment for moral misbehaviour, so they were just
accepted as something that had to be endured. In the last century the growth of
scientific knowledge has led to greater understanding of the natural origin of these
events, but several factors led to the belief of many that these hazards can be made
less threatening or safely ignored, issues described in Chap. 1 as our hubris, myo-
pia and what amounts to environmental blindness or forgetfulness.
Fortunately the geophysical and environmental research of the last two decades
has led to greater recognition of the increasing intensity and impact of many nat-
ural hazards, plus awareness of their catastrophic impacts on lives and property
in urban places, as seen in many academic papers and also major texts focusing
on environmental issues (Zebrowski
1997
; Blaikie et al.
2004
; Abbott and Samp-
son
2009
; Smith and Petley
2009
). In addition, there has been a growing litera-
ture on a more community-based approach to the effect of natural hazards, deal-
ing with community capacity building and local risk reduction (Townshend et al.
2014
; Kulig et al.
2013
), initially stimulated by concepts of ecological resilience
in plant ecology (Holling
1973
) and the work of psychologists dealing with stress.
More generally, an international effort on the problems began when the United
Nations declared the 1990s as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Re-
duction (IDNDR) This led to major conferences (Hyogo
2005
), reports from or-
ganizations at an international level (World Bank
2006
; United Nations Office for
Disaster Management or UNISDR 2011; Arup
2011
), and new policy initiatives
from governments who have recognized their need to respond to major disasters,
as well as from major aid agencies, such as Oxfam and Red Cross-Red Crescent
(Walter
2004
; Jennings 2008). The UNISDR (Blackburn and Johnson
2012
) report
entitled
Making Cities Resilient: My City is Getting Ready
has popularized 'Resil-
ient Cities' as a shorthand term for work that seeks to expose and reduce the risk
of natural hazards to all sizes of settlements, which is a different sort of resiliency
to that used in the Transition Town literature (Chap. 7). This review summarizes
the background to the emerging Resilient Cities literature, identifying the prob-
lems posed by these natural hazards to urban places and the way that human activ-
ity often exacerbates the problems they create. It is followed by a summary of the
various ways in which urban places are improving their capability to minimize the
number of deaths, injuries and amount of property damage from these various haz-
ards and to recover from the disasters they have created in so many places.
