Cities, Disaster Risk and Adaptation

Worldwide, disasters and climate change pose a serious risk to sustainable urban development, resulting in escalating human and economic costs. Consequently, city authorities and other urban actors face the challenge of integrating risk reduction and adaptation strategies into their work, although related knowledge and expertise are still scarce.

Cities, Disaster Risk and Adaptation explores ways in which resilient cities can be ‘built’ and sustainable urban transformations achieved. This book provides a comprehensive understanding of urban risk reduction and adaptation planning, exploring key theoretical concepts and analysing the complex interrelation between cities, disasters and climate change. The book provides an overview of current risk reduction and adaptation approaches taken by both city authorities and citizens from diverse contexts in low, middle and high income nations. It presents a planning framework for reducing and adapting to risk in urban areas, expanding on current positive actions and highlighting current gaps and shortfalls in theory and practice. The importance of a distributed urban governance system is highlighted, where citizens’ and urban institutions’ adaptive capacities can support and complement each other.

This book presents a holistic approach throughout, integrating perspectives and practice from risk reduction and climate change adaptation from a specific urban perspective. The text is richly supplemented throughout with boxed case studies written by renowned academics and practitioners in the field, and ‘test yourself’ scenarios to integrate theory into practice. Each chapter also contains learning objectives, end of chapter questions, suggested further reading and web resources, as well as many tables and figures. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Geography, Environmental Studies, International Development, Urban Studies and Planning, as well as Sociology.

Christine Wamsler is Associate Professor at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS); Associate of The Lund University Centre for Risk Assessment and Management (LUCRAM); and Honorary Fellow at the Global Urban Research Centre (GURC) and the Institute for Development Policy and Management (IDPM) at Manchester University, United Kingdom.