Marginality and Disaster

Disasters primarily hit places which, at different scales, are marginalised in everyday life, such as prisons, slums and peripheral cities. In addition, those affected are often from marginalised segments of society, such as the poor, children, elderly, people with disabilities. Many disasters are unacknowledged by those with more wealth and power, leading to many events to be neglected and marginalised by policy makers and practitioners of disaster risk reduction.

This book offers an integrated overview of these issues and provides a conceptual framing of the multiple, tangled and complex interactions between marginality and disaster. It explores marginal places through case studies of slum settlements and prisons, and marginalised social groups, including gender minorities and homeless people. It also discusses why and how some events are neglected and marginalised by stakeholders of disaster risk reduction. The book offers an integrated and inclusive framework for taking back marginal places, marginal people and marginal events at the core of disaster risk reduction, and further provides examples of tools which could enable the implementation of such framework.

This book thus focuses on places, people and events which are seldom addressed in the literature elsewhere, such as small-scale disasters, thus providing a unique overview of disasters and their effects. It analyses the root, structural and largely exogenous (to places and people affected) causes of marginality and disasters. The argument however moves beyond this sole bleak picture of vulnerability to also portrait resistance and hope through the concept of capacities, which emphasises that those marginalised and living in marginal places display knowledge, skills and resources in facing hazards and disasters, including small-scale events.

JC Gaillard is Associate Professor, School of Environment, the University of Auckland.