Managing Urban Disaster Risk: Analysis and Adaptation Frameworks for Integrated Settlement Development Programming for the Urban Poor

 The research is driven by the need to provide a better understanding of the challenges
of increasing risk and its impact on the living conditions of the urban poor,
as well as to provide new conceptual and strategic approaches to face those challenges.
Such approaches are especially required within the pre-disaster context.
Technically speaking, they come under the heading of ‘adaptation’ or ‘ex ante
disaster risk management’ and include measures both for risk reduction and risk
financing. With this in mind, the overall research objective is to enhance and
develop new knowledge and innovative ways in which urban development actors
can contribute more effectively to disaster risk management, thus demonstrating
their role and potential within this field. The overall research question can thus be
framed as: how can disaster risk management be properly integrated into settlement
development programming (i.e. social housing, upgrading and/or local urban
governance programmes)? To answer this question, the following three areas
were investigated: (a) the existing interlinkages between disasters and urban settlement
development, more specifically, between disasters and building and
planning practices related to low-income settlements; (b) the current relationship
between the working fields of disaster risk management and settlement development
planning; and (c) the possibilities for overcoming existing challenges and
gaps in order to increase the potential of settlement development programming to
reduce and transfer or share risk.