Measuring Urban Vulnerability to Natural Disaster Risk: Benchmarks for Sustainability

The Millennium Declaration and the Hyogo Framework for Action point towards the need for methods to identify urban vulnerability to disaster risk as a pre-cursor for the development of benchmarks with which to track policy progress for urban sustainability and risk reduction. This paper responds to this call by assessing the state of the art in urban vulnerability and risk assessment tools. It presents a review of the conceptual frameworks, methodologies and comparative advantages of ten tools. These are categorised into deductive and inductive approaches, with inductive approaches in turn separated into those that use social-survey and participatory methods. The tools examined vary in the focus of their interests between those concerned with the vulnerability of places (cities or buildings) and people (either as predefined vulnerable social groups or identified through household livelihood sustainability). The paper calls for a deeper conversation between the emerging community of practitioners working on urban disaster risk management and the existing urban development community. For example, disasters are typically defined as exceptionally large, single events, which adds to analytical clarity, but misses the cumulative impact of multiple small, local events on household sustainability and urban infrastructure, ultimately distorting planning guidance. There is also a need for natural hazard specific vulnerability assessment tools to be interpreted alongside, or to incorporate social, economic and political sources of danger to livelihoods and human health. For forward looking policy relevance, tools are also needed that can assess adaptive or coping capacity. This is essential for the building of a holistic approach to urban risk management. An approach that coherently tackles the multiple hazards and vulnerabilities faced by urban dwellers, and seeks to avoid the shifting of risk burdens between populations and the movement of people from one kind of threat to another.

Such ideas may be far fetched. However, this special issue on "Managing Urban Disasters" shows that the integration of an appropriate risk reduction strategy in the fields of housing and settlement planning is possible and is a first step to convert such a utopian situation into an effective and realistic vision. In fact, such integrated urban housing and planning can prevent and mitigate disasters or, at least, minimise its effects. Nevertheless, "disaster risk reduction"1 is still a relatively new area of knowledge. It is slowly developing and undergoing a multifaceted process of institutionalisation, especially within our professional disciplines. Those working in housing and settlement planning far too often think about risk reduction in a purely physical way, ensnaring themselves in physical/constructive (high-)tech discussions and discourses, that are seldom of relevance to the approximately one billion poor residing in precarious and dangerous living conditions