Hazard-Intensifying and Disaster Forcing Aspects of Urbanisation!
Urban development increases disaster-susceptibility in a number of ways. First is the frequent association of cities with naturally risky locations such as seacoasts and floodplains because such places also confer important benefits.
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Initial settlements may take advantage of available safe sites but subsequent growth typically spills over into adjacent high-risk areas. Coastal metropolises of the eastern United States (Boston, New York, Miami, and Houston) and the seaward-expanding cities of Japan are good examples.
Again the physical process of building cities often creates or exacerbates existing environmental risks. For instance, paving over watersheds reduces infiltration, speeds runoff, and increases flood volumes; constructing coastal defences may reduce supplies of beach sand and facilitate erosion during storms. As the leading edge of urban development marches across the landscape, the incidence of natural disasters tends to keep pace.
The human role in creating conditions for disaster is clearly visible. Bangkok klongs (canals) that used to accommodate overflow from the Chao Phraya River have been filled in to create streets that are now chronically flood prone, while the city continues to subside owing to pumping of water from underlying aquifers.
The cities increase disaster potential by concentrating people and investments. A disproportionate amount of material wealth is bound up with cities in the form of buildings (ceremonial, commercial, industrial, and residential) and infrastructure (i.e. the complex and expensive networks of lifelines that sustain urban populations and make it possible for them to interact with each other and the outside world).
When an extreme event occurs, urban losses are often very heavy. In a matter of hours, hurricane Andrew inflicted over US$20 billion of property damage on the Miami metropolitan area, whereas it took about six weeks of heavy flooding in mostly rural sections of nine Midwestern states to produce approximately half as much material loss.
The built environment is continuously wearing out but the rate of urban replacement rarely matches the rate of urban obsolescence. As a consequence, most cities contain large concentrations of old buildings that fail to meet present standards for hazard-resistant construction. Differential ageing and uneven replacement of the physical stock typically produce a complex patchwork of disaster-susceptibilities.
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Many urban areas contain populations that are particularly vulnerable to disaster. For example, metropolitan areas often attract large numbers of in-migrants, most of them poor and all of them separated both from the familiar landscapes of home, whose risks were known, and from traditional support networks or customary behaviours that provided a modicum of security in the event of disaster.
Only few governments of rapidly growing cities have been able to allocate significant resources to hazard reduction when they are already stretched to breaking point by the task of providing basic support services for their expanding populations. In short, cities often contain all of the ingredients for disaster: heightened risks, concentrated exposure, and increased vulnerability.
Changing Patterns of Urbanization:
In 1990 urban dwellers accounted for 47 per cent of the world’s population but that number is expected to rise to around 63 per cent by 2020. Some 6,000 years separated the earliest urban centres from the first cities of more than 1 million people. Now there are about 300 such places and their numbers are growing rapidly. At the beginning of the twentieth century approximately 2 per cent of all humans lived in just 14 mega-cities. Today the proportion is close to 20 per cent and it will probably rise to around 30 per cent by the year 2020.
Moreover, the size of mega-cities is increasing rapidly. In 1900 there were no cities of more than 10 million and only three that exceeded 3 million (London, Paris, and New York). Now there are about 60 cities with populations greater than 3 million and 14 super-mega-cities of more than 10 million. What is, by some counts, the world’s largest city (Mexico City) currently contains at least 15 million people.
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The entire contiguous area of Mexico City (i.e. the central city plus adjacent smaller cities, towns, and suburbs) may hold more than 20 million. It is projected that there will be two or three urbanized areas of 20 million by the year 2000 (Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and perhaps Tokyo-Yokohama) and another 20 of between 10 and 20 million.
Urban analysts recognize a number of different cultural variants of city form and structure, each with their own characteristic patterns of land use and population distribution. For example, Latin American cities tend to be made up of concentric zones, with old but well-maintained housing near a single central business district and poor shanty towns on the periphery. Industrial areas and the elite residential zone cut across these rings in the form of wedge-shaped blocks of territory.
In contrast, the typical North American city more or less reverses this pattern, with a ring of decayed housing surrounding the central business district and affluent suburbs on the periphery. Also the central business district may be in decline, its functions challenged by many secondary shopping and industrial nodes scattered throughout the metropolis.
West European cities often have well-marked historic cores with many preserved public buildings, surrounded by old houses – newly upgraded by middle-class gentrifiers – side by side with the cramped homes of working-class residents. Segregated urban ethnic neighbourhoods are less marked than in the United States. Suburbs may be either rich or poor and are often flanked by green belts with dormitory villages in the countryside beyond. African and south Asian cities tend to contain substantial tracts of market gardens within the built-up area.
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Middle Eastern cities often preserve distinct religious “quarters.” The former socialist cities of Russia and Eastern Europe have a high percentage of their land given over to industrial districts and relatively few socioeconomic contrasts among neighbourhoods.
For much of the post-Second World War period, new investment was denied to Shanghai and other coastal cities of China, as national leaders sought both to hold down the growth of all large cities and to spread economic development more widely into the interior. The contrast between outmoded facilities and today’s resurgent economic boom in the coastal mega- cities of China is striking.
These examples do not exhaust the catalogue of cultural and regional variations of urbanization but suffice to make the point that cities are functionally organized in different ways that have distinctive areal expressions. These patterns are then draped over a varied physical landscape and adjusted to it, a process that helps to disguise the underlying organizing principles.
When a natural disaster strikes, it disrupts – and may destroy – not just the lives of citizens and the city’s physical fabric but also the functional organization of the metropolis. However, the same organizing principles typically reassert themselves during post-disaster reconstruction.
Different types of organization have different loss potentials, different vulnerabilities, and different prospects for recovery. Likewise, different types of city require different types of preparedness-planning and different hazard- mitigation strategies.
For example, a single central business district plays an irreplaceable role in Lima (Peru), a city that contains 30 per cent of the country’s population and 70 per cent of its industry; the several business districts of a typical multi-nucleated North American city share economic functions and rarely serve the entire nation.
Likewise, the Lima periphery would hardly be a suitable location for the replication of suburban watershed management schemes borrowed from an American mega-city. In similar vein, the in-city agricultural lands of African and South-East Asian cities provide amounts of open space for hazard refuges and post-disaster relief staging areas that could only be dreamed about in the typical large Japanese city.
The preceding variants notwithstanding, there are also significant similarities among mega-cities. For example, the great majority are ports -very often the most important ports in the respective countries. Therefore protection against waterborne hazards and disasters is likely to be a shared concern, and safeguarding marine facilities, ship channels, and water-dependent land uses may receive high priority.
Polycentre and Periphery Perspectives:
Much of the concern about natural disasters in mega- cities of developed countries stems from the fact that such places contain a large proportion of the world’s material investments and economic wealth.
A disaster that takes many human lives is clearly possible in cities such as London, Los Angeles, or Tokyo, but such places are much more likely to suffer heavy economic and material losses in the wake of extreme natural events. As hurricane Andrew demonstrated for Greater Miami and the Hanshin earthquake for Kobe, a single metropolitan disaster in a rich country can produce economic losses that rock the global reinsurance industry.
But, the issue of mega-city disasters in rich countries is not simply one of losses that are inflicted on the affected communities themselves; it is increasingly connected with the roles that such places play in the global economy and the capacity of disasters to disrupt global economic functioning.
Several years ago the world’s business community was jarred by reports that a major earthquake in Tokyo might precipitate a collapse of the global economic system. This revelation followed on the heels of a record 1987 windstorm in southern England that had shut down the London Stock Exchange and may have helped to trigger the worst international stock market crisis since the Great Depression.
Since then a series of other events has further underlined the disaster-vulnerability of mega-cities that anchor the global finance and trading network. They include – an underground flood that immobilized much of Chicago’s financial district; riots and the possibility of a great earthquake in Los Angeles; an earthquake that disrupted the San Francisco Bay Area; and the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Between them these six mega-cities house the headquarters of more than 60 per cent of the world’s leading private corporations.
Now there is evidence that the urban-based new information technologies on which the global economy increasingly depends are highly vulnerable to disruption by storms, floods, earthquakes, and other unexpected events. Nineteen mega-cities together make up a global “poly-centre” that directs and controls the international entrepreneurial system. Fifteen of these places account for 70 per cent of all electronic data flows in the contemporary world.
Not only are mega-cities of the polycentre full of expensive buildings and infrastructure and strategic economic functions, their sophisticated but demanding technologies that make for economic (and perhaps geopolitical) dominance may be susceptible to new kinds of vulnerability. In these cities, as well as the familiar consequences of natural disasters, there is considerable potential for disaster “surprises” in the future.
What do we know about the ability of mega-cities in developed countries to respond to severe natural events? The Loma Prieta earthquake and other recent mega-city disasters provided evidence that some of the measures that have proven to be effective in reducing losses in smaller cities may not work quite so well in emerging Western mega- cities.
Prediction, warning, and evacuation systems that depend on sophisticated technology and highly effective public bureaucracies are particularly open to question. In addition, big-city disasters possess features that have not been common in smaller communities and that may raise entirely new problems of disaster management.
For example, disaster impacts in mega-cities that dominate mass media markets are likely to be extensively, continuously, and obsessively reported whereas impacts on other communities that have less access to these channels are likely to be overlooked. The consequences for skewing post-disaster relief are considerable. Secondly, the complex societal mixes of mega-cities pose new problems for the delivery of emergency response services and disaster relief; linguistic, ethnic, and other differences are often marked in such places. Thirdly, the sheer size and complexity of mega-city infrastructure networks make them particularly liable to disruption. Finally, recovery is apt to occur more slowly than in smaller places. In short, past lessons of disaster management may no longer be applicable in the mega-cities of the polycentre.
In places such as Manila, Dhaka, Ankara, or Lima there is the potential for heavy loss of life during disasters as well as catastrophic material destruction. The situation in Lima is typical. This is a city that has suffered severe earthquakes at least five times in the past 300 years. At the end of the Second World War, just over half a million people lived in the metropolitan area. Today, there are more than 5 million.
Vast numbers of poor rural peasants have flooded into Lima. Not all groups are equally exposed to hazard. Indeed, the pattern of hazard-susceptibility is a complex one that has evolved in response to changes in demography, economics, land ownership, building practices, and other factors.
Middle- and upper-income groups live in well-constructed houses that often comply with anti-seismic codes and are sited in neighbourhoods with wide streets and ample open spaces. If affected by an earthquake there are enough resources to ensure quick recovery. The peripheral shanty towns (pueblos joveues) are also low-density settlements, this time composed of light bamboo structures that do not collapse when the ground moves.
People are poor, but levels of social organization are high. In contrast, seismic vulnerability is high in the inner-city slum areas. Here many poor families are crowded into old adobe brick structures, adjoining streets are narrow, and open spaces are non-existent. There are few neighbourhood organizations or other local institutions that might be called on in the event of a disaster. Here earthquake protection measures are minimal or, more often, non-existent.
As summarized by one observer, the situation is full of bleak prospects – The inhabitants of critical areas would not choose to live there if they had any alternative, nor do they neglect the maintenance of their overcrowded and deteriorated tenements.
For them it is the best-of-the-worst of a number of disaster- prone scenarios such as having nowhere to live, having no way of earning a living and having nothing to eat. Given that these other risks have to be confronted on a daily basis, it is hardly surprising that people give little priority to the risk of destruction by earthquake.
To sum up, there is a high degree of uncertainty about the future of mega-cities. Their growth seems assured, but at what density? New ones may spring up in unexpected places under the influence of changing geo-economic forces. Increasingly similar in outward form, mega-cities in different cultures and continents may still retain distinctively different internal structures.
The divisions between rich mega- cities and poor ones may become wider and their disaster- susceptibilities may also diverge. But, at the same time, the differences between all mega-cities and their rural hinterlands may become sharper. It would be foolhardy to assume that the disaster-susceptibility of any one mega-city will be quite like that of any other.
The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been a particular target. It has been accused of providing insufficient and inappropriate relief to disaster victims. It has also been criticized for encouraging the occupation of hazardous lands by offering low-cost insurance to rich investors; and it has drawn fire for devoting too much effort to cleaning up after past disasters and too little effort to reducing the probability of future disasters.
FEMA’s mishandling of relief in the wake of hurricane Andrew triggered a major investigation by the US Congress. Critics called for the nation’s armed forces to replace FEMA, and large numbers of military personnel have, in fact, been deployed after recent disasters. The military is commonly in charge of disaster management in third world nations because it is often the only institution capable of providing aid during disasters and one of the few organizations that can be counted on to enforce government policies at other times.
But in the United States and other Western nations proposals for a larger military role in civilian affairs are often controversial. Advocates of civil authority and legal due process are concerned that increased military involvement in disasters may signal an erosion of citizen rights and responsibilities, while others point to the reduction in international tensions and the need for more cost-effective national institutions as grounds for making creative use of military expertise in new roles.
Without going into detail, it is worthwhile to note that there is a widespread loss of faith in the ability of national public agencies to combat natural and technological hazards in many other countries. The failures of Soviet agencies in connection with the Armenian earthquake (1988) and the Chernobyl nuclear power station fire (1986) have been well documented and they are believed to have contributed to the collapse of the Soviet government. British civil defence agencies have also been roundly criticized for inadequate preparedness and lack of attention to hazard mitigation.
Partly because government agencies have come under attack, there has been a determined effort to shift the burden of disaster management onto private individuals and institutions. In countries such as the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, this began with a conservative revolution in politics led by people such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Helmut Kohl.
In the context of hazard management, policy reforms commonly took the form of insurance schemes (flood insurance, earthquake insurance, crop insurance, etc.), limitations on central government spending for disaster relief and recovery, an end to public subsidies for building in hazardous areas, and penalties for people who wilfully build – or rebuild – in such places.
Now there is a growing body of evidence that such policies may not work as intended. For example, insurance is not the panacea it was once proclaimed to be. Many potential victims are uninsured or underinsured and those who have -adequate insurance often experience serious problems securing reimbursements. Not all perils are covered by insurance, and major problems arise when hazards involve several perils (e.g. hurricanes bring floods, erosion, wind damage, landslides, and other events).
Cut-backs in government funding of social services have become common throughout the developed world in recent years, and spending on disasters is no exception. As a result, policies that emphasize private responsibilities for hazard management may help to widen the gap between richer and better-educated victims – that is, those who can afford to make provisions for their own security – and the poor or disadvantaged groups that lack such a capacity. In short, a hazard-protection system that relies primarily on market mechanisms may well be detrimental to broader public interests.
British experience with the great storm of 15 October 1987 illustrates several of these problems. Before the storm, local governments and private individuals in England had been encouraged to be self-reliant and not to expect the national government to provide recovery funds in the event of a disaster.
But the storm which recorded the highest wind speeds in 250 years blew down some 15 million trees and inflicted economic losses greater than any natural disaster in Britain since the end of the Second World War. In the process it exposed the limitations of local resources for coping with disasters and it compelled a major reversal of national policies that would have left local governments to take care of natural disasters.
If there is concern about the general effectiveness of disaster management by the private sector, there is deep consternation about the future of hazard insurance systems. Lack of insurance coverage and inadequate reimbursements are continuing problems, but the central issue is that very large disasters may bankrupt the entire international insurance system.
Insurance and reinsurance companies in Germany, Japan, and the United States are all deeply troubled by this prospect. These include Lloyd’s of London, which ran up losses of US$4.2 billion in 1993 as a consequence of heavy pay-outs to victims of earthquakes, hurricanes, and pollution emergencies (New York Times, 30 April 1993).
In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake (northern California) and hurricane Hugo (Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and South Carolina) inflicted severe losses on the American insurance industry and the global reinsurance market. But these losses were nothing compared with the losses sustained in 1992 as a result of three “superstorms” that occurred within a few weeks: typhoon Omar (Guam), hurricane Andrew (Florida), and hurricane Iniki (Hawaii).
The total bill for insured storm losses was at least US$20 billion. Yet worse is possible – indeed likely. It is estimated that a single large hurricane could cause US$30-40 billion in insured losses and that a major earthquake in Tokyo or southern California might wreak even worse damage. These are the kinds of event that could disrupt investment markets throughout the world and trigger a collapse of the global financial system. Such circumstances underline the increasing interdependence of global society and its vulnerability to strategic loss.
Failure to make use of available hazard-reduction information and measures of known effectiveness constitutes another general policy issue. It is one that helps to stimulate the ongoing UN-sponsored International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. In many places it would be possible to mitigate losses simply by putting what is known into effect.
For example, the value of warning and evacuation systems has been proven repeatedly; yet such systems are often underused. Likewise, hazard-mitigation schemes offer reliable paths towards reducing the long-term costs of disasters but they are often resisted in favour of immediate post-disaster relief, insurance, and compensation programmes. Why do individuals and governments fail to make optimal use of available knowledge? There is no single answer to this question.
A large number of factors are involved:
(i) Lack of agreement about definition and identification of problem;
(ii) Lack of awareness of hazards;
(iii) Misperception or misjudgement of risks;
(iv) Lack of awareness of appropriate responses;
(v) Lack of expertise to make use of responses;
(vi) Lack of money or resources to pay for responses;
(vii) Lack of coordination among institutions;
(viii) Lack of attention to relationship between “disasters” and “development”;
(ix) Failure to treat hazards as contextual problems whose components require simultaneous attention (i.e. reciprocity);
(x) Lack of access by affected populations to decision making;
(xi) Lack of public confidence in scientific knowledge;
(xii) Conflicting goals among populations at risk;
(xiii) Fluctuating salience of hazards (competing priorities);
(xiv) Public opposition by negatively affected individuals and groups.
Underlying all of these specific reasons is a larger problem. It is this – society fails to treat natural hazards as complex systems with many components that often require simultaneous-attention. We tinker with one or another aspect of these systems when what is required are system-wide strategies.
Perhaps even more important, we fail to address the direct linkage between natural hazard systems and economic investment decisions that drive the process of “development” and affect the potential for disasters. That such links exist has been known for a very long time-
If a man owes a debt, and the storm inundates his field and carries away the produce, or if the grain has not grown in the field, in that year he shall not make any return to the creditor, he shall alter his contract and he shall not pay interest for that year.
But most of the decisions that are taken to build new facilities or redevelop old ones, or to adopt new production and distribution processes, or to develop new land, or to effectuate a myriad of other development goals are not currently very sensitive to considerations of natural hazards.
They should become so. And that is a task that will require a great deal of effort by natural hazard scientists to go beyond the laboratory and the research office or the field study site to acquire an understanding of how best to apply their expertise in public settings.
It will also require the users of scientific information about hazards (architects, engineers, planners, banks and mortgage companies, international development agencies, and investment financiers) to nurture a mutually interactive relationship with the scientists who are producers of that information.
“Development” is only one of the major public issues that overlaps with natural hazards reduction. Others include – environmental management; public health; security (personal, social, and national); and urbanization. All of them are major problem sets in their own right, each patterned by philosophical and managerial disputes and unresolved issues.
Efforts to work out mutually supportive policies and programmes raise entirely new sets of contextual issues for hazards experts. How shall the different kinds of policies for these broad problem sets be articulated? Can they be organized around a single concept such as sustainable development, or will it be necessary to make trade-offs among each of them separately on an ad hoc basis?
Some of the experience gained from attempts to work out sustainable development programmes in the World Bank and elsewhere might prove useful here. So might the experience of “harmonizing” laws and regulations among countries that join together in new continental-sized free trade blocs (e.g. the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement).
The difficulties of merging hazards reduction in the overlapping context of sustainable development are instructive and require further comment. The rising incidence of disasters throughout the world is one of the most commonly cited indicators of non-sustainable development. (The other major villains are loss of biodiversity, impairment of natural systems, and global economic crises.)
As Odd Grann, Secretary General of the Norwegian Red Cross, has said – All major disaster problems in the Third World are essentially unresolved development problems. Disaster prevention is thus primarily an aspect of development, and this must be a development that takes place within the sustainable limits.
The evidence that disasters and development are connected is simply too overwhelming to be ignored. In the case of problems such as drought and famine in the African Sahel or the deaths of poor slum dwellers in landslides that affect the unstable slopes of Latin American cities, the connections between disasters and development are clear. But it is another matter entirely to believe that most or all natural disasters will disappear if only we adopt sustainable development policies and programmes. “Sustainable” development does not necessarily equal “safe” development.
It will probably always be necessary to support and nourish institutions that have the capability of responding to unexpected natural disasters. Much of what our existing hazard-management organizations do could be described as preparing for and coping with “routine disasters,” that is, problems that were bound to occur sooner rather than later and for which we have developed reliable management responses. These are the sorts of things that it is hoped will diminish if sustainable development is properly implemented.
Clearly, the roster of hazard-management issues is packed with still unresolved old issues and emerging new ones.
Among the topics that require attention are the following:
(i) The changing contributions of people, natural systems, and technology to the creation of hazard;
(ii) Measures to encourage improved use of available information about hazards (including scientific knowledge and folk wisdom);
(iii) Global interdependence and the vulnerability of large institutions (e.g. economies, cities) to major disruptive events;
(iv) The relative human impacts of cumulative small-scale hazards and single large disasters;
(v) Innovative procedures for coping with unprecedented hazards (i.e. surprises);
(vi) Attitudes toward risk and hazard;
(vii) Equity in the distribution o/hazard costs and benefits;
(viii) The illumination of polarizing debates about appropriate hazard-management strategies (e.g. “top- down” versus “bottom-up,” centralization versus decentralization, rights versus responsibilities, anticipation versus reaction);
(ix) Alternative means for sustaining stakeholder involvement in decision-making beyond periods of acute crisis; and coalition-building between hazards interest groups and others that address overlapping problems (e.g. sustainable development).