Public Participatory Risk Mapping for Community-Based Urban Disaster Mitigation

Abstract

As crises happen more frequently and in bigger magnitudes in urban communities, disaster prevention and disaster mitigation become increasingly more important. One useful preventive measure is for community members to report relevant risk information before an actual crisis occurs. This paper presents a Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) system called Collaborative Risk Map System (CRMS), which is community based and through which local residents can report risk information of crisis events and share the information in disaster mitigation. Although the Internet and mobile phones are the preferred methods for public participation due to their convenience and ease of use, the feedback information needs to be filtered before usage, so we designed a credibility model to filter out the mendacious information. A risk model of crisis events is also proposed which transformed the static pre-planning to dynamic and timely risk map as a result of public participation. The risk state of the community and reliable risk feedback is displayed on the map using Oracle Spatial technology so that public can see the risk information visually. Through the analysis of risk information, the community can directly access reliable risk information easily and can prepare for it immediately. Most importantly, decision-makers can get the most up-to-date risk information and do more accurate risk analysis so as to make better informed decisions. We demonstrate the prototype system by selecting 20 places to be a community in Chengguan district in Lanzhou, the capital city in Gansu Province, China and selecting fire risk to evaluate its effectiveness and efficiency.