Urban Risk Management Research Articles

Research on Risk Management in Urban Subway Construction

As one of the major projects, urban subway plays an important role in the city development. However, therere a lot of uncertain risks throughout the entire construction process, any improper handling may lead to serious safety accidents and incalculable property damage, so it is essential to take full concentration in the urban subway risk management. This paper divided risks that may encountered in the process of subway construction into three parts, and gave advices from four aspects so as to effectively prevent and mitigate the subway risk, thus ensure the achievement of the subway construction.

Dynamic decision trees for building resilience into future eco-cities

Intensifying global urbanization and environmental changes bring about the imperative of sustainable urban development and decisions upon inescapable pressures and risks, but knowledge integration between disciplines is a limiting contextual challenge. This paper proposes a reformulation, in terms of urban risk management, of an earlier developed ontological scenario generation method. The procedure consists of several steps: (i) identification-and-prioritization of main pressures, (ii) paired discussion of pressures using four-cell matrices, (iii) re-visit of the pressures' priority order, (iv) articulation of short-listed pressures as decision-making questions, and (v) generation of scenarios via “yes/no” responses to each question, in their order of priority. In this article, the method feeds upon the general context described in recent multi-disciplinary urban studies and public strategic plans in the city of Iasi (Romania), to propose a formal procedure for enabling the acceleration of productive decision making towards city sustainability. Answering three top priority questions, namely “Implement a business-friendly and efficient governance system?”, “Develop a resource management system?”, and “Carry out a human capital accelerator strategy?” results in a 4-scenario set: Receding City, Wanting City, Promising City, Inspiring City. The scenarios are discussed in terms of systemic risks at the end of post-communist transition and beginning of the socio-economic convergence with Western Europe.

Urban Technological Risk Characterization and Management: Towards a Better Understanding of Non-Natural Threats in Merida City, Venezuela

The past four decades has seen an increase in the destructive impact of human-originated and natural hazard disasters in industrial facilities. This illustrates the limited capacity for comprehensively estimating and responding to technological risk scenarios at all urban scales. Accidents, such as the chemical releases at Séveso (Italy) in 1976 and Bhopal (India) in 1984 and the 1992 gas explosion in Guadalajara (Mexico), have led national legislation for implementing strategies for countering and preparing for urban technological risks. Other accidents, however, suggest the need to understand that the inherent conflict between how we occupy urban space creates new needs for technological risk management methods that can be used by city planners and disaster/emergency management planners. Information and procedural gaps also exist in terms of citizen knowledge (the right to know) and local administrative knowledge (missing expertise). This paper illustrates that technological risk does occur in many areas of the city and is not isolated in just large industrial sites. Advances and experience accumulated by the Disaster Risk Management Research Center in identifying and integrating technological risk treatment for the city ofMérida, Venezuela are presented. The application of new tools and technologies in geospatially characterizing risk scenarios are presented. Strengthening of the institutional and community aspects of local urban risk scenario management is recommended.

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.

Urban Risk Assessment And Management In TheEnlarged EU, Recent Status And Trends

A detailed qualitative study on assessing and managing urban risks, co-financed by the European Commission (EC), is in progress. Key findings and preliminary results underline the importance of safety and security issues for urban life quality. This paper presents the findings of this study aiming at proposing a European wide strategy for Urban Risks assessment and management by taking into account legal status for current practices at EU 25. A structured questionnaire was addressed to National Authorities aiming to gain an insight into existing law provisions, emergency planning and urban risk management practices. An analysis of the replies highlighted the diversity of both urban risks and emergency management structures. The risks investigated cover a range from natural catastrophes and technological failures to terrorism and intended action threats. Risks were ranked by priority according to frequency of occurrence and consequences. The scaling of hazards, the identification and mapping of risks, the severity of consequences and matters concerning mutual assistance in major emergencies are identified as the priority fields. A refined version of the results, following consultations with the parties involved and the EC forms the basis of the project proposals. The complexity fo the modern urban Environment, urbanization trends, increasing vulnerability and the different approaches in dealing with urban risks, indicate a clear need for a common platform and a unified approach across the EU. Basic components of a suggested unified approach and an EU wide mitigation strategy are also discussed.

The state, policing and “Old Continental Europe”: managing the local/national tension

This article deals with the reshuffling of policing within the strong states of Continental Europe. It is argued that scholars should take social history into account because it shows that the problematic tension in security matters in Continental Europe is not public/ private, which the public sector has become able to deal with fairly well over the long term, but local/national—a central tension in the history of the formation of the countries of Continental Europe characterized by a fairly strong state tradition. Use of the “governance” vulgate, or of a concept like “multilateralization, should be resisted, and it is contended that the local/national tension determines the public/private tension. Moreover, the constitution of what should be termed “risk management bureaucracies” at the local level in large European cities underscores an astonishing comeback of the local level in the measurement and management of urban risks. It is as if the infra‐national level intended to regain the role of interface it once played by acting as a mediator between a private sector that sells and manages surveillance and protection technologies, and a public sector that is content with regulating at a distance the activities of private actors within a newly controlled logic of security co‐production.