Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

188
Natural and human-made disasters
Urban land-use
planning has not
succeeded in
separating people
from sources of
potential humanmade
or natural
hazard
Arguably, the most important reason for unsafe
construction is the failure to implement and enforce building
codes. Failure to enforce regulation was the principal
cause of high losses among poor and middle-class households
in the 1999 Marmara earthquake in Turkey, 85 and in the
collapse of multi-storey buildings in Spitak in the Armenian
earthquake in 1988. 86 Even among public buildings and critical
infrastructure such as schools, unsafe construction
continues in the face of building codes. The 2005 Pakistan
earthquake destroyed 4844 educational buildings, 18,000
children were killed by the collapse of school buildings and
300,000 children were still unable to attend school six
months after the event. 87 The collapse of schools was
presumed to have resulted from poor-quality construction
and construction materials, a lack of monitoring in the building
processes, and a general lack of awareness of seismic risk
and appropriate standards. 88
Municipal authorities are normally charged with
overseeing construction standards, but are prevented from
fulfilling their duty for several reasons. Lack of resources and
human skills are perhaps greatest for smaller cities, where
land-use or development planning departments may be
absent, and responsibilities for overseeing construction
standards become added to those of the city engineer or
Box 7.11 Poverty and flooding in Mumbai, India
The 2005 monsoon brought disastrous flooding to Mumbai (India). Those worst affected were
the most vulnerable – slum dwellers living in flood-prone locations and with little capacity to
avoid or cope with flood impacts. Over half of Mumbai’s 12 million people live in slums. 89
Because the majority of these slums are located on hill slopes, low-lying areas, coastal locations
and pavements along water mains and open drainage systems, they are the most prone to
flooding during times of heavy rainfall and high tides.
Typically, slum dwellers occupy land that is close to the streets or main transportation
hubs, such as railways. These communities are constantly in danger from passing trains and are
denied formalized access to water, sanitation and electricity because they build on land owned
by the Indian Railways and other public or private companies. 90 Beyond this, encroachment
onto this land is in conflict with the need to maintain transport and drainage networks. The
survival strategies of Mumbai’s poorest populations directly affect the city’s ability to maintain
disaster management infrastructure. By not addressing chronic housing and infrastructure
problems, the entire city is exposed to flood hazard.
A risk analysis was undertaken as part of Mumbai’s Disaster Management Plan (DMP)
prior to the July 2005 floods. Subsequently, a mitigation strategy that focuses on public information
systems, infrastructure and sanitation improvements, as well as land-use policies and
planning, was developed. The strategy also includes a plan for coordination between public
service providers, emergency personnel and disaster aid non-governmental organizations
(NGOs). 91 Despite the DMP, the severity of the 2005 floods indicated just how much risk had
accumulated over time in the city, built into the geography of its land use, the inadequacy of
drainage, rapid urban expansion and tensions within the urban and state-level administrations,
including competing interests of senior politicians who are also real estate developers and
owners of commercial land. 92 The neglect of outdated zoning regulations and inflated land
markets, in particular, contributed to the overall vulnerability of Mumbai and its inhabitants to
flood risk.
The experience of the slum dwellers of Mumbai and their vulnerability to flooding is
rooted in the larger socio-economic processes of the city (and beyond); but failure to address
this vulnerability threatens the sustainability of the city as a whole – as well as the poor
majority.
Source: Stecko and Barber, 2007
surveyor. In many cities, even these professionals may be
absent and construction regulation is, in effect, nonexistent.
Resource scarcity can be compounded by
institutional cultures that allow corruption to distort regulation
and enforcement.
While lack of enforcement fails those who can afford
to build safely, poverty and exclusion from the formal
housing sector consign many, often the majority of urban
residents, to living in unsafe dwellings. Unsafe building in
slums is compounded by the burden of natural and humanmade
hazards found in these communities. The result is a
deadly cocktail of human vulnerability, unsafe dwellings and
high hazard. It is not surprising, then, that the poor,
especially those living in slums, bear the brunt of natural
disaster losses.
■ Land-use planning
Urban land-use planning has not succeeded in separating
people from sources of potential human-made or natural
hazard. In the UK, around 15 per cent of urban land,
containing 1.85 million homes and 185,000 commercial
properties, is built on land known to be at risk from flooding.
Much of this land has been developed since the 1947 Town
and Country Planning Act, which gave local authorities
power to prevent floodplain development. 93 In this case, as
in many others, pressure for local economic development
has been given priority over flood risk management, with
increasingly disastrous consequences demonstrated by
widespread flooding in 1998 and 2000.
In middle- and low-income countries experiencing
rapid urbanization, the capacity of town planning departments
to measure, let alone manage, the expansion of urban
land use is seriously inhibited. This is a major cause for the
accumulation of disaster risk in human settlements. The
spread of informal and slum settlements has already been
identified as an acute concern. These settlements, at best,
are only weakly influenced by land-use planning policy, so
that internal structure as well as adjoining land uses and
characteristics combine to produce disaster risk. Not only
are slum settlements located in risky places, but high density
also limits access for emergency vehicles and can in itself be
a cause of hazard – for example, in spreading house fires.
Even in cities responsive to formal planning control,
inappropriate policy can lead to increased risk. In many
cities, widespread concretization and the infilling of natural
drainage has increased flood hazard. In Bangkok, the conversion
of drainage canals into streets now results in regular
flooding. 94 In Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, uncontrolled
expansion of the built environment, infilling of
drainage canals and concretization has similarly increased
the speed of runoff and reduced the water storage capacity
and speed of natural drainage in the city, contributing to an
increase in flooding. 95
Box 7.11 takes up this theme with regard to Mumbai
and looks in some detail at the ways in which poverty has
come together with poor planning decisions and hazard
management to generate flood risk.
Urban land-use planning is too often left outside of
reconstruction planning. When reconstruction is undertaken