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24Understanding Urban Safety and SecurityOne of the mostimportant socioeconomicdeterminants ofvulnerability ispovertyAnother veryimportantdeterminant ofvulnerability is thecapacity ofinstitutionswithstand natural hazards such as floods, tropical storms andearthquakes. Ex post actions may include evacuating peoplefrom affected areas; selling household assets in order to dealwith sudden loss of income; providing public-sector safetynets, such as food-for-work programmes; or reconstructingdamaged buildings and infrastructure.From the point of view of policy-making, the challengewith respect to risk response is to find ways of addressing theconstraints faced by individuals, households, communitiesand cities in managing risk. These constraints may be relatedto poor information, lack of finance or assets, inability toassess risk, ineffective public institutions and poor socialnetworks. 4 All of these constraints are among the determinantsof resilience, a concept that reflects the quality oreffectiveness of risk response. Resilience has been defined asthe capacity of an individual, household or community toadjust to threats, to avoid or mitigate harm, as well as torecover from risky events or shocks. Resilience is partlydependent upon the effectiveness of risk response, as well asthe capability to respond in the future. 5 The concept ofresilience, which is discussed in more detail later in thischapter, has been increasingly used during the last decade tocharacterize societies and institutions that are able to adjustto change or to bounce back from problems.Outcome is the actual loss, or damage, experienced byindividuals, households and communities due to a riskyevent or risky process – for example, physical injury, deathand loss of assets resulting from crime and violence; fallingbelow a given poverty line and loss of income as a result offorced eviction from informal housing or informal sources oflivelihood; as well as damage to buildings and infrastructureresulting from natural or human-made hazards. The outcomeof a risky event is determined by both the nature of the riskas well as the degree of effectiveness of the response ofindividuals, households, communities and cities to riskyevents.A recent paper has provided a good interdisciplinaryworking concept of vulnerability at the household level,which can be extended to the individual, community, cityand national levels as well: 6A household is said to be vulnerable to futureloss of welfare below socially accepted normscaused by risky events. The degree of vulnerabilitydepends on the characteristics of the riskand the household’s ability to respond to risk.Ability to respond to risk depends on householdcharacteristics – notably their asset base. Theoutcome is defined with respect to some benchmark– a socially accepted minimum referencelevel of welfare (e.g. a poverty line).Measurement of vulnerability will also dependon the time horizon: a household may bevulnerable to risks over the next month, year,etc.One of the most important socio-economic determinants ofvulnerability is poverty. 7 It has even been suggested that,because of their close correspondence, poverty should beused as an indicator of vulnerability. 8 The urban poor aregenerally more exposed to risky events (such as crime,forced eviction or disasters) than the rich, partly because oftheir geographical location. With respect to disasters, theurban poor are more vulnerable than the rich because theyare often located on sites prone to floods, landslides andpollution. The urban poor also have relatively limited accessto assets, thus limiting their ability to respond to risky eventsor to manage risk (e.g. through insurance). Because the poorare politically powerless, it is unlikely that they will receivethe necessary social services following disasters or otherrisky events. In addition, the urban poor are more vulnerableto the undesirable outcomes of risky events because they arealready closer to or below the threshold levels of theseoutcomes, whether they are income poverty or tenureinsecurity. Particularly affected in this respect are the leastadvantaged groups in society, such as women, children, theelderly and the disabled.Another very important determinant of vulnerabilityis the capacity of institutions. This influecnes the responseand outcome elements in the risk chain discussed above – interms of effectiveness and severity, respectively. For thepurposes of the conceptual framework currently underdiscussion, the term institution refers to any structuredpattern of behaviour, including informal institutions orbehaviours, which communities and households may use tomaintain their equilibrium in the face of dynamic conditionssuch as crime and violence or disasters. Given the weaknessof formal institutions in many developing countries, it isinstructive to approach this question from the level of socialorganization, rather than only from the perspective of formalinstitutions such as municipalities, police or emergencypreparedness agencies, which are usually the focus oftechnocratic approaches to these problems. This broaderdefinition thus allows the recognition of ‘informal’ institutionsas legitimate participants and stakeholders inaddressing threats to urban safety and security. Both formaland informal institutions can be characterized by theirdegree of resilience in the face of threats and uncertainty.Vulnerability may be used as a general framework forconceptualizing and analysing the causal relationshipsbetween risk, responses and outcomes of risky events andprocesses, as in much of the work on sustainable livelihoodsand also as used in this report. However, some applications ofthe vulnerability concept have been quite precise and havesought to measure vulnerability in quantitative terms. Themain challenge has been to identify measures of vulnerabilityto different outcomes of risky events and processes and,sometimes, to find a common metric that is applicable acrossdifferent outcomes. 9 Another approach has been that ofvulnerability mapping. 10 This has been used predominantly infood security and disaster management studies. The objectiveof vulnerability mapping is to identify spatially vulnerableareas by overlaying maps of different vulnerability factors (orvariables) and of population distribution by socio-economicclass in order to identify the extent of vulnerability of populationsresiding in high risk areas.Clearly, the concept of vulnerability provides a usefulframework for understanding the nature of risk and risky