World Disasters Report 2010 - International Federation of Red Cross ...

But only a very small proportion of urban centres in low- and middle-income nations
have a comparable web of institutions, infrastructure, services and regulations, although
there are very large variations between urban areas in these nations as regards the extent
of both provision and coverage. For instance, the proportion of urban populations living
in legal homes that were constructed in accordance with appropriate building regulations
varies from 10–20 per cent to close to 100 per cent. The proportion of the population
living in homes adequately served by sanitation, waste-water removal and storm
drains also varies enormously – most urban centres in Africa and Asia have no sewers and
for many of those that do, these serve only a very small proportion of the population. No
family in urban areas in high-income nations, however poor, expects to have to walk several
hundred metres to collect water from a communal standpipe shared with hundreds
of others, to have no toilet in their home or to have no service to collect household waste.
It is common that between one-third and one-half of the population of cities in low-
and middle-income nations lives in informal settlements. And this is not just the case
in cities with little economic success – around half the population of Mumbai and
Nairobi, both of which are successful economically, lives in informal settlements. It is
also common in such cities for the local authorities and utilities to refuse to extend to
informal settlements (or to be prevented from doing so by law or regulation) all the
infrastructure and services that do so much to reduce disaster risk. There are no statistics
on the proportion of the urban population covered by good-quality fire services or
rapid response to serious injuries or illnesses (including ambulances and hospitals able
to provide rapid treatment), but the inadequacy or complete absence of such services
is evident in many informal settlements. Only 1 per cent of households and businesses
in low-income countries and 3 per cent in middle-income countries have catastrophe
insurance, compared to 30 per cent in high-income nations.
Urban myths
The discussion of urbanization is still full of myths (see Box 1.1). It is often seen as ‘the
problem’ (nations being ‘too urbanized’, cities growing ‘too fast’, ‘too many migrants’
flooding the city) when it is associated with economic success. All high-income nations
are predominantly urbanized and most of their rural population are ‘urbanized’ in that
they no longer work in agriculture and a high proportion of them commute to urban
areas. All low- and middle-income nations that have had the greatest economic success
have urbanized; most of those that have not had economic success are among the
world’s least urbanized nations. There are worries about ‘mega-cities’ with more than
10 million inhabitants but there are relatively few of them (17 in 2000, the last year
for which census data were available for most cities) and they are concentrated in the
world’s largest economies. There is an economic logic to where urbanization and large
city development is taking place – and also good evidence to show that in successful
economies that are urbanizing and where the competence of city governments is
strengthened, urban development decentralizes to community and urban district levels.
World Disasters Report 2010 – Focus on urban risk
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