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

A young boy leans
over a balcony
overlooking an
informal settlement
in Cape Town,
South Africa.
© IFRC
18
The crisis of urban poverty, rapidly growing informal settlements and growing numbers
of urban disasters arises from the failure of governments to adapt their institutions
to urbanization. It stems also in part from the failure of aid agencies to help
them to do so – most aid agencies have inadequate or no urban policies and have
long been reluctant to support urban development at a sufficient scale. Governments
fail to stop urban disasters when they fail to help local government structures in cities
and metropolitan areas to provide the web of institutions, infrastructure and services
noted above. In so many cities, disaster risk is produced over time by the failure of city
governments to ensure that neighbourhoods are not built with bad-quality housing
and on dangerous sites without adequate infrastructure. Often this failure is linked to
their weak financial status, lack of trained staff and lack of capacity due to the refusal
of central and provincial governments to provide them with resources commensurate
with their responsibilities. Perhaps the most important issue that runs through all the
chapters in this report is that city and municipal governments should be working with
their low-income populations and other vulnerable groups to take disaster risk out of
urban development and expansion. We have enough examples to illustrate that this is
possible, despite the constraints that city governments face.
If national and international databases on disasters become more precise and comprehensive
as to the impact on individual cities, it is certain that the observed trends would