ancient cities

120 Catastrophe
system, as commuters were able to commute to
work as usual because most of the system remained
intact. Most cities can cope with disaster events
through emergency response systems, but they are
ill prepared to deal with the sheer scale of devastation
associated with catastrophes.
Risk to Cities
Rather than originating from unexpected events,
catastrophes are a predictable result of interactions
among several major global forces: (1) rapid
urbanization, (2) growth in extremely hazardous
locations, (3) growing inequities in social vulnerability,
and (4) global climate change. The accelerating
rate of urbanization has caused greater
concentrations of people and property that can
increase risk if hazards are not anticipated and
addressed. Global statistics for urban growth indicate
that in 2000 more than 50 percent of the
world’s population lived in urban settlements. By
2020, 90 percent of the population growth in
developing countries will be urban. Although cities
comprise only 1 percent of the earth’s land area,
they concentrate more than half of the world’s
population and the majority of its physical capital,
including buildings and infrastructure. Frequently,
growth occurs too rapidly to allow cities to keep
pace in expanding the capacity of their hazard
mitigation programs. These programs include proactive
land use planning to steer new development
away from hazard areas, building codes to
strengthen new and existing buildings to withstand
hazardous forces (wind, floods, and seismic shaking),
and resilient infrastructure systems that serve
as critical lifelines for stricken populations.
Istanbul, Turkey, which is highly vulnerable to
earthquakes, exemplifies a city in which the rate of
growth far exceeds its ability to effectively mitigate
the risks. This city grew from 1 million people in
the 1950s to about 10 million today, a tenfold
increase in half a century. Yet, by 1999 only 20
schools out of 1,783 schools and 2 hospitals out of
308 hospitals in Istanbul have been retrofitted.
Second, cities are growing in perilous geographic
locations such as gently sloping floodplains,
coastal shorelines, and uplifted precipices
along seismic faults. These places confer benefits
that attract development (e.g., buildable lands,
strategic sites for transportation, scenic amenities).
In the United States, the number of people residing
in earthquake- and hurricane-prone regions is growing
rapidly. Over the past several decades, the population
growth rate along the hurricane- and
storm-prone U.S. coast is more than double the
national growth rate. Worldwide, 11 of the 15 largest
cities in 2000 were highly exposed to one or more
natural hazards, including coastal storms, earthquakes,
and volcanoes. Beijing, Los Angeles, Mexico
City, and Tokyo sit astride active seismic faults,
while Bombay (Mumbai), New York, and Shanghai
are vulnerable to coastal storms, and Jakarta and
Tokyo are in close proximity to active volcanoes.
Third, deep inequities in social vulnerability
result in wide variations in how catastrophes affect
different populations. Whereas physical vulnerability
emphasizes the location, frequency, and
magnitude of hazardous forces and the resiliency
of the built environment to withstand such forces,
social vulnerability centers on characteristics of
social groups that affect their ability to cope with
and rebound from a catastrophe or disaster.
Several factors comprise the social vulnerability of
populations including socioeconomic status, gender,
race/ethnicity, and age. Differences in these
factors result in a system of stratification of wealth,
power, and status. In the United States, this has
caused social inequities in fiscal and human
resources between older core areas of cities and
wealthier suburban areas. Spatial differences, in
turn, result in uneven distribution of exposure and
vulnerability to catastrophic events and access to
aid for planning and recovery. The Hurricane
Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans laid bare
these inequities. Inner-city New Orleans had the
highest social vulnerability of all the impacted
coastal jurisdictions along the Gulf Coast. Displaced
low-income minority populations were left
behind at the New Orleans convention center and
elsewhere because they did not have access to
vehicles to evacuate, while suburban residents with
automobiles were able to flee the destruction.
Dissimilarities in social vulnerability can also be
observed between cities in developed and developing
countries. Inhabitants and businesses in cities
of developed countries can afford new construction
and the retrofitting of existing structures to
disaster-resistant building standards, mapping of
hazard locations, widespread insurance to cover
losses, and investment in structurally strengthened