ancient cities

lifelines (i.e., roadways for evacuation; water,
sewer, and electrical utilities; and communication
systems). In developing countries, poverty makes
many people more vulnerable to hazards and less
able to recover from them. Impoverished city governments
lack the resources to plan for future
disasters, while most, if not all, of their capacity is
directed at providing basic services. Waves of
migrants crowd into existing houses, often substandard,
or put up cheap shelters wherever they
can, frequently on land left empty because it is
extremely hazardous. In Quito, the capital of
Ecuador, many flimsy houses perch on the sides of
hills, where they are vulnerable to landslides caused
by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. Substandard
construction puts impoverished neighborhoods at
extreme risk to tropical storms in Bombay, floods
in São Paulo, and earthquakes in Guatemala City.
Lastly, global warming has increased the prospects
for catastrophes in cities. Although the connection
between global climate change and gaseous
emissions from urban-industrial regions is a controversial
topic, there is no question that global
warming is occurring. Global warming raises the
temperature of sea water, which acts like fuel for
hurricanes and typhoons. The strike range of these
tropical storms could increasingly extend into nontropical
coastal cities. New York City, the most
populous city in the United States, is now the
American city at second highest risk for potential
total economic loss from a major hurricane, preceded
only by the Miami–Fort Lauderdale area in
Florida. Global warming is causing sea level rise
along coastlines to increase 1 to 1½ feet or more
per century. The numerous consequences of sea
level rise, including higher storm surge and tsunami
wave heights, increased beach erosion, and ultimately
the loss of low-lying coastal areas and
coastal wetlands, increase the vulnerability of many
coastal cities. Global warming also raises the
chances of tipping many cities and metropolitan
regions into drought and full-blown water shortage
crises. Warmer, dryer land and vegetation caused
by higher climate temperatures also increase the
likelihood of wildfires that threaten urban areas.
Resilient Cities
In light of the available evidence, the threat of catastrophic
events to cities is apparent and rising. Cities
Catastrophe
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often contain all the ingredients for catastrophic
losses: growth of concentrated settlement patterns
in hazardous locations, urban poverty and increased
vulnerability of disadvantaged groups, and heightened
exposure to the forces associated with global
warming.
The creation of resilient cities has become a
prominent goal. Resiliency is the ability of a city to
anticipate and mitigate hazards, contain the effects
of a crisis event, and recover in ways that minimize
social disruption and mitigate risks from future
events. Four challenges establish a framework for
action to enable cities to move from response and
recovery to proactively enhancing their resiliency,
First, cities should develop hazard mitigation
plans. A well-conceived plan identifies hazard
areas where new development should not take
place and potential sites free of hazards that can
serve as relocation zones for existing development
when hazardous areas sustain damage. Where hazard
areas have significant cultural or economic
advantages for redevelopment that cannot be forgone,
a mitigation plan should include provisions
that guide development (or redevelopment after
disasters) to the least hazardous parts of building
sites and modify construction and site design practices
so that vulnerability is minimized.
Second, cities should support meaningful citizen
participation in planning for resiliency. When citizens
are exposed to the more resilient alternatives
for dealing with catastrophes, they are more likely
to mobilize and insist that elected officials attend
to the impending threat. Active citizens who are
deeply involved in planning and understand the
forces that increase risk are more likely to be committed
to seeing a mitigation plan through to
implementation.
Third, external aid delivery organizations (both
public and private) treat disaster-stricken people as
participants in the recovery process, rather than
helpless, poor victims. Specific approaches need to
be employed in which those with a stake in recovery
planning can develop a bottom-up ability to
take collective action. External aid delivery programs
that take a bottom-up approach enable
local people to have greater access to extra-
community institutions that expand resources
potentially available to the community. Moreover,
issues of local concern have a greater chance of
being communicated to external authorities. In