Urban resilience approaches

With rapid urbanization, the risk of disasters is increasing as more people and assets locate in areas of high risk. For instance, more than half of the world’s large cities, with populations ranging from 2 to 15 million, are located in areas of high earthquake risk. The impact of Disasters is even more pounding in these high risk areas. Disasters not only erode and destroy years of development gains, destroy assets, kill people and increase poverty but impact GDP directly especially in more vulnerable urban areas. Therefore we need a long term strategy for disaster management than merely emergency management. Researchers have indicated that urban resilience is most significant and impactful method for reducing growing levels of disaster risk in long run. Resilience is also directly linked with sustainability. Urban Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience. Thus an urban resilient citizen is disaster resilient and more sustainable over the others. This paper aims at identifying the concept of urban resilience to combat long term disaster management in urban areas. Some best practices taken up for study here include-guidance for measuring disaster resilience indicated in Twigg’s (2009) ‘characteristics of resilience’ framework; Emergency Capacity Building Project (2013) indicated in ‘Toward Resilience: A Guide to Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation’; DFID’s Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment Framework; Oxfam GB’s Multidimensional Approach for Measuring Resilience; Sendai Framework-2015; Hyogo framework 2005. We further try to identify the challenges in urban resilience and its further scope of development. With time, the disaster resilience methods have also adapted to smart techniques. We also try to identify some of these here.