09 • 00 • 2022

Urbanization and risk –

challenges and opportunities

Clouisse Doctolero
Maria Fatima Quezada
John Michael N. Reyes
Which effects can be observed in terms of exposure, susceptibility, coping capacities, and
adaptive capacities? These questions are of key importance not only for gaining an
understanding of the city as a “risk area” but also for developing applied risk mitigation
strategies. Therefore, key questions emerge for the field of international development
cooperation: does urbanization produce exclusively negative effects on vulnerability? To date,
urban risk trends have all too often been explained by changes in natural hazard patterns (such
as sea level rise or the increase in extreme weather events) or, at most, by shifts in physical
exposure (caused, for example, by the rapid growth of cities in coastal areas). However, what is
typically underemphasized is the influence that urbanization has on the other components of
risk defined in the WorldRiskIndex, for example, susceptibility, coping capacity, and adaptive
capacity. The focus will be especially directed towards the crosslinks between the individual
components, for example, on self-reinforcing but also contradictory effects of urbanization on
susceptibility, coping capacity, and adaptive capacity.
 1 Urbanization 2 Urban area
the process by which can refer to towns,
large numbers of people cities, and suburbs. An
become permanently urban area includes
concentrated in relatively the city itself, as well
small areas, forming cities.
as the surrounding
areas.

3 Informal 4 Slum
Settlement
a squalid and
overcrowded urban
Terms for “The
areas where groups of
housing units have been street or district
constructed on land that inhabited by very
City as a risk the occupants have no
legal claim to, or occupy
poor people.

area” illegally.
Urbanization and exposure
. In Asia, for instance, more than 18 percent of the
urban population lives in the Low Elevation Coastal
Zone, the contiguous area along the coast that is
less than 10 meters above sea level (McGranahan
et al. In contrast, only about eight percent of
Europe`s and North America`s urban population
lives in this coastal zone. At the same time, out of
the 350 million urban inhabitants of this zone,
around 30 percent live in low-income countries
and another 36 percent in lower-middle-income
countries.
 On a mesoscale, it can be observed that many cities, especially in developing countries and
emerging economies with rapid urbanization, are sprawling into hazard-exposed areas which
had previously been exempted from development. Much of the damage caused by the Bangkok
flood in 2011, for example, resulted from the unplanned sprawl of the city along the Chao Phraya
River and the filling of tributaries and canals (Kraas 2012). In many developing countries with
rapid urbanization and shortages of affordable housing, labor migrants and other poor groups
often must settle in urban wastelands. However, problematic exposure effects of urbanization
can also be observed in industrialized countries
Bangkok Flood (2011)
 Urbanization and adaptive capacities

Urbanization also implies a duality of challenges and opportunities with respect to key adaptive capacity factors (e.
g. investments, educational standards, or public participation). In this context, the crucial question for developing
countries and emerging economies will be whether the projected future urbanization going to trigger sufficient
economic growth and equitable socio-economic development to provide the resources necessary for successful
adaptation – or whether urbanization will be paralleled by economic stagnation, truncating the urban potential for
development and adaptation.
 
 Did you know?

East Asia and the Pacific is the world's most rapidly urbanizing region,
with an average annual urbanization rate of 3 percent. By 2018,
half of the region's population will be urban – more than 1.2 billion
people in all, or one-third of the world's urban population.
Conclusion

This report shows what urbanization is, and its effects, and
depending on the context it also shows drives up urban disaster
risk while, at the same time, unleashing the potential for risk
mitigation. The question of whether individual countries and cities
will be able to harness the urban opportunities for mitigating the
impacts of natural hazards ultimately depends on the
implementation of integrative and effective risk governance, as the
following articles will illustrate.
.