Cassidy Johnson

Built-in resilience: learning from grassroots coping strategies for climate variability

Significant lessons can be drawn from grassroots experiences of coping with extreme weather for reducing the vulnerability of the urban poor to climate change. This paper examines the household and community coping strategies used by low-income households living in Korail, the largest informal settlement in Dhaka. This includes how they use physical, economic and social means to reduce risk, reduce losses and facilitate recovery from flooding and high temperatures, and shows how grassroots adaptation differs according to the level of risk from flooding. The paper also discusses how local planning and governance mechanisms aimed at adaptation can support these coping strategies, including mainstreaming them into adaptation plans that can be scaled up to the citywide level.

Advocacy for urban resilience: UNISDR's Making Cities Resilient Campaign

This paper reviews what local governments in more than 50 cities are doing with regard to disaster risk reduction. It draws on the reports of their participation in the global Making Cities Resilient Campaign and its 10 “essential” components, and on interviews with city mayors or managers. These show how resilience to disasters is being conceived and addressed by local governments, especially with regard to changes in their institutional framework and engagement with communities and other stakeholders, also in mobilizing finance, undertaking multi-hazard risk assessments, upgrading informal settlements, adjusting urban planning and implementing building codes. The paper summarizes what city mayors or managers view as key milestones for building resilience, and further discusses their evaluation of the usefulness of the campaign to them. It also discusses how a local government-focused perspective on disaster risk reduction informs our understanding of resilience. This includes how development can contribute much to disaster risk reduction as well as a more tangible and operational understanding of resilience (resistance + coping capacity + recovery + adaptive capacity) that local governments can understand and act on.

Perceptions of Climate Variability and Coping Strategies in Informal Settlements in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Many of the urban poor living in Dhaka city, Bangladesh are frequently exposed to flood hazards, as most of the informal settlements are located in highly flood-prone areas of the city. Based on findings from household surveys in two informal settlements in Dhaka, this chapter seeks to examine the relationship between people’s perceptions of flood hazards and the actions they take to reduce their vulnerability. It also explores the latent drivers (psychological, environmental and political) behind these perceptions and behaviours. The findings conclude that risk perceptions and related preparedness actions are framed by the highly vulnerable context in which the urban poor live in. Although they are extremely anxious about their exposure to a range of hazards or any life stresses, their limited power to influence institutional-level affairs encourages undertaking more individual and household preparedness through a range of different activities. The chapter suggests that the experience of relatively small hazard events on a yearly basis fosters highly-tuned perceptions about hazard risk and high levels of worry, thereby making the urban poor more resilient to a range of hazards and life stresses.

Kernels of change: civil society challenges to state-led strategies for recovery and risk reduction in Turkey

Disaster recovery and risk reduction are most effective when the state can provide an enabling environment to support community action. Following the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey, there were many initiatives undertaken by civil society to fill the gaps left by government programmes that did not reach tenants who had lost their homes nor support livelihoods and social recovery of the people. Now, 11 years later, this paper looks at how these community-based recovery initiatives have transformed into initiatives around larger issues of building resilience and risk reduction. It examines the nature of their relationships with the state and with each other. The research is based on a cross-case analysis of three civil society organizations that were active in Düzce, one of the disaster-affected regions. It finds that while the community-based initiatives working in this area have built up the capacity of groups to demand change from the government, the lack of government support has meant that these groups have not been able to effectively act in partnership or cooperation with the government, which has impacted on their ability to scale up.

Environmental justice and urban resilience in the global south

© The Editor(s) and The Author(s) 2017. This edited volume provides a fresh perspective on the important yet often neglected relationship between environmental justice and urban resilience. Many scholars have argued that resilient cities are more just cities. But what if the process of increasing the resilience of the city as a whole happens at the expense of the rights of certain groups? If urban resilience focuses on the degree to which cities are able to reorganise in creative ways and adapt to shocks, do pervasive inequalities in access to environmental services have an effect on this ability? This book brings together an interdisciplinary and intergeneration group of scholars to examine the contradictions and tensions that develop as they play out in cities of the Global South through a series of empirically grounded case studies spanning cities of Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe.

Environmental Justice and Resilience in the Urban Global South: An Emerging Agenda

There has been a profusion of work since the turn of the last century exploring environmental justice in urban areas and resilience in cities of the Global South. These works have largely entailed the assumption of an a priori positive relationship between the two. In introducing this volume, we argue that a case-study approach based on empirical research is necessary in order to reveal the more complex ways in which the relationship between environmental justice and resilience operates in practice. We further argue that cities of the Global South, in particular, can offer a unique vantage point for observing the multiple manifestations of justice and resilience within the same city. In this introductory chapter, we provide a historical overview that links the ongoing discussions on environmental justice to practices of planning and governing for urban resilience. The conceptual development of both principles is vital to processes of governance, not only due to the complexity and multiplicity of actors involved in governance processes but also due to the surprisingly ambivalent relationship between justice and resilience in practice. The diversity and spatial fragmentation of socio-ecological processes in cities of the Global South create multiple cityscapes within the same city, resulting in similarly multiple environmental justices and levels/forms of resilience. In the face of such internally variegated cities, it is crucial to integrate the role of power, politics and uneven governance into our understanding and practice of both concepts. This introductory chapter concludes by outlining the three main research directions that are further explored throughout the remainder of the volume, which are institutional governance of resilience that has supported or undermined environmental justice, informal and everyday attempts to achieve resilience and environmental justice by grassroots actors themselves, and the co-production of resilience and environmental justice between grassroots actors and institutional agencies.

Urban Resilience and Justice: Exploring the Tensions, Building upon the Connections

The conclusion reflects on the theoretical, conceptual, methodological and empirical breadth of the contributing chapters and returns to the question outlined at the beginning of the book: what is the relationship, emerging connections and tensions between environmental justice and resilience in urban areas of the Global South? As explored throughout the chapters, in the face of environmental injustices, people develop survival strategies to cope. These actions might lead to both positive and negative outcomes for resilience. Resilience can be a policy objective enacted by governments in the face of shocks and stresses, and environmental justice and resilience might further have a co-function, as justice is required for resilience.