Mike Douglass

The Urban Transition of Disaster Governance in Asia

The increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters in Asia are highly correlated with the rapid urban transition now taking place in this world region. Five types of urban transition effects are identified to explain how the urbanization of disasters calls for fundamental changes in approaches to disaster prevention, response, adaptation and resilience. The effects include agglomeration and the formation of mega-urban regions, spatial polarization in high-risk zones, new forms and magnitudes of vulnerability, compound disasters and the expanding ecological reach of cities. Taken together, they call for a shift from expert-centred disaster management to participatory disaster governance as the framework for society-wide engagement in all phases of disaster experiences and responses. Three spatial scales of governance – neighbourhood, city region and transborder riparian region – are among the most critical to be included in the search for innovations in disaster governance.

Globalizing the Household in East Asia

Referred to in this chapter as global householding, the major dimensions of this process are as follows: marriage, child-bearing and adoption, education of children, hiring foreign domestic helpers and caregivers, and moving not only from low to high-income economies, but as retirement ages approach, also moving from higher to lower income societies as a way of stretching fixed incomes. Despite the importance of the household in its many dimensions, it remains a phantom in migration studies. As the region with the most rapidly advancing economy in the world over the past several decades, East Asia is now beginning to experience the gamut of global householding. There are many sources of this global turn. Most are due to difficulties in forming and sustaining households within a nationally constituted territory. Keywords:child-bearing; East Asia; global householding; global migration

Water, Water Everywhere: Toward Participatory Solutions to Chronic Urban Flooding in Jakarta

Jakarta has entered an era of chronic flooding that is annually affecting tens of thousands of people, most of whom are crowded into low-income neighbourhoods in flood-prone areas of the city. As the greater Jakarta mega-urban region—Jabodetabek—approaches the 30 million population mark and the sources of flooding become ever more complex through combinations of global climate change and human transformations of the urban landscape, government responses to flooding pursued primarily through canal improvements fall further behind rising flood risks. Years of field observation and archival and ethnographic research are brought together in a political ecology framework to answer key questions concerning how government responses to flooding continue without significant participation of affected residents, who are being compelled to relocate when floods occur. How do urban development processes in Jakarta contribute to chronic flooding? How does flooding arise from and further generate compound disasters that cascade through Jakarta’s expanding mega-urban region? What is the potential for neighbourhoods and communities to collaboratively respond through socially and environmentally meaningful initiatives and activities to address chronic flooding? Floods, urban land use changes, spatial marginalization, and community mobilization open new political dynamics and possibilities for addressing floods in ways that also assist neighbourhoods in gaining resilience. The urgency of floods as problems to be solved is often interpreted as a need for immediate solutions ____________________ Rita Padawangi is a senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in sociology from Loyola University Chicago where she was also a Fulbright Scholar for her MA studies. Her research interests span the sociology of architecture, participatory urban development, social movements, and public spaces. Email: ritapd@nus.edu.sg Mike Douglass is a professor at the Asia Research Institute and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD in urban planning from UCLA. His most recent book is Michelle Miller and Mike Douglass, eds., Disaster Governance in Urbanising Asia (Springer, forthcoming 2015). Email: michaeld@nus.edu.sg. * The fieldwork for this paper was funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education AcRF Tier 2 grant for the project “Aspirations, Urban Governance, and the Remaking of Asian Cities” (MOE2012-T2-1-153).

Disaster Governance in an Urbanising World Region

In the early twenty-first century, Asia’s accelerated urban transition is both a major source and target of increasingly frequent and costly environmental disasters. Asia is home to more than half of the global urban population, and its share is increasing. Currently, over 1.5 billion people live in Asia’s urban settlements. High rates of rural to urban migration coupled with industrialisation and the advent of automobile societies that are drivers of global climate change and related environmental degradation have amplified the exposure, intensity and human as well as material costs of environmental disasters. The dominant pattern of urban expansion along Asia’s coastlines and river deltas is also producing extended urban agglomerations that are at or below sea level, raising the vulnerabilities of their growing populations to floods, storm surges, typhoons and the unpredictable impacts of climate change on local ecologies. As Asia’s environmental disasters occur at multiple scales and impact upon urban populations in different ways with unintended and often long-term consequences, a multi-sector and multidisciplinary approach is needed to adequately address the multitude of theoretical and practical dimensions of disaster governance in urbanising Asia.

Crossing Borders: Governing the Globalising Urban Matrix of Compound Disasters in Asia and the Pacific

The chapter conceptually situates our original contribution to scholarship in four key areas: (1) through our treatment of environmental disasters as compound events with multiple causalities and far-reaching consequences, (2) by adopting an inclusive multi-sector, multi-disciplinary and multi-scalar approach to disaster governance, (3) by framing the urban transition in the Asia-Pacific region within an urban-rural matrix that encompasses the ecological reach and demands of cities into remote and rural areas, and (4) by interrogating the border as a site that is selectively porous and bounded, depending on the nature of the flows of cross-border environmental harm at different junctures and according to the range of strategic interests at stake. The idea of the national border is explored in this chapter within the context of the particularities of the Asia-Pacific region, where urbanisation is realigning the possibilities for cross-border disaster governance, while at the same time raising new problems for socioeconomic resilience and stability at multiple scales. The chapter concludes with an overview of the structure of the volume, explicating the threads of connectivity between the theoretical essays and case studies.