The Urban Transition in Disaster Governance: Scaling up from Neighborhood to City and Transborder Region in Asia = The Urban Transition in Disaster Governance: Scaling up from Neighborhood to City and Transborder Region in Asia

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Increases in the frequencies and costs of environmental disasters in Asia are directly related to Asia`s ongoing rapid urban transition. As urbanization polarizes in and around coastal and riparian mega-urban regions, hundreds of millions of people are moving into huge agglomerations that are at high risk and poorly prepared for disasters. This is being manifested in heightening vulnerabilities of growing slum populations. Disasters are also leading to other disasters, compounding the effects of one upon another that can extend well beyond the site of initial disaster impacts to reach even global scales. All of the changes in the relationships between urbanization and disasters call for a shift away from the management of disasters as a process of providing physical infrastructure for recovery to the governance of the urbanization process as it contributes to disasters and their human impacts. A key to initiating a participatory disaster governance process is to link together the smallest settlement scale at the neighborhood level with the city region scale of the urban ecology.