Abstract
Christine Wamsler has produced what can only be described as an all-encompassing book on urban sustainability, risk and disaster management, and urban resilience. Concepts such as resilience and sustainability continue to nurture a growing literature and lively debates among specialists. Wamsler takes on the whole gamut of concepts, models, and precepts current in the urban sustainability and risk management literature. Nothing is left out in this tightly written book: earthquakes, hurricanes, mudslides, heatwaves, fires, wind and snow storms, rising sea levels … The focus is on risk reduction and hazard avoidance and how urban planning can contribute to making communities safer and more resilient in the face of climate change and non-climate change associated risks. What can communities (and individuals) do, Wamsler asks, to minimise risk and prepare for impending disasters?
The book does not fall into an easy to classify category. The author has, manifestly, not set out to write a critical essay on urban resilience or urban sustainability. The book’s purpose is not primarily to contribute to intellectual debate. Its primary audience is not fellow academics. The author sees it as a manual or a textbook aimed, specifically, at students in urban planning and related fields and beginning practitioners in local risk and disaster management. The book is structured along the lines of a textbook or how-to manual with numerous boxes, examples, and questions and discussion points at the end of each chapter.
However, this is not truly a textbook, at least not as I understand it as a university professor. The language of the book leans towards the normative, which is to be expected from a prescriptive manual, but less so for a textbook which aims to teach student readers to think critically. Wamsler’s tendency to advocacy, which I do not necessarily see as a failing, draws her into a style which is sometimes closer to that of an NGO report or a UN or World Bank commissioned text on urban sustainability and risk management. This makes the book a useful reference for urban planning students wishing to embark on a career in international development agencies, if only as an introduction to the peculiar vocabulary of that milieu. By the same token, I see it as a companion volume for urban planning courses in search of a good overview of current thinking and practices in what, for lack of a better term, might be called the international sustainability community.
The book is divided into three sections. The first part, over a hundred pages, is largely conceptual and theoretical in nature with numerous flow-charts and listings (sometimes adapted from official reports and documents). Concepts such as adaptive capacity, vulnerability, risk and mitigation are presented and discussed in turn. The author goes on to explore the possible linkages between disasters and cities, considering how urban fabric and form, including the characteristics of the built-up environment, can influence levels of risk. As one would expect lower income neighbourhoods and cites in poorer nations are generally less well prepared and the first victims of disasters when they strike. Wamsler’s message is clear: such happenings can be avoided with proper urban planning and community adaptive strategies.
Part 2 looks at current urban planning practices for risk reduction and adaptation in both poor and developed nations with, however, a focus on the former. The two chapters that comprise part 2 present, alternatively, strategies implemented by city authorities and coping strategies adopted by individual actors, often shanty-town dwellers in developing nations. The author correctly notes that the two do not always act in harmony.
The book adopts a more proactive and prescriptive tone in part 3, elaborating on the goals of resilient cities and sustainable urban transformation and how these might be achieved. Resilience is a recurrent theme throughout the book. In the very first pages, citing a 2009 United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) report, the author writes: ‘resilience refers to the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazard to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner.’ The aim, the author goes on, is ‘to restore the historical function of cities as places where citizens can find safety and protection from disasters and environmental change … It is hoped that this book will help this vision become reality’ (quotes taken from Box 1.4; p. 10).
In the last chapter, Wamsler enunciates a set of planning principles for urban risk reduction and adaptation, which she calls the ten essentials for moving forward, of which I shall cite only the first two (Box 6.3; p. 257):
Planning principle 1: Address root causes of urban risk by designing local activities on the basis assessments comprising thorough analyses of the city-disasters nexus, related urban–rural linkages and citizens’ differential risk patterns (including local coping strategies and further adaptive capacities).
Planning principle 2: Address risk holistically in daily planning practice through the consideration and combination of measures for hazard reduction and avoidance, vulnerability reduction preparedness for response and preparedness for recovery (both in the pre- and post-disaster context).
The above citations illustrate both the book’s strengths and weaknesses. The author visibly wishes to provide the reader with a generalisable set of precepts and teachings, applicable over a wide range of situations and circumstances. The choice of words is not accidental. The book takes a resolutely ‘holistic’ approach. An overly compartmentalised or technical approach (say, to flood water management) can, it is true, lead to poor decision-making. It is also difficult to argue with the precept that efficient interventions need to involve all actors (‘stakeholders’, to use the favoured term). In an ideal world, this is how things should work.
However, the flip side of the book’s holistic philosophy is a tendency to general declarations with, at least for this reader, an overdose of truisms and common-sense statements. The author’s choice of vocabulary does not help; all too often sliding into bureaucratic UN-NGO-speak. When I see a word like ‘mainstreaming’, a constant throughout the book, I immediately become concerned. References to specific cases, although almost always interesting and useful, remain largely anecdotal. The author’s laudable thoroughness – her desire to take on the whole gamut of risks and hazards – all too often translates into long listings (e.g. Table 4.10; p. 168: ‘Challenges faced by city authorities and planners …’) which again, although informative, do not go very deep. The visual presentation of the book also falls victim to holistic thoroughness with some 35 boxes (some over a page long) and some 30 tables including, for example, six tables (Tables 5.1 to 5.6) on the subject of ‘coping strategies’. The overcrowding of tables, boxes and flow-charts, not always well-presented, reduces the book’s heuristic value and its potential use as a textbook. This is a pity. I would have thought that the publisher (Routledge in this instance) would have taken greater care in the book’s material presentation. The editing is not always up to par: authors to whom boxes are attributed are absent from the bibliography.
In the end, however, this is an admirable book. I know of nothing similar on the market, certainly nothing as thoroughgoing. The author would be doing future urban planning students a great service if, in her next book, she chose a less jargon-laden vocabulary and a more direct style of writing.