Chapter 6 Future perspective of urban risk reduction

Urbanization is a complex dynamic process playing out over multiple scales of space and time. It is both a social phenomenon and a physical transformation of landscape that is now clearly at the forefront of defining current and future trends of development. The key challenge for effective urban risk reduction and mitigation will be to identify the points of intersection for urban vulnerability and risk reduction in order to localize and contextualize the components, so that it can be customized to the unique needs of each urban area. This requires a critical revisit to the way we look at cities and urban areas, and is a useful starting point to contextualize the urban risk management components presented earlier. Taken together these points of intersection put cities in a unique position to generate both the problem and the solution. The concentration of politico-economic decision-making processes in cities of Asia, particularly capital mega cities, provide greater opportunities to meet the urban vulnerability challenge. For effective urban risk reduction, there is a need to strike a balance between natural and built environments and between ecological and economic objectives.