This book provides an important overview of how climate-driven natural hazards like river or pluvial floods, droughts, heat waves or forest fires, continue to play a central role across the globe in the 21st century. Urban resilience has become an important term in response to climate change. Resilience describes the ability of a system to absorb shocks and depends on the vulnerability and recovery time of a system. A shock affects a system to the extent that it becomes vulnerable to the event. This book focus examines how private property-owners might implement such measures or improve their individual coping and adaptive capacity to respond to future events. The book looks at the existence of various planning, legal, financial incentives and psychological factors designed to encourage individuals to take an active role in natural hazard risk management and through the presentation of theoretical discussions and empirical cases shows how urban resilience can be achieved. In addition, the book guides the reader through different conceptual frameworks by showing how urban regions are trying to reach urban resilience on privately-owned land. Each chapter focuses on different cultural, socio-economic and political backgrounds to demonstrate how different institutional frameworks have an impact.

Pushing the boundaries of flood risk management research, this comprehensive Research Handbook presents pragmatic insights into all areas relating to flood risk. Through its use of dynamic and people-centred paradigms, it explores urban flood management within localities, properties, neighbourhoods and cities.

Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scales provides professionals with guidance on adapting the built environment to a changing climate. This edited volume brings together practitioners and researchers to discuss climate-related resilience from the building to the city scale. This book highlights North American cases that deal with issues such as climate projections, public health, adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations, and design interventions for floodplains, making the content applicable to many locations around the world. The contributors in this book discuss topics ranging from how built environment professionals respond to a changing climate, to how the building stock may need to adapt to climate change, to how resilience is currently being addressed in the design, construction, and operations communities. The purpose of this book is to provide a better understanding of climate change impacts, vulnerability, and resilience across scales of the built environment. Architects, urban designers, planners, landscape architects, and engineers will find this a useful resource for adapting buildings and cities to a changing climate.

This edited volume addresses sustainability efforts in cities and metropolitan regions around the world; focusing on four key areas: environment, economic, sociopolitical, and cultural sustainability. It includes chapters about applications to urban regions focusing on the movement from sustainable development to resilient urban centers.

Twelve global planning and urban design interventions—and what they reveal about equity-centered urban resilience in the face of climate change. Hillside favelas in South America imperiled by landslides. Flood-threatened mobile home parks on the American Gulf Coast. Canal-side settlements facing eviction in megacities in Southeast Asia. Too often the places most vulnerable to climate change are the ones that are home to people with the fewest economic and political resources. And while some leaders are starting to take action to reduce climate risks, many early adaptation schemes have actually made preexisting inequalities worse. In The Equitably Resilient City, Zachary Lamb and Lawrence Vale ask how cities can adapt to climate change and other threats while also doing right by disadvantaged residents. Lamb and Vale’s model for the equitably resilient city includes four central domains: (1) environmental safety and vitality; (2) security from displacement; (3) stable and dignified livelihoods; and (4) enhanced self-governance. These principles represent the four LEGS (Livelihoods, Environment, Governance, and Security) of equitable resilience. To illustrate these core principles, the book draws on 12 case studies from settlements facing a range of hazards across diverse geographies in the Global North and South, from heat stress in Paris to drought in Bolivia to floods in Bangkok and New Orleans. Offering concrete strategies in the form of planning, community action, and design interventions, Lamb and Vale show that equitable urban resilience is not a pipe dream nor an abstract ethical proposition but an achievable reality grounded in struggle and solidarity.

Revealing how traumatized city-dwellers consistently develop narratives of resilience and how the pragmatic process of urban recovery is always fueled by highly symbolic actions, The resilient city offers an informative tribute to the persistence of the city, and indeed of the human spirit. --book cover.

Assembling papers originally presented at the Resilient Cities 2011 Congress in Bonn, Germany (June 2011), the second global forum on cities and adaptation to climate change, this volume is the second in a series resulting from this annual event. These cutting-edge papers represent the latest research on the topic and reflect the intensification of the debate on the meaning of and interaction between climate adaptation, risk reduction and broader resilience. Thus, contributors offer more material related to resilience, such as water, energy and food security; green infrastructure; the role of renewables and ecosystem services; vulnerable communities and urban poor; and responsive financing for adaptation and multi-level governance. Overall, the book brings a number of different perspectives to bear on the most pressing issues and controversies surrounding climate change adaptation in cities. These papers will prove invaluable to anyone interested in deepening their understanding of urban resilience and contributing to tackling climate change at the local level.

This open access book addresses the way in which urban and urbanizing regions profoundly impact and are impacted by climate change. The editors and authors show why cities must wage simultaneous battles to curb global climate change trends while adapting and transforming to address local climate impacts. This book addresses how cities develop anticipatory and long-range planning capacities for more resilient futures, earnest collaboration across disciplines, and radical reconfigurations of the power regimes that have institutionalized the disenfranchisement of minority groups. Although planning processes consider visions for the future, the editors highlight a more ambitious long-term positive visioning approach that accounts for unpredictability, system dynamics and equity in decision-making. This volume brings the science of urban transformation together with practices of professionals who govern and manage our social, ecological and technological systems to design processes by which cities may achieve resilient urban futures in the face of climate change.

Asian cities are particularly vulnerable to risks associated with natural disasters. While they are exposed to various types of natural hazards, flooding and other water-related disasters pose particularly significant risks and undermine long-term economic growth, especially in coastal cities.

Flood Resilience of Private Properties examines the division and balance of responsibilities between the public and the private when discussing flood resilience of private properties. Flooding is an expensive climate-related disaster and a threat to urban life. Continuing development in flood-prone zones compound the risks. Protecting all properties to the same standards is ever more challenging. Research has focused on improved planning and adapting publicly-owned infrastructure such as streets, evacuation routes, and retention ponds. However, damages often happen on private land. To realize a flood-resilient city, owners of privately-owned residential houses also need to act. Measures such as mobile barriers and backwater valves or avoiding vulnerable uses in basements can make homes more flood-resilient. But private owners may be unaware of flooding risks or may lack the means and knowledge to act. Incentives may be insufficient, while fragmented or unclear property rights and responsibilities entrench inertia. The challenge is motivating homeowners to take steps. Political and societal systems influence the action citizens are prepared to take and what they expect their governments to do. The responsibility for implementing such measures is shared between the public and the private domain in different degrees in different countries. This book will be of great interest to scholars of water law, property rights, flood risk management and climate adaptation. This book was originally published as a special issue of Water International.