Investigating urban vulnerability and resilience: a call for applied integrated research to reshape the political economy of decision-making

Abstract

There is growing recognition of the cumulative impact that converging environmental, political, social and economic risks have on the ability of cities to function in times of shocks and stresses. While many frameworks and assessment tools have been developed to assess the technical resilience of the infrastructure of cities, there have been fewer attempts to holistically understand and map all the factors that interact to potentially produce functioning urban systems, including the role of institutions (both formal and informal). Applied integrated research is needed to understand the daily functioning, vulnerability and resilience of these rapidly growing cities amid chronic and acute stresses and shocks; to also understand why and how multiple risks and protective factors converge and interact to constrain or enable cities to fulfil their core functions in times of stability and crisis; and finally to produce operationally relevant recommendations that could inform interventions.

I. Background

Many cities are undergoing significant transformations and growing at a rapid pace.⁽¹⁾ In addition to rapid urban growth, they face a combination of challenges that can include violence,⁽²⁾ armed conflict,⁽³⁾ forced migration (of refugees and internally displaced people),⁽⁴⁾ climate change-induced hazards (such as more flooding, higher temperatures and stronger windstorms),⁽⁵⁾ and social and economic pressures. These are all within a context – for the worst-hit areas – of weak governance⁽⁶⁾ and substantial chronic poverty.⁽⁷⁾ Increasingly, these risks are converging and complicating the task of effecting positive change for local and national organizations, for citizens and for international actors. This convergence of risks has been observed in the way climate change has stressed populations, driving displacement into underdeveloped urban areas, creating pockets of chronic poverty, stressing host populations and fuelling further conflict, where it exists.⁽⁸⁾ The effects of these shocks are often compounded, causing complex crises that can be difficult to recover from. Anticipating how these disturbances and multiple risks interact and play out to stress urban populations requires a more concerted approach across disciplines that is able to confront the complexity of cities as integrated systems. For this, it is critically important to undertake applied research that can help urban stakeholders (i.e. public authorities, communities, the private sector) to achieve resilience. In other words, it is crucial to build and activate the protective qualities and processes that help maintain or recover functionality at the levels of the individual, community, system and entire city in times of crises. An integrated approach to mapping and interrogating the interactive effects of these protective factors and specific risks would allow for the creation of a roadmap for better decision-making.

Recent research by John de Boer, Robert Muggah and Ronak Patel (de Boer and Patel are also contributing authors to this article) has documented how well-functioning cities “ensure the security and safety of people, property, and infrastructure; provide basic services such as public health, water, sanitation and electricity; and guarantee basic norms and rights”.⁽⁹⁾ While many cities around the world are capable of fulfilling these core functions on a regular basis, there are also many rapidly growing cities that face significant difficulties doing so.⁽¹⁰⁾ There is a high degree of awareness about some of the key constraints placed on them that make fulfilling core functions a tall order. As de Boer et al. have pointed out, this can include a lack of institutional capacity and resources, recurring cycles of violence, climate-induced crises, political instability, demographic youth bulges, and a lack of employment opportunities, to name a few.⁽¹¹⁾ Numerous attempts have been made by national and international agencies to respond to the variety of challenges facing such cities, yet many of these initiatives have been sectorally constrained and have failed to take into account the interlocking nature of these risks.

II. The Coexistence of Risk and Resilience

It is important to note that while many existing frameworks conceptualize resilience and vulnerability as opposite sides of the same coin, research should not characterize resilience and vulnerability as antonyms.⁽¹²⁾ The reality in cities is not that straightforward. Cities typically experience a combination of the two characteristics simultaneously as a function of the current political economy and political settlement. In fact, according to de Boer et al., “the continued daily function of individuals, households, neighbourhoods and cities in many highly vulnerable urban contexts exemplifies and illuminates the parallel and interconnected nature of resilience and vulnerability in cities”.⁽¹³⁾ This is why it is critical that both risk and protective factors are mapped to better comprehend how they interact, how they are mediated by institutions, and how protective factors can be better harnessed for resilience.

How cities manage internal and external risks and invest in protective factors helps determine the extent of city vulnerability and resilience. The research conducted by de Boer et al. has demonstrated how such protective factors can be “institutional in nature, including norms, standards, policies, programmes and organizations. They can also consist of latent socioeconomic, infrastructure, and environmental properties that minimize internal and external risks.”⁽¹⁴⁾ Actors also need to take into consideration hyper-contextual factors that shape risk. In Somalia, for example, conflict and climate-induced displacement from inside and outside of the country has exacerbated vulnerability in urban centres such as Kismayo, where hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived in already crowded and underserved neighbourhoods, challenging underequipped institutions and already insufficient services.

Vulnerable populations both arriving and living in cities very clearly display the coexistence of risk and resilience in the face of the daily hazards they face. They consequently employ protective mechanisms that allow them to function in chronic and acute stress.⁽¹⁵⁾ When the vulnerability and resilience of cities are being investigated, members of the most vulnerable groups should be key research participants as well as beneficiaries of the research. Systematically interrogating modes of urban governance and decision-making will require examining both formal and informal institutions. It will also entail disaggregating research findings by ethnic/tribal group, income status, gender, age and geography to better understand the distribution of risk and the differential impact of political settlements on various parts and population groups in the city.⁽¹⁶⁾ Based on a comprehensive understanding of how multiple risks and protective factors interact across sectors and populations and are shaped by existing political arrangements in these cities, this form of integrated research should be able to propose to local and external actors practical and evidence-based opportunities to mitigate specific risks across multiple sectors. Such research should also be able to influence urban governance in a way that helps facilitate more inclusive and pro-poor decisions and outcomes.

III. Interrogating Risk and Resilience

In reality, according to de Boer et al., there are a myriad of risks facing cities that can induce vulnerability.⁽¹⁷⁾ As was outlined in a recent paper by these authors on city fragility and resilience, “most of these risks combine both exogenous and endogenous characteristics”. Internal risks can include extreme poverty, nonexistent infrastructure or being situated in a floodplain. External risks can mean, for example, windstorms or conflict that can result in unregulated migration, with consequent political and social backlash.⁽¹⁸⁾ Importantly, this research report also noted that “city vulnerability is seldom the result of a monolithic root cause”.⁽¹⁹⁾ The evidence suggests that what matters is how multiple risks aggregate to drive vulnerability.⁽²⁰⁾ Moreover, recent research applying a political economy and political settlements approach to understand how cities function has demonstrated how formal and informal institutions that “govern” decision-making in urban contexts have a defining impact on the development trajectories of cities.⁽²¹⁾ Purely technical approaches that fail to take into account the political arrangements that determine who is able to access services, exercise their basic norms and rights, and prosper in a city, will likely reinforce existing forms of exclusion and even exacerbate vulnerability.⁽²²⁾

The discussions of risk have progressed to include a recognition of the multiple risks that populations and urban systems face. The term “vulnerable populations” can be too blunt to be useful, when the levels and types of vulnerabilities are so heterogeneous even among populations living in the same location. More granular and context-specific language is required. For example, recent research examined the relationship between disaster risk and urban development in Lima, Peru and José Carlos Mariátegui, one of its peripheral settlements. This research employed the concept of “risk traps” to capture how marginalized low-income urban dwellers can become caught in situations of increased vulnerability “despite, and in some cases, because of investments undertaken to improve their living conditions”.⁽²³⁾ Highlighted are the “frequently invisible or neglected” aspects of urban risks that are shaped by factors such as gender, socioeconomic status, income and household-level resilience factors. Public investments in urban risk mitigation often fail to address underlying risk factors that relate to “the context-specific characteristics of the beneficiaries”.⁽²⁴⁾ There is a clear need to better understand how risks are constructed, reinforced and incrementally exacerbated by a series of interlocking factors.

This recognition of the multiplicity of risk allows a more informed approach to building resilience. Taking a detailed view, individual strategies to cope with a single risk such as flooding from normal rainfall, employed by households in isolation, can have unintended consequences for spreading risk. For example, an autonomous adaptation strategy employed by residents of one peri-urban plot around Bangkok, Thailand, involved digging into a road to drain floodwater into an adjacent vacant lot. This in turn generated multiple other risks, including the creation of a standing pool of water that allowed mosquitoes to breed, damage to a public road used by others and the waterlogging of adjacent land.⁽²⁵⁾

The description by David Satterthwaite and Sheridan Bartlett of the full spectrum of risks helps to move the discussion toward addressing the multitude of risks that populations face, the variations in their manifestations for different groups, and their differential probabilities of contributing to various negative outcomes to health and wellbeing.⁽²⁶⁾ A useful illustration of multiple risks and their variations in impacts is provided by a case study of Karonga, Malawi, where acute shocks such as flooding and earthquakes coexist with daily risks such as poor sanitation, tenuous housing and poor-quality drinking water. These coexisting risks combine in various ways that are detrimental to the health of the population.⁽²⁷⁾ In this situation, both poverty and the quality of governance are levers that affect the severity of the impacts that play out from these risks. The literature on critical infrastructure and risk helps provide some insight into cascading risks and the compounding of various hazards and multiple effects. For example, industrial sites near residential areas may be at risk of fire. But this is not just a single hazard. A fire at such a facility may lead to an explosion and then to the release of toxins and to further contamination of land and groundwater supplies.⁽²⁸⁾

This additive linear approach provides some useful direction in improving our response to urban risk but it still falls short of the complexity required. In addition to understanding the full spectrum of risks, their variations in effect and their compounding nature, we need to understand their interconnected effects. It is essential to grasp how these multiple risks combine in a networked fashion along with other variables that exacerbate or mitigate their effects to produce vulnerability or the negative outcome of interest. Participatory hazard and vulnerability assessments have been employed among urban informal settlement populations to uncover the interactive effects of risks, exemplifying how this complexity can begin to be tackled. In a study of informal settlements in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, flooding risks in low-lying areas or along riverbanks are exacerbated by urban expansion, which reduces wetland storage and increases runoff from heavy rainfall. These factors then combine with daily stressors such as poor transportation, sanitation and water infrastructure along with tenure insecurity – all interacting and playing out in different ways that collectively lead to property damage, disrupted livelihoods and disease.⁽²⁹⁾ As these risks interact to stress populations, the protective factors employed against specific individual risks can have unintended consequences. Microfinance to cope with income shocks, for instance, can lead to indebtedness, thus increasing vulnerability in the long term. For a better understanding of these interconnected impacts, it is clearly necessary to take an integrated approach that addresses both risk and protective factors such as avoidance, coping, mitigation and adaptation strategies, and assets that interact to enhance resilience.

A systematic approach to understanding the political economy behind the risks afflicting these cities has been largely absent. Understanding the political economy requires a deeper understanding of the political and economic institutions that shape the uneven growth and inequalities that exist within cities.⁽³⁰⁾ These patterns of growth and inequality that are shaped by the political economy are also shaped by the risks that various geographic and socioeconomic parts of the city face and the resilience mechanisms they can employ. To develop policy agendas, a complex and dynamic mix of parties both within and outside the city are necessary; effective governance relies upon leaders to put these coalitions together to enable policy.⁽³¹⁾ An analysis of the challenge of Indian cities to future-proof themselves identified informality as critical, both as a product of urban growth and as integral to it and even embedded within the political economy of the planning process.⁽³²⁾ Yet these types of political economy factors have yet to be integrated into models that explain their contribution to the risk and resilience of rapidly growing cities.

Building resilience to these interlocking threats requires a comprehensive approach that takes into account multiple risks and the political economy that shapes them. Yet to date both practice and research have largely been undertaken within established silos divided by disciplines.⁽³³⁾ The result has been approaches that address individual risks in isolation. Systemic approaches are therefore needed – ones that support individuals, households, neighbourhoods and systems within cities to cope with the impact of converging and compounding risks, and that take into consideration the various political arrangements that govern decision-making in these cities, often to the detriment of marginalized groups and genders.

IV. Applied Research With a Systems Approach

Research capable of addressing the gap in understanding how risk and resilience factors coexist would adopt an approach that assesses the cumulative impact of multiple risks, as well as integrating a political economy analysis of the drivers behind these risks. This kind of approach recognizes that acute forms of vulnerability often emerge at the intersection of poverty, violence and disaster.⁽³⁴⁾ Such integrated research would be transdisciplinary and seek to understand how risks that lead to vulnerability can manifest rapidly, in the wake of armed conflict or natural disaster, or can emerge more incrementally, particularly when the credibility, authority and capacity of governance institutions erodes or systematically fails to deliver core services and resources to city residents or certain population groups.⁽³⁵⁾

Such research requires applied and innovative methods suited to the complexity of urban resilience in order to develop a relevant evidence base. Urban complexity arises from density, diversity and constant change among people, and within infrastructure and the sociocultural mechanisms that govern interactions.⁽³⁶⁾ Moreover, the problems that cities face are complex. For instance, such factors as unmanaged and rapid urbanization, and the proliferation of informal settlements, climate change, corruption and violence, have no easily identifiable chain of cause and effect and are difficult to disentangle from a broader context.

A systems-based research approach aims to simplify complexity by creating categories that make it possible to interrogate both the city as a whole and the heterogeneous, interdependent component parts of the city, in order to identify factors that interact to shape emergent patterns of risk and resilience.⁽³⁷⁾ A systems approach to resilience – addressing component parts of an urban centre as well as the urban context as a whole in order to alleviate poverty and reduce risk – reflects the structures of global frameworks for poverty and disaster risk reduction such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the New Urban Agenda, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

Based on common themes within a variety of urban systems frameworks, Campbell⁽³⁸⁾ proposes a typology of five systems that can be used for turning research into action: 1) economy and livelihoods, 2) infrastructure and services, 3) space and settlements, 4) social and cultural dimensions, and 5) politics and governance. Such typologies can be adapted and reshaped based on the context, purpose and desired application of the research. For instance, the Global Alliance for Urban Crises selected five similar yet different categories to understand the impact of protracted crises on cities: 1) economy, 2) social protection and accountability, 3) access to essential services, 4) the built environment and 5) ecology.⁽³⁹⁾

Research is needed that can assist a better understanding of how cities function on a daily basis by probing the underlying determinants that interact to produce functioning or failing systems, as well as demonstrating for whom these systems function or fail. Friend and Moench⁽⁴⁰⁾ write that examination of urban processes is important because of the high dependency urban inhabitants have on complex infrastructure for delivering energy, food, water, transportation and communication, all of which are vulnerable to unintended consequences from a range of shocks and stresses. These unintended consequences occur at different scales, including those of the individual, household, neighbourhood, city or country. Since most urban systems are not in fact centrally controlled, extensive analysis of processes at different scales is required to discover cause and effect relationships⁽⁴¹⁾ across time.

When systems are disturbed by bottom-up or top-down chains of causation, or by internal and external shocks and stresses, they respond with a positive or negative feedback loop.⁽⁴²⁾ Martin-Breen and Anderies⁽⁴³⁾ observe that an example of a positive feedback loop could be a drop in energy consumption per capita as a result of urbanization. Disturbances provide an opportunity for a system to demonstrate its adaptive capacity, its ability to develop and evolve, or its failure to adapt.⁽⁴⁴⁾ In other words, understanding processes is part of understanding urban transformation and thereby urban resilience.

A strong evidence base for activities that build resilience could be provided by applied research that aims to explore a question with the express purpose of applying the findings to a disturbance that produces a positive or negative feedback loop across component parts of a system. In addition, by examining how urban stakeholders (both formal and informal) choose to plan for, manage or ignore disturbances, this form of research would also contribute to an understanding of why these cities work as they do. New ground could be broken by an integrated approach to understanding the key risks facing cities and an assessment of how these risks are influenced by the exercise of power, the distribution of resources, and the effectiveness of institutionalized political processes, based on a range of established norms and relationships.⁽⁴⁵⁾

Moreover, defining and advancing a systems approach aligns with the good practice of integrated programming, which aims to address the interlinked negative impacts of urbanization such as deteriorating living conditions, traffic congestion, waste disposal problems, increased disaster risks, and limited access to basic services, along with a lack of access to formal institutions such as banks, education and health systems.⁽⁴⁶⁾

To be sure, this is no easy task, and complexity is key. It is indeed a large endeavour to consider the number of factors, their relationships with one another and the direction of causality, as well as the weight of those relationships within an outcome such as resilience, based on a single measure, let alone of an entire system, or of a city that is a collection of systems. The quantity and quality of data required are significant, and the character and validity of underlying relationships between factors are not always easily determined. Yet this difficulty should not steer investigators towards simplistic analyses. Engaging in this kind of applied research is critical. Initial results will be coarse, unrefined and imprecise, but iterative research will improve the roadmaps developed and improve decision-making. Even initial attempts will be instructive and enlightening. Newer methodologies and mixed-methods approaches will be required to bridge this research gap. Fuzzy cognitive mapping, for example, can be a very useful approach.⁽⁴⁷⁾ This has been applied to ecology and more recently, as in a case study of Bilbao, to urban system resilience, engaging the complexity described above and leading to equally intricate maps of urban resilience.⁽⁴⁸⁾

V. Conclusions

The applied and integrated research proposed here would help break down barriers between disciplines and practices that have, to date, constrained our understanding of how political, social, economic and environmental factors interact in cities. To address the constraints facing cities, an integrative approach across multiple sectors and disciplines, which explores and comprehensively reveals the interactive effects of various factors for specific challenges, is critical to guide decision-makers. An approach capable of comprehending how multiple risks interact and compound to affect particular communities and groups in a city is essential.⁽⁴⁹⁾

Addressing urban risk entails a deep understanding of the political economy that shapes risk (and its manifestation) within urban development constraints such as governance frameworks, political agency, collective action, service delivery, conflict and violence, and the exclusion of vulnerable groups.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Efforts are required that systematically map multiple risks facing towns and cities, coupled with a deep interrogation of their interactive effects. A corresponding systematic mapping is needed of the various protective factors that individuals, communities and cities can employ, along with an interrogation of their respective interactive effects with the risks they address. The ultimate goal should be to produce a roadmap, based on empirical evidence, that will provide insights and recommendations on how the political economy shaping risks in these cities can be reconfigured to enable city residents, particularly the most vulnerable, to capitalize on protective factors that enhance their resilience and support the capacity of city authorities to deliver on their core functions. The approach put forward builds on the increasingly robust treatment of resilience that is occurring in the fields of risk reduction and risk mitigation regarding natural hazards and disasters. This approach would also enable research that can propose solutions that are not just technically sound but that take into account the principal political economy constraints that ultimately determine success or failure.⁽⁵¹⁾