Assessing Risk and Resilience in Urban Low-Income Neighbourhoods

This presentation aims to set the scene for the session and promote debate about how we as a scientific community can better address the issue of risk in low-income neighbourhoods (also referred to as ‘slums’ and ‘informal settlements’).

Low- and middle-income countries are experiencing rapid urbanisation, often with limited capacity to manage the rapid growth and associated accumulation of risk. One billion people currently live in low-income neighbourhoods. For many cities in the Global South, this means that large proportions (up to 60%) of the urban population live in very small proportions of the urban land which are not formally planned/monitored and are often exposed to a range of single and multi-hazards. This creates challenges in compiling records of hazards, their impacts and feedbacks as many methods are not of sufficient resolution to record high-frequency low-magnitude hazard events that chronically affect these settlements and erode capacity to cope. Additionally, although low-income neighbourhoods often appear as one homogeneous unit on maps, this masks the fact that these areas often act as urban centres within their own right, with high levels of heterogeneity in terms of infrastructure, land use and demographics. This creates challenges in understanding exposure and vulnerability. Overall, these issues mean that our ability to understand single and multi-hazards in low-income neighbourhoods is limited, and resultantly we may miss large proportions of the population in city-wide risk assessments.

Based on my work on a number of projects in low-income neighbourhoods, I will discuss some ways of addressing these challenges and their associated strengths and weaknesses. This includes: (a) Whatsapp focus groups to map social networks of resilience, (b) low-cost smartphone GPS mapping to document the bottom-up response to shocks and stresses within low-income neighbourhoods, (c) exploration of novel ‘big’ and 'medium' data sources. These techniques are participatory and designed to support both residents and city-level stakeholders in better understanding the complexities of risk in slums. The results of this work document that residents of low-income neighbourhoods are not passive but often the first or only responders in dealing with risk in these areas.