Creating and implementing a decision support environment for risk-sensitive, pro-poor urban planning and development of Tomorrow’s Cities

As the negative impacts of natural hazards continue to escalate around the world due to increasing populations, climate change, and rapid urbanisation (among other factors and processes), there is an urgent requirement to develop structured and operational approaches towards multi-hazard risk-informed decision making on urban planning and design. This is a particularly pressing issue for low-to-middle income countries in the Global South, which are set to be impacted ever more disproportionately during future natural-hazard events if the “business as usual” urban-development approach continues unabated. The urban poor of these countries will suffer most under current, risk-insensitive development trajectories.

To address this crucial challenge, we introduce the Tomorrow’s Cities Decision Support Environment (TCDSE). The TCDSE facilitates a participatory, people-centred approach to risk-informed decision making, using state-of-the-art procedures for physics-based hazard and engineering impact modelling, integrating physical and social vulnerability in a unified framework, and expressing the consequences of future disasters across an array of stakeholder-weighted impact metrics that facilitate democratisation of the risk concept. Operation of the TCDSE leads to a risk-sensitive future urban scenario (consisting of an urban plan and a set of pertinent policies) owned not only by the planning authorities, municipalities, the government or the private sector, but also by the communities who will live in these future cities. It therefore represents a significant advancement in the state of the art towards inclusive, people-centred disaster risk reduction, as advocated by global policies and world-leading international agencies like the United Nations, the International Federation of Red Cross, and the World Bank.

This talk will cover the successful deployment of the TCDSE across a range of rapidly expanding urban areas in the Global South that lack formal planning and are increasingly exposed to multi-hazard occurrences (e.g., Nablus in Palestine, Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, and Kathmandu in Nepal). The promising potential of the TCDSE to help minimise future urban risk creation in these contexts will be highlighted.