Co-developing flood vulnerability frameworks for deprived urban contexts

Urban vulnerability frameworks play a central role in shaping flood risk assessments and informing adaptation strategies. However, in deprived urban areas (DUAs), these frameworks are often derived from literature-driven concepts that insufficiently capture how flood impacts are experienced in contexts characterized by informality, service deficits, and structural marginalization. This study builds on our prior flood exposure research conducted in six Sub-Saharan African cities – Nairobi, Kisumu, Accra, Tema, Beira, and Chimoio – which findings challenged the dominant flood risk logic that low flood depths equate to minimal impacts. In DUAs, shallow floods were found to cause severe disruptions, including disease outbreaks and damage to properties and infrastructure, highlighting limitations in conventional flood risk framings.

Motivated by these insights, this study empirically co-develops and critically assesses a flood vulnerability framework by systematically comparing the vulnerability domains identified in literature with those emerging from citizen science. We adopt a participatory mixed-methods approach grounded in the lived experience of DUA residents. Empirical data were generated through impact chain analyses conducted in 21 participatory workshops involving residents, local practitioners, and civil society actors across the six cities. Workshop outputs were analysed using grounded theory coding to identify vulnerability domains and sub-domains, resulting in an empirical framework. In parallel, a scoping review of 57 peer-reviewed flood vulnerability studies in African DUAs published between 2005 and 2025 was conducted to extract literature-based vulnerability domains. The two frameworks were systematically compared to identify convergences, divergences, and blind spots, resulting in a comprehensive flood vulnerability framework tailored to DUA contexts, validated through an online questionnaire with local stakeholders (n=15) to assess interpretability and relevance.

Results reveal strong alignment for commonly associated vulnerability domains, such as physical environment and spatial factors, but also systematic contrasts. Literature places greater emphasis on governance, economic and socially stratified factors, which are often well suited for comparisons between deprived and non-deprived contexts but less effective for differentiation within DUAs. In contrast, empirically derived domains emphasize everyday practices and conditions through community actions and local awareness systems, pointing to the context-dependent aspect of vulnerability. The findings also suggest that dimensions central in empirical accounts, such as livelihood conditions, remain largely absent or weakly integrated in existing frameworks. The resulting co-developed framework repositions how flood vulnerability is understood in deprived urban contexts by improving contextual relevance and completeness. The findings demonstrate the value of participatory knowledge production for refining vulnerability frameworks an supports the development of more inclusive and meaningful urban flood research in data-scarce urban contexts.