Urban disaster resilience: learning from the 2011 Bangkok flood
type: CreativeWork
description: Reducing disaster risk, managing rapid urbanisation and tackling poverty is an enormous challenge, particularly in vulnerable neighbourhoods in low and middle-income countries. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in towns and cities, with 95 per cent of future urban expansion in the global South. At the same time, disasters are increasing in frequency, severity and intensity. Poorer people in vulnerable neighbourhoods are least equipped to cope with the threat of disaster. When flooding struck Thailand’s capital city Bangkok in 2011, the United Nations estimated that 73 per cent of low-income households were badly affected (UNISDR 2013). With disasters in cities on the rise, current thinking suggests that resilience offers valuable insights for reducing risk. This research seeks to develop and validate a conceptual framework for understanding urban disaster resilience in low-income neighbourhoods. It combines two urban approaches. The first, complex adaptive systems (CAS), views the city as a combination of inter-dependent parts working together at a multitude of scales that shapes its overall behaviour. The second, urban morphology, seeks to understand the creation of urban form by establishing connections between the city’s historical economic, political and social transformations to its modern day form. The conceptual framework was applied to three low-income neighbourhoods in Bangkok affected by the 2011 flood. Through a case study approach, qualitative information was gathered and analysed in order to understand city-scale and neighbourhood level transformations that built patterns of vulnerability and resilience to chronic stresses and acute shocks. This research concludes that combining CAS and morphology provides a valuable conceptual framework for understanding urban disaster resilience. Such a framework places people at the centre while providing a scalar and temporal analysis of co-evolving acute and chronic risks in urban areas. Moreo…
abstract: Reducing disaster risk, managing rapid urbanisation and tackling poverty is an enormous challenge, particularly in vulnerable neighbourhoods in low and middle-income countries. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in towns and cities, with 95 per cent of future urban expansion in the global South. At the same time, disasters are increasing in frequency, severity and intensity. Poorer people in vulnerable neighbourhoods are least equipped to cope with the threat of disaster. When flooding struck Thailand’s capital city Bangkok in 2011, the United Nations estimated that 73 per cent of low-income households were badly affected (UNISDR 2013). With disasters in cities on the rise, current thinking suggests that resilience offers valuable insights for reducing risk. This research seeks to develop and validate a conceptual framework for understanding urban disaster resilience in low-income neighbourhoods. It combines two urban approaches. The first, complex adaptive systems (CAS), views the city as a combination of inter-dependent parts working together at a multitude of scales that shapes its overall behaviour. The second, urban morphology, seeks to understand the creation of urban form by establishing connections between the city’s historical economic, political and social transformations to its modern day form. The conceptual framework was applied to three low-income neighbourhoods in Bangkok affected by the 2011 flood. Through a case study approach, qualitative information was gathered and analysed in order to understand city-scale and neighbourhood level transformations that built patterns of vulnerability and resilience to chronic stresses and acute shocks. This research concludes that combining CAS and morphology provides a valuable conceptual framework for understanding urban disaster resilience. Such a framework places people at the centre while providing a scalar and temporal analysis of co-evolving acute and chronic risks in urban areas. Moreo…
author: Sitko, P
language: en
date published: 2016
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:44:32Z
provider: Oxford Brookes University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Oxford Brookes University