Challenges of urban disaster response-rethinking development as strategy

It is a widely cited fact that over half of the human population today lives in cities and urban dwellings. The implications of this shift in the 20th century are wide ranging, complex and have significance for all kinds of actors, not just the ones involved in the delivery of humanitarian aid and assistance. The response to disaster led crises has completely reformed as the precise definition of disasters and the vulnerabilities it leads to, have blurred in the recent past. As Bankoff (2006) notes, By the 1980's, it was apparent in both the developed and the developing world that to be "at risk" was not just a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and of regarding disasters as purely physical happenings requiring largely technological solutions.He explains the importance of the shifting paradigm of disaster response which helps us gain a clear understanding of the complexities of the urban crises. He further explains, Disasters were more properly viewed as primarily the result of human actions, that while hazards are natural, disasters are not. Social systems generate unequal exposure to risk by making some people more prone to disaster than others and these inequalities are largely a function of the power relations (class, age, gender and ethnicity amongothers) operative in every society.