Rethinking Urban Risk and Resettlement in the Global South

Edited by Cassidy Johnson, Garima Jain, and Allan Lavell

ISBN: 9781787358287

Publication: June 10, 2021

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Environmental changes have significant impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods, particularly the urban poor and those living in informal settlements. In an effort to reduce urban residents’ exposure to climate change and hazards such as natural disasters, resettlement programmes are becoming widespread across the Global South. While resettlement may reduce a region’s future climate-related disaster risk, it often increases poverty and vulnerability, and can be used as a reason to evict people from areas undergoing redevelopment.

A collaboration between The Bartlett Development Planning Unit at UCL, the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and the Latin American Social Science Faculty, Rethinking Urban Risk and Resettlement in the Global South collates the findings from Reducing Relocation Risks, a research project that studied urban areas across India, Uganda, Peru, Colombia and Mexico. The findings are augmented with chapters by researchers with many years of insight into resettlement, property rights and evictions, who offer cases from Monserrat, Cambodia, Philippines and elsewhere.

The contributors collectively argue that the processes for making and implementing decisions play a large part in determining whether outcomes are socially just, and examine various value systems and strategies adopted by individuals versus authorities. Considering perceptions of risk, the volume offers a unique way to think about economic assessments in the context of resettlement and draws parallels between different country contexts to compare fully urbanised areas with those experiencing urban growth. It also provides an opportunity to re-think how disaster risk management can better address the accumulation of urban risks through urban planning.

Cassidy Johnson is Professor of Urbanism and Disaster Risk Reduction at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL.

Garima Jain is Senior Consultant at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore.

Allan Lavell is a researcher at the Latin American Social Science Faculty based in San Jose, Costa Rica.

List of figures and tables

List of contributors

Introduction

Cassidy Johnson, Allan Lavell and Garima Jain

Part I: Framing the issues

1. Resettlement and relocation: an approach to understanding failure and guiding success

Allan Lavell

2. Re-settling, re-enabling, the challenge of reconstructing a human habitat

Anne-Catherine Chardon

3. How do relocation decisions and implementation impact risk outcomes? Raising questions after learning from India

Garima Jain

Part II: Understanding and interpreting risk

4. Risk as a subjective concept and its influence on decision-making

Cassidy Johnson, Garima Jain, Vineetha Nalla and José Delfin Cáceres-Martínez

5. A risk assessment framework for decision making that transcends economic valuation: understanding why people choose to stay in disaster-risk prone areas

Shuaib Lwasa, Amir Bazaz and Garima Jain

6. Resettlement in Montserrat after the volcanic crisis: A consensus on tolerable levels of risk?

Emily Wilkinson

Part III: Protest and power: resistance to resettlement

7. The choice of perils: understanding resistance to resettlement for urban Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)/Climate Change Adaptation (CCA)

Anthony Oliver-Smith

8. Resistance and resilience of the community of Belen, Iquitos, Peru, to resettlement

Angel Wilson Chávez-Eslava

Part IV: Land issues in resettlement

9. Land, property rights and risk

Colin Marx

10. Climate change, land and housing induced evictions. Another round of accumulation through dispossession?