Chapter 10

Cities under stress: The uneven

geographies of urban vulnerability
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Three-fourths of those joining the world’s population during the next century will live in Third World
cities. Unless these cities are able to provide decent livelihoods for ordinary people and become
ecologically sustainable, the future is bleak.The politics of livelihood and sustainability in these cities
has become the archetypal challenge of twenty-first century governance.
Peter Evans, Livable Cities

one fourth of the world’s urban population is living below the poverty line. In many cities, which are
confronted with rapid growth, environmental problems and the slow pace of economic development,
it has not been possible to meet the challenges of generating sufficient employment, providing
adequate housing and meeting the basic needs of citizens.
United Nations General Assembly, June 2001

INTRODUCTION including terrorism; a lack of employment, high

As we saw in the previous chapter, the majority of
the world’s urban population face challenges that
while not absent from more developed countries are
a consistent and life inhibiting feature of cities in the
Global South. In this chapter we examine some of the
major threats to urban well-being in the twenty-first
century around the world – from natural disasters
and environmental hazards, to the threats to life
created by war, political violence and epidemic
disease as well as the more systemic risks of economic
decline and spatial abandonment.
Cities can be said to be stressed due to a variety of
factors – an imbalance between population size and
the capacity of the water, energy, transport and
communication infrastructure; a geographical
location that makes the city vulnerable to extremes
of climate and weather events or to other
environmental hazards such as earthquakes, volcanic
eruptions or tsunami; the existence of war and
conflict and other types of organised violence
concentrations of poverty, and high unmet social
needs due for example to the presence of displaced
persons and refugees, young people, the elderly and
those with disabilities; the lack of effective security
and governance such that people fear for their
personal safety and that of their friends and family.
The OECD’s Future Global Shocks report (OECD,
2011b) identified the key macro drivers that it saw as
representing an amplification and extension of the
sorts of crises with which governments are typically
confronted. These include the increased circulation
of populations around the world, which ‘facilitates
the spread of risk carriers or vectors, such as viruses
or terrorists’; the integration and interdependence
of production and delivery systems and their
infrastructure as a result of globalisation, leading to
the concentration and hence increased vulnerability
of critical systems (such as computer systems, energy
grids, and satellite communications systems); and
urbanisation which is leading to ‘the concentration
of populations’ and ‘further exacerbate societies’
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 CITIES UNDER STRESS
vulnerabilities by creating hot-spots for catastrophic
events with a huge potential for direct losses, as well
as by being attractive targets for terrorist attacks’
(OECD Risk Management, 2013: 7).
However, increased urbanisation does not only
involve acute exogenous risks such as terrorists
threats that we deal with in more detail later in this
chapter, it also brings more chronic and diffused
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endogenous threats linked to the nature of urbanising
populations themselves and the types of habitat in
which the vast majority are forced to live. As
Sorensen and Okata write:
Even in developed countries, economic restruc-
turing, the weakening of social welfare systems,
the abandonment of social housing programs,
the downloading of responsibilities to municipal
governments, and increased competition for
inward investment have led to social polariza-
tion, poverty, and social pathologies such as
homelessness.
(Sorensen and Okata, 2011: 3)
How cities cope with these twenty-first-century
challenges depends considerably on the resource base
of governments at all relevant scales, the nature of
the threat or threats – whether incremental and long
term or short lived but intense and powerful – and
the capacity of the local population to withstand and
respond effectively to different risk environments.
As Rodney White notes, ‘[s]ustainable develop-
ment became an issue of widespread concern with
the publication of “Our Common Future”, the sum-
mary report of the World Commission on
Environment and Development (the Brundtland
Commission)’ (WCED, 1987; White, 2001: 48).
The aim of the report was to promote continuing
economic and social development especially of
poorer communities alongside the preservation of
the natural and physical environment. Richardson
defines this sustainable development in the urban
context as, ‘the development of a city’s physical
structure and systems and its economic base in such
a way as to enable it to provide a satisfactory human
environment with minimal demands on resources
182
and minimal adverse effects on the natural environ-
ment’ (Richardson, 1992: 148 in Chowdhury and
Furedy, 1994: 6).
Sustainability is clearly, therefore, not just an
issue of environmental concern. One study identified
nine themes in urban sustainability including strategy
and development; environmental management and
pollution; land-use and management; transport,
environment and integration; cultural heritage and
architectural issues; planning, development and
management; restructuring and renewal; the com-
munity and the city; and public safety and security
(Mattrisch, 2001). However, critics point out that if
by ‘development’ we mean more consumption-
based growth, increased production and higher car-
bon emissions, then this goal is certainly not
compatible with ecological sustainability.
As the previous chapter found, urban growth in
the developing world is increasingly associated with
the growth in slums around the fringes of established
cities. The UN is committed to improving the lives
of some 100 million slum-dwellers by 2020, by
which time the total number of slum-dwellers is
likely to have reached one billion or one seventh of
the predicted world’s total population in 2010 (UN
Global Urban Observatory, see also Davis, 2006).
Welcome though these interventions will be if words
are turned into actions, such an aspiration reveals
that even the most optimistic plans fail to scratch the
surface of a global urban crisis that is reaching
dangerous levels of violence and discontent.85
The degradation of the urban environment also
manifests itself through the atrophication of its
communication systems. While many Western local
governments have agreed to sign up to traffic
containment, waste reduction and environmental
protection programmes agreed at the Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro in 1991 (known as Local Agenda
21), most urban authorities in the cities of the Global
South lack even the limited political and economic
freedoms available in the West to pursue such
objectives. Governments in the Global South are
often faced with the Hobson’s choice of accepting
lower environmental standards than transnational
corporations would be able to operate with in the

West or face the prospect of disinvestments and job
losses in often desperately poor communities.
However, while corruption remains a major problem
at every level of government,86 it is encouraging to
see that many politicians and NGOs in the developing
world are working to improve the quality of their
urban environment and are active supporters of the
urban sustainability agenda of the Habitat II Summit.87
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There is also an argument that ‘sustainability’ for
all its unwelcome consequences for individual city
users is a form of spatial regulation that is essential for
the long-term survival of capitalism and its workforce.
World Health Authority data collected in Austria,
France and Switzerland found that exposure to
pollution caused an estimated 21,000 deaths a year,
and found that car fumes were responsible for
300,000 extra cases of bronchitis in children and
15,000 extra hospital admissions for heart disease
problems exacerbated by pollution.88 In the more
heavily polluted industrial cities of Russia, children
were 1.3 times less healthy in the 1990s than they
were in the 1980s, and 0–7-year-old children fell ill
1.5 times more frequently (Russian Federation,
2000). In economic terms, at the end of the last
century road congestion (chiefly urban, but also
increasingly suburban) was estimated to have cost
$100 billion a year in the US alone.89
The industrial legislation that was introduced to
prevent the cities of Victorian England from
descending into squalor, dirt and disease were
violently resisted by the business interests who
confidently predicted that such regulations would
strangle enterprise in red tape and make its activities
unprofitable. When, in the middle of the nineteenth
century the urban middle classes also began to die of
water-borne diseases such as cholera, the ‘laissez-
faire’ city soon gave way to an efficient local state
armed with all the utilities and resources it needed to
guarantee clean air and water, pleasant parks and
efficient public transportation. However, 150 years
later the succession of the successful to privatopias
and gated communities is leaving the world’s cities
bereft of the influential patrons who once
made London, Paris and New York the envy of the
world.
CITIES UNDER STRESS
The warnings that were issued by nineteenth-
century social reformers about the general social
costs of non-intervention in risk prone cities which
contained less than a tenth of the population that they
do today have now become voiced by international
bodies such as UN Habitat, the International Panel on
Climate Change and a legion of national and
international NGOs. In the following section we
assess the warnings of these latter day Cassandras and
the response of local and national government to the
increasing environmental and climate based threats
to urban life.
ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS, RESOURCE
DEPLETION AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Placed within the larger framework of environ-
mental and resource concerns . . . climate
change does not rank as the largest problem fac-
ing humanity, even though the changes are likely
to be large. In the short term, many other envi-
ronmental concerns are already more worri-
some, especially major ecological changes. Over
the longer term, humanity’s concerns will prob-
ably shift to the gradual depletion of irreplacea-
ble ‘gifts’ that Earth has freely provided.
(William F. Ruddiman, 2010: 178)
William Ruddiman is right to point out that more
immediate ecological challenges may make urban life
unviable for many people long before the full effects
of unchecked climate change are felt. Not only will
cities experience more frequent high temperatures,
heat waves and periods of heavy precipitation – cities
will also be affected by prolonged water shortages,
severe weather events such as storms and cyclones
and by increased sea levels in many parts of the world
(UN-Habitat, 2011: vi). Combined with increased
population pressures in many of the rapidly urbanising
cities of the Global South (see Chapter 9), climate
change will make it difficult for some cities to provide
essential services to their inhabitants including ‘water
supply, physical infrastructure, transport, ecosystem
goods and services, energy provision and industrial
production’. As the UN-Habitat report continues,
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 CITIES UNDER STRESS

‘[l]ocal economies will be disrupted and populations
will be stripped of their assets and livelihoods’
(2011: 8).
This problem will be particularly pronounced in
the low lying coastal areas that account for only
2 per cent of the world’s land mass but as much as
13 per cent of its population. The impact of climate
change as with historic and existing environmental
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Hurricane Katrina and most recently Hurricane/
Super Storm Sandy can cause to vulnerable urban
populations. In many parts of the world where
shelters are built from salvaged materials that are
incapable of keeping out heat and water in normal
conditions, and where relief and emergency services
are either absent or thinly spread and poorly
equipped, the chances of surviving major fires,

disasters is uneven and disproportionately
experienced by vulnerable population groups – the
poor, the elderly, women, those with some form of
disability and discriminated against minorities (ibid.).
Even wealthy industrialised democracies such as
the United States have failed adequately to prepare
for and mitigate against the severe economic and
social trauma that extreme weather events such as
storms and floods without evacuating the hazard zone
are greatly reduced (see Table 10.1).
Super Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated much
of the Visayas region of the Philippines in November
2013, affected 16 million inhabitants and took the
lives of more than 6,000 people. The cyclone was the
most powerful storm ever recorded with wind
speeds of up to 195 miles per hour (235 km/h) and

Table 10.1 Top 10 largest city populations in 2011 at 8–10th risk deciles by type of hazard

Cyclones Droughts Earthquakes Floods Landslides Volcanoes

1 Tokyo, Japan Kolkata Los Angeles- Tokyo, Japan Taipei, China Napoli (Naples),
(Calcutta), India Long Beach- Italy
Santa Ana, USA
2 Shanghai, China Karachi, Manila, Delhi, India Bandung, Quito, Ecuador
Pakistan Philippines Indonesia
3 Manila, Los Angeles- Istanbul, Turkey Ciudad de Quito, Ecuador Bogor, Indonesia
Philippines Long Beach- México (Mexico
Santa Ana, USA City), Mexico
4 Osaka-Kobe, Chennai Lima, Peru New York- San Salvador, Malang,
Japan (Madras), India Newark, USA El Salvador Indonesia
5 Guangzhou, Lahore, Tehran, Iran Shanghai, China Kaohsiung,
Guangdong, Pakistan (Islamic China
China Republic of)
6 Shenzhen, China Ahmadabad, Santiago, Chile São Paulo, San José, Costa
India Brazil Rica
7 Seoul, Republic Santiago, Chile San Francisco- Dhaka,
of Korea Oakland, USA Bangladesh
8 Dongguan, Belo Horizonte, Kunming, China Kolkata
Guangdong, Brazil (Calcutta), India
China
9 Hong Kong, Luanda, Angola Nagoya, Japan Buenos Aires,
China, Hong Argentina
Kong SAR
10 Foshan, China Yangon, Izmir, Turkey Rio de Janeiro,
Myanmar Brazil

Source: UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2012: 24.

184

gusts of up to 235 miles per hour (275 km/h). This
unprecedented severe weather event damaged or
destroyed more than one million homes and over five
million people lost their livelihoods. In the storm
corridor, 70 to 80 per cent of the buildings and infra-
structure was destroyed and 90 per cent of homes in
the hardest hit areas were made uninhabitable.90 The
casualties would have been still higher were it not for
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improved early warning and communication systems
and the prompt interventions of local civic leaders.91
Climate scientists believe such record-setting severe
storms will be a more common feature of weather
patterns as average ocean temperatures continue to
rise in the decades to come.
Although the UN Habitat report refers to green
house gas emission reduction as a necessary strategy
for all urban administrations in the global mission to
halt climate change, 97 per cent of climate scientists
accept that a rise in average global temperatures from
man made greenhouse gas emissions is underway and
that the question is no longer whether climate change
can be stopped so much as can the rate of increase be
controlled to allow the ecosphere time to adapt
without catastrophic consequences? The search for a
global policy response has been given added urgency
by the publication of the 5th Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report in
September 2013 in which more than 800 scientists
collaborated. Their unambiguous conclusion is
that, despite an apparent stabilisation in surface
temperatures since the late 1990s, the major cause of
climate change is anthropogenic.
It is extremely likely that more than half of the
observed increase in global average surface tem-
perature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the
anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas con-
centrations and other anthropogenic forcings
together.
(IPCC, 2013: 17, original emphasis)
The ecological and human health and safety
consequences of this warming trend for the urban
populations of Australia are potentially very severe,
with predictions of a six-degree increase in average
CITIES UNDER STRESS
maximum temperatures, which currently regularly
exceed 40 degrees Celsius, by the end of the century.
More frequent and intense heatwaves will result in
greater numbers of heat-related deaths especially
among the elderly and socially vulnerable groups.92
But rather than mitigating climate change risk by
avoiding locating residential developments and key
infrastructure developments such as airports and
power stations in flood plains, low lying coastal areas
and arid, fire prone rural locations, highly permissive
land-use regulations around the world appear to be
encouraging just the opposite.
Settlement patterns, urbanization, and changes
in socioeconomic conditions have all influenced
observed trends in exposure and vulnerability to
climate extremes (high confidence) . . . Rapid
urbanization and the growth of megacities, espe-
cially in developing countries, have led to the
emergence of highly vulnerable urban commu-
nities, particularly through informal settlements
and inadequate land management (high level of
agreement, robust evidence) . . . Vulnerable popu-
lations also include refugees, internally dis-
placed people, and those living in marginal
areas.
(IPCC, 2012: 5–6, original emphasis)
As the UN-Habitat report on cities and climate
change warns, ‘there is the plausible future of
continuation along a dangerous collision course if
national, regional and local governments continue
with business as usual. Many of the dysfunctions of
the current political, economic and social systems
at play could lead inexorably to the very worst
outcomes imaginable.’ ‘Furthermore, uneven
development and inadequate infrastructure and
governance structures constrain the ability of
populations and local authorities of many urban
centres to adapt to existing and future climate change
and to other environmental and societal stresses’
(UN-Habitat, 2011: 164). On a more positive
note the report offers the prospect of a future
in which ‘cities have historically proved their
talents as sources of innovation, and laboratories for
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 CITIES UNDER STRESS
the transition to different and more sustainable (i.e.
less carbon intensive and more resilient) pathways of
development’ (ibid.).
The challenge remains a considerable one,
however. Urban populations have quintupled in
the period from 1950 to 2011, during which time the
urban population grew from 28.8 per cent of
the world’s inhabitants to 50.8 per cent. Significant
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though the number and size of the southern
hemisphere’s megalopolises are, most of the rapid
increase in urban populations is taking place in the
smaller towns and cities in the low and medium
income countries where infrastructure is at its most
basic and state capacity weakest (Heinrichs et al.,
2013: 1866). Of the 67 million new urban dwellers
that will be created each year, 91 per cent will live in
developing countries (UN-Habitat, 2011: 164).
coupled with the increased intensity and fre-
quency of adverse weather events [this] will have
devastating effects precisely where the capacity
to deal with the consequences of climate changes
is weaker, or even lacking . . . even within
developing countries – it is the affluent and
politically enfranchised enclaves, groups
and Communities with access to more services
and amenities who consume more and become
the highest GHG emitters within their cities,
regions and countries. This deeply entrenched
inequity lies at the heart of environmental justice
issues surrounding climate change mitigation
and adaptation actions.
(UN-Habitat, 2011:164–5)
Megacities like Dhaka in Bangladesh face a stark
future as rising sea levels combined with higher
intense rainfall patterns are predicted to increase the
number, severity and duration of floods. By 2020 the
arrival of new migrants and a natural increase in
population will add five million inhabitants to a city
population of 15 million in an area of only 325 square
kilometers. Given that ‘around 60 per cent of the
land mass of Bangladesh [including the capital Dhaka]
is less than six meters above the mean sea level’ and
about one fifth of the country is subject to flooding
186
every year (Sultana and Rayhan, 2012: 1209), these
new arrivals will be forced to occupy terrain that is
environmentally unsuitable, if not perilous, for
human habitation (see Figure 10.1).
As Shahadat Hossain (2008: 17) writes:
The distinctive aspect of urban poverty in Dhaka
City’s slums is its close connection with recent
migration. The slum dwellers have mostly
migrated to the city from rural areas. . . . The
rural poor migrate to Dhaka City due to some
push and pull factors. The push factors include
over-population, floods and natural disasters,
river erosion, growing landlessness and exploi-
tation by the rural elites and moneylenders.
In other words, increasing environmental threats to
the sustainability of rural poor communities have
been a major factor in Bangladesh’s rapid urbanisation,
but the human pressure on the natural environment
has been displaced and concentrated in cities like
Dhaka where, as the Ministry of Environments and
Forests admitted in its report to the Rio+20 meeting
Industries are causing 60% of the river pollution
through wilful discharge of effluent, even by those
few having effluent treatment plants. The cities
discharge 82% human excreta directly into the
rivers without treating them. The situation is so
bad that some rivers like the Buriganga in Dhaka
are almost biologically dead with no oxygen in the
water and hence fail to support any aquatic life. In
fact the water is filthy, smelly and black.
(Bangladesh Ministry of Environment and
Forests, 2012: 44)
By their own admission, national and local
governments faced with the harmful environmental
impact of rapidly growing urban settlements in the
Global South appear to be reduced to the status of
anxious bystanders at an intensifying ecological
disaster that is not only impacting on waterways,
soils and the atmosphere, but, as we saw in the
previous chapter, is making the marginal inhabitants
of informal settlements increasingly vulnerable to ill

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Figure 10.1 Flood-prone waterside shanty dwellings in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Photograph © Björn Surborg.
health and diseases due to poor sanitation, air and
water pollution and lack of sunlight.
Following a Cities Climate summit in London in
May 2007 a C40 Large Cities Climate Summit was
subsequently held in New York City at which
municipal leaders committed to a number of action
points aimed at slowing the pace of climate change.
These included ‘sharing “best practice”; developing
common procurement strategies; and devising
standardized methods for measuring greenhouse
emissions and responses to them’ (Hodson and
Marvin, 2010: 104).
New York City’s response to the climate change
agenda (see Exhibit 10.1), while an important step in
the right direction, needs to be set in the context of
an escalating demand for carbon based energy
that is essentially unregulated and driven by the
requirements of private corporations and house-
holds. In the United States, domestic shale gas
CITIES UNDER STRESS
extraction has significantly reduced the cost of
carbon-based fuel and is expected to account for half
the US energy market by 2035.93 However, carbon
energy reliant economies in the rest of the world
have not managed to expand sources of cheaper oil
and gas supply leading to rising consumer energy
costs. In the absence of state subsidies or price
regulation, fuel poverty (defined as a household
energy expenditure of 10 per cent or more of
income) has risen sharply for many urban populations.
Set against the challenge of moving from a carbon
dependent city to one that is capable of meeting its
energy and resource needs in a sustainable manner,
municipal, regional and national governments also
need to plan for severe weather events and geologically
based hazards such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions
and tsunami given that so many millions of the world’s
inhabitants live on or near exposed coasts, seismic
fault lines and storm corridors (see Table 10.1).
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 CITIES UNDER STRESS
EXHIBIT 10.1 NEW YORK CITY’S PLANYC: REDUCING MUNICIPAL
GREENHOUSE GAS (GHG) EMISSIONS 30 PER CENT BY 2017 (30X17)
In October 2007, the City of New York adopted an
ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
by 30 per cent by the year 2017. Much of the
energy efficiency gain is to be achieved through the
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retrofitting of existing buildings, better auditing
of energy usage and training of personnel, improving
operations and maintenance, the greater uptake of
renewal and clean energy systems, and the purchase
of more fuel efficient and hybrid and fuel alternative
vehicles.
The City’s data-driven approach to reaching its
30x17 target is based on several strategic actions.
First, the City is using its benchmark results and other
data sources to prioritize energy efficiency projects and
monitor building performance over time. Another major
piece of the strategy and a component of the City’s
landmark energy efficiency legislative package – the
Greener, Greater Buildings Plan – is the implementa-
tion of energy audits and cost-effective retrofit
measures as well as the identification of clean DG
NO SUCH THING AS A NATURAL
DISASTER? URBAN VULNERABILITY AND
RESILIENCE TO SEVERE GEOPHYSICAL
AND METEOROLOGICAL HAZARDS
As Keith Smith writes, ‘[t]he concept of vulnerability
emerged from research within the social sciences’,
and ‘early applications were in the natural hazards
field’, but since then ‘vulnerability theory has been
extended from exposure to geophysical risk to
embrace the human responses and adaptations to
other threats’ (Smith, 2012: 52). The United Nations
defines vulnerability as
The characteristics and circumstances of a com-
munity, system or asset that make it susceptible
to the damaging effect of a hazard.
(UN/ISDR 2009 in Smith, 2012: 53)
188
[Distributed Generation] opportunities. Next, these
retrofit efforts are tied to improved operations and
maintenance as well as retro-commissioning. Finally,
the City analyzes the energy performance results regu-
larly. Future year-to-year analyses against benchmark
baseline scores will allow the City to identify the impact
that factors such as efficiency investments, building
management and occupant behavior have on energy
use. [The Department of Citywide Administrative
Services] will conduct further analyses and will pro-
ceed with data quality improvements, including sub-
metering and an energy and property tracking system,
over the course of the next several years.
The City also continues to invest in methane reduc-
tion at wastewater treatment plants, greening of its
vehicle fleet, and converting to energy-efficient street
lighting.
Source: c40cities.org, http://www.c40cities.org/c40cities/
new-york/city_case_studies/new-york-city-government-leading-
by-example.
However, in the developed world it is rare for a
settlement the size of a city to suffer an equal degree
of trauma arising, for example, from a heat wave, a
flood, earthquake or a cyclone. The structural
robustness of the dwelling or place of work, the
ability to access early warning information,
the availability of transportation to evacuate the
threatened site or to access suitable shelter where
that is not possible, and the financial means to
re-locate for weeks, months or even years following
the impact of the hazard event are significant risk
reducers. Unsurprisingly, therefore, ‘the highest
levels of vulnerability tend to occur amongst the
poorest people living in environmental settings’. In
an urban context this particularly includes those
living in ‘informal settlements and inner-city slums
of the most rapidly expanding cities who inhabit
unsafe structures on steep slopes or near industrial

sites prone to hazards like earthquakes, landslides
and fires’ (Smith, 2012: 53).
In the case of the Haitian earthquake of January
2010, the severity of the seismic shock coupled with
its proximity to Port-au-Prince, a city that was home
to more than two million of the poorest and most
densely populated inhabitants in the Global South,
accounted for the high proportion of residents
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(nearly 1 in 4) who were either killed or injured
(Exhibit 10.2 and Figure 10.2). Beyond the environs
of the capital a further 1.5 million citizens were
affected by the earthquake, many in harder to reach
rural locations. The almost complete destruction of
the capital’s transport infrastructure therefore
exacerbated the problems of providing rescue and aid
services to the country at large.
Despite the intervention of international aid
agencies, many of which appeared to be acting with
no central coordination, the vast majority of the
EXHIBIT 10.2 THE IMPACT AND AFTERMATH OF THE 2010 HAITIAN
EARTHQUAKE ON THE CITY OF PORT-AU-PRINCE
On January 12, 2010 a 7.0 magnitude earthquake
struck near Port-au-Prince on the Caribbean island of
Haiti. Aid agencies reported that more than 3.5 million
people were affected by the quake and as many as
220,000 people were estimated to have died with over
300,000 people suffering from related injuries. Over
188,383 houses were badly damaged and 105,000
were destroyed by the earthquake (293,383 in total),
1.5 million people became homeless. The quake left
19 million cubic metres of rubble and debris in Port-
au-Prince – enough to fill a line of shipping containers
stretching end to end from London to Beirut.
In addition 4,000 schools were damaged or
destroyed, and 1 in 4 of civil servants in Port-au-
Prince were killed. 60 per cent of Government and
administrative buildings, 80 per cent of schools in
Port-au-Prince and 60 per cent of schools in the
South and West Departments were destroyed or
damaged. Over 600,000 people left their home area in
CITIES UNDER STRESS
disaster victims were forced to cope by themselves
or rely on the hospitality of family or friends outside
the affected zone. Reporting on the third anniversary
of the earthquake Amnesty International declared:
Three years on from the Haiti earthquake the
housing situation in the country is nothing short
of catastrophic with hundreds of thousands of
people still living in fragile shelters . . . The
earthquake left more than 200,000 people dead
and some 2.3 million homeless. It 2013 it was
estimated that more than 350,000 people lived
in 496 camps across the country.94
Even the internally displaced survivors of the
earthquake who have managed to find some
temporary shelter face the threat of being made
homeless once again. One mother and her child were
evicted along with tens of other families from Place
Port-au-Prince and mostly stayed with host families.
At its peak, one and a half million people were living
in camps including over 100,000 at critical risk from
storms and flooding.
Economists estimate that rebuilding Haiti will cost
between $8 billion and $14 billion. Haiti does not have
this level of civil contingency funds. It is one of the
poorest nations on earth, ranking 145 out of 169
countries in the UN Human Development Index – the
lowest in the Western Hemisphere. Its population live
on average on less than $2 a day. Even before the
earthquake 86 per cent of people in Port-au-Prince
were living in slum conditions, half the population had
no access to toilets, and only 1 in every 3 residents had
access to tap water. Unsurprisingly cholera and other
epidemic diseases spread rapidly in the wake of the
earthquake.
Source: Disasters Emergency Committee.
189
 CITIES UNDER STRESS
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Figure 10.2 The devastating effects of the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, which struck Haiti on January 12, 2010.
© arindambanerjee/ Shutterstock.com.
Jérémie on 21 December 2011. She told Amnesty
International
The camp committee was putting pressure on us
to leave the camp. They said they needed the
square for a [football] championship. But we
didn’t have anywhere to go so we stayed there.
They distributed leaflets every now and then with
threats. At night they would throw stones and
bottles on our tents . . . Then one day at 3 o’clock
in the morning, they came and started knocking
on the doors. Then they destroyed my shelter
with razor blades and knives . . . They pushed me
out and started tearing down everything. I did not
have time to take any of my things with me; I left
only with the clothes I was wearing.95
As we saw in the previous chapter, local and regional
governments and non-state actors may become
190
involved with and even organise intimidation,
violence and forced evictions rather than ensuring
the safety of the vulnerable populations, because they
stand to profit politically or economically from the
control or ownership of the land.
The Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) that
struck off the coast of Tokohuru on 11 March 2011
was of an extreme intensity, measuring 9.0 on the
seismic scale. The resulting tsunami rose to over
19.5 meters in places and swept up to 5 kilometers
inland covering 650 kilometers of coastline. 500 km2
of land area was flooded and many villages and towns
were entirely destroyed with the loss of over 15,000
lives, and 400,000 people were forced to leave their
homes. The nearby Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear
power plant was also severely damaged and
experienced a meltdown. Radiation from the
crippled reactor was emitted into the sea and air
resulting in restrictions on the export of farm
 CITIES UNDER STRESS

produce and fish and shellfish. A 20 km exclusion
zone has been in place around the Fukushima-Daiichi
plant since the accident and it is forbidden for tourists
and visitors to enter the exclusion zone. Abandoned
settlements such as Tomioka and Futaba have become
ghost towns and 80,000 evacuated residents have
been told that they will not be allowed to return to
their homes for at least five years (see Figure 10.3).
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only two metres above sea level. Earthquakes
destroyed large parts of the capital city in 1855 and
1923 and the Japanese government estimates the
probability of a major seismic shock (magnitude 8 or
9) striking the Tokyo city-region at between 60 and
70 per cent within the next 30 years.97 Emergency
evacuation procedures, better advanced warning
systems and the hardening of infrastructure and

The economic loss to Japan resulting from the GEJE buildings can only go so far in terms of mitigating the
was estimated at $220 billion, equivalent to 3.4 per effects of these often unpredictable geophysical
cent of Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP).96 events.
Compared with Haiti where over 6 per cent of the Yet despite these threats it appears that urban
population in the affected area are thought to have populations and governments are prepared to rebuild
died as a direct result of the earthquake (with many and resettle environmentally dangerous and unstable
more deaths later attributed to water borne diseases), landmasses rather than accept, as ancient populations
only 4 per cent of the population affected by the appear to have done, that the forces of nature can
much more powerful Eastern Japanese earthquake make even long established urban settlements
and tsunami lost their lives. By way of contrast, in the uninhabitable. Exposure to risk is not only limited to
aftermath of the Meiji-Sanriku Tsunami of 1896, environmentally vulnerable urban locations;
40 per cent of the population in the affected zone however, it is a feature of the industrial city that
perished. According to the World Bank, the much despite technological advances continues to expose
lower levels of mortality in the more recent Japanese
earthquake and tsunami were a consequence of 2,000
years of learning to live with and mitigate the
consequences of disasters. Hence the so-called
‘Kamaishi Miracle’, where 99.8 per cent of the
elementary and junior high school children of the
coastal city of Kamaishi were saved from drowning
was much more a consequence of regularly repeated
school evacuation drills and very good disaster relief
management.
The Japanese government has pledged $35 billion
in an effort ‘to clean up radioactive fallout across an
area of northern Japan larger than Hong Kong’. But
the cost and difficulty of recruiting workers to deal
with the decontamination has been one of the major
contributing factors in the estimated six-year delay in
returning residents who lived in the area before the
disaster to their former homes.
Appalling though the GEJE has been for the
inhabitants of north east Japan, geoscientists have
observed that if the epicenter of the earthquake had Figure 10.3 The towns located within the Fukushima-
been a few degrees further south, Tokyo’s much Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant exclusion
larger population of over 30 million inhabitants could zone.
have faced disaster since much of the urban area lies Source: OpenStreetmap.

191
 CITIES UNDER STRESS
residents and workers to health and safety dangers on
a daily basis.
TOXIC CITIES: HAZARDOUS
PRODUCTION AND URBAN RISKSCAPES
Cities like Dzerzhinsk in Russia are typical of Soviet
era ‘monotowns’ in which an entire population is
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dependent on a single factory or industry. Today it is
estimated that some 400 towns are monotowns and
that they account for a quarter of Russia’s urban
population, and are home to 25 million people.
Before the 2008 financial crisis, Russia’s monotowns,
where environmental and health problems are more
elevated than in the general population due to the
nature of the often hazardous working environment
and the polluting effects of the industrial process,
provided as much as 40 per cent of Russia’s GDP (see
Exhibit 10.3).Unemployment in these towns is also
often more than double the national average.
However, as we noted in Chapter 9, these economic
problems are not true of Russia’s largest and richest
EXHIBIT 10.3 DZERZHINSK, RUSSIA
Pollutants: Numerous chemicals and toxic by-products
from numerous chemical-manufacturing processes
including sarin, lead and phenols.
Population Affected: 300,000
Throughout the Soviet period, Dzerzhinsk was one of
Russia’s principal sites of chemical manufacturing,
including chemical weapons. Today, it is still a signifi-
cant centre of the Russian chemical industry. Between
1930 and 1998, an estimated 300,000 tons of chem-
ical waste were improperly land filled in Dzerzhinsk
and the surrounding areas. From this waste, around
190 identified chemicals were released into the
groundwater. In 2007, water samples taken within the
city showed levels of dioxins and phenol thousands of
times above recommended levels. This prompted the
Guinness Book of World Records to name Dzerzhinsk
the most polluted city in the world later that year.
Over the last years, efforts have been undertaken to
192
cities including St. Petersburg and Moscow where
official unemployment runs at a mere 1 per cent and
migrant workers from Uzbekistan, Ukraine and
Tajikistan are employed to do the dirtiest, heaviest
and least well paid jobs.98 All of which serves to
emphasise the increasing economic hierarchisation
and uneven geographical development of post-Soviet
Russia following the ‘shock doctrine’ liberalisation
and privatisation of banks, public services and utilities
and state enterprises after 2000.
The ethnographers researching one of Buenos
Aires’ most polluted shantytowns (see Exhibit 10.4)
expected to conduct their field research ‘with the
specter of collective action in mind’, but their
notebooks became filled with quizzical reflections on
its absence. Abject communities with low levels of
economic and social capital are rarely able to become
‘agents of livability’ in Peter Evans’ words. ‘Urban
communities’, he goes on to add, ‘contain an even
more daunting spectrum of interests, identities, and
political positions. Communities also lack power. As
long as they act by themselves, the capacity to reshape
close down out dated facilities and restore contami-
nated land.
High concentrations of toxic phenol in the air have
led to residents of Dzerzhinsk suffering from increased
levels of diseases and cancers. This has caused life
expectancy in the city to plummet. A study from 2006
revealed that average life expectancy in Dzerzhinsk
was 47 for women and just 42 for men. Sulphur
dioxide in the air also remains a big problem. A study
published in 2013 found that 35 per cent of those
residents living adjacent to an industrial or mining
area had experienced a chronic cough with sputum,
compared with just 18 per cent of those residents
who did not (odds ratio: 2.16). The city has a total
population of nearly 245,000 people. The toxic
emissions and pollutants from local industries are
potentially affecting all of the local residents.
Sources: Green Cross, Switzerland and worstpolluted.org.

EXHIBIT 10.4 TOXIC LIVES: EVERYDAY LIFE IN AN
ARGENTINIAN SHANTYTOWN
In Argentina, the quality of life in its poorest shanty-
towns does not appear to have improved very much
even after the fall of the military junta. In just five
years (2001–2006) the number of people living in
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slums, shantytowns and squatter settlements in the
Greater Buenos Aires region doubled from less than
640,000 to more than 1.4 million, while the number
of settlements rose from less than 400 to more than
1,000. It is estimated that one tenth of the greater
Buenos Aires population live in informal settlements
(Auyero and Swistun, 2009: 23). Auyero and Swistun’s
ethnographic study of ‘Flammable’, an informal settle-
ment in Avellaneda on the south-eastern fringe of
the larger urban environment is beyond them’
(Evans, 2002: 15 in Auyero and Swistun, 2009:
137). But there is nothing inherently powerless
about poor urban communities, which in other
contexts and with the right organisation have been
able to transform their neighbourhoods and their
own lives (see Parker, 2011: 66–72). At the same
time, the factors capable of triggering effective
mobilisation in one context will not necessarily be
successful in a different one.
The examples of Dzerzhinsk and ‘Flammable’
highlight the point that environmental hazards are a
constant feature of those generally low-income urban
populations who through the need for work or the
lack of housing alternatives find themselves in the
shadow of potentially lethal factories, storage
facilities, power stations and other high level
pollutant and toxic emission sites. Major disasters
including the Union Carbide toxic gas leak in Bhopal,
India which killed more than 8,000 people in 1984
are a powerful reminder that industrial workforces
and their adjacent populations are vulnerable to man
made disasters that result from hazardous, mass risk
manufacturing processes. A combination of weak
environmental protection, political lobbying (and in
many cases corruption) by industrial interests and the
CITIES UNDER STRESS
Buenos Aires, reveals a world of environmental haz-
ard, toxicity and social and economic insecurity. The
settlement adjoins one of the largest petro-chemical
complexes in the country and a coke processing plant
and high power voltage cables crisscross its garbage-
strewn streets. The local population complains of
chronic illnesses including respiratory problems,
heightened incidence of cancers and lead and
heavy metal blood poisoning. Despite promises of
action from high-level federal government officials,
Flammable’s inhabitants are still waiting to learn
when they will be moved to a safer environment.
Source: Auyero and Swistun, Flammable, 2009, p. 159.
increasing world demand for oil, gas, metals,
minerals and chemicals that are very expensive to
produce in a safe and low environmental impact
manner means that certain urban populations and
workers have little prospect of escaping a toxic
habitat that is health limiting and life threatening.
But whereas the ‘dirty industries’ that the world’s
economy relies on are mostly a health risk only to
those who live and work within their toxic environs,
in an increasingly mobile and globalised urban world,
it is the risks from infectious and communicable
diseases that has pushed the issue of pandemic illness
up the agenda of emergency urban planning in recent
years.
EPIDEMICS AND THE THREAT
TO URBAN PUBLIC HEALTH
Modern health systems and medicines are much
better adapted than they were in the previous century
at dealing with the spread of epidemic diseases such
as influenza, which during the ‘Spanish Flu’ epidemic
in 1918 is estimated to have killed between 20 and
100 million people worldwide (Chowell et al.,
2006). Like the more recent ‘Swine Flu’ epidemic,
the 1918 virus is thought to have been an H1N1 type
193
 CITIES UNDER STRESS
influenza strain, but its biology was poorly under-
stood at the time, with medical opinion believing the
infection was caused by a bacterium. In fact, the
virus compromises the immune system and allows
more opportunistic bacterial infections to spread
causing pneumonia in many cases and this is what
contributed to the high mortality rate in the aftermath
of the First World War. Virulent influenza strains
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then went into abeyance for several decades until
doctors in China began to notice high death rates
from a new influenza variant in the 1950s. A further
two million people are thought to have died from the
H2N2 ‘Asian Flu’ epidemic in 1957–58 which
included 70,000 deaths in the United States even in
an era prior to mass air travel.
In the introduction to their edited volume on
networked disease and the global city in the aftermath
of the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Disease)
epidemic in the late 2000s, Harris Ali and Roger Keil
(2008: 1) wrote that ‘not much specific work has
been published on the urban aspects of emerging
infectious diseases’. The case of A(H1N1) or ‘Swine
Flu’ is particularly unusual because of its high
mortality rates, especially among patients aged
between 20 and 40. Domínguez-Cherit and
colleagues reported that, ‘By August 30, 2009, there
were more than 116,046 cases [of A(H1N1)] with
2,234 deaths in the Americas and 277,607
documented cases and at least 3,205 deaths
worldwide’ (Domínguez-Cherit et al., 2009: 1880).
Almost all of these deaths took place among urban
populations and in the most highly urbanised
countries (see Figure 10.4).
Global pandemics are certainly a major negative
externality of the globally networked city, but
disease and infection has long been associated with
travelling bodies and especially with the effects of
colonisation where the spread of European cold and
influenza viruses had a devastating impact on the
indigenous populations of the Caribbean and the
Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
(Wolf, 1997). Indeed, some have argued that
globalisation has transformed the twenty-first-
century world into what Dr Bernard Vallat, the
Director General of the World Organisation for
194
Figure 10.4 The global distribution of A(H1N1)
influenza cases, June 2009.
Source: World Health Organization.
Animal Health (OiE), has called a ‘global biological
cauldron’ with increased risks of ‘catastrophic
pandemics’ (Braun, 2008: 260).
As Bruce Braun writes, ‘modern air travel viruses
can circle the globe at breakneck speeds – but the
networks that compose urban lives also include
elements that mitigate against a global pandemic’
(ibid.: 261, emphasis in original). In particular Braun
is referring to the network of pharmaceutical and
medical scientists and technologists, public health
alert systems that rely on advanced communication
systems, and efficient governments that can mobilise
a vaccination and treatment programme in most
cases quickly enough to prevent major disease
outbreaks. As a report by the international affairs
think tank, Chatham House points out (Merrett,
2013: 2):
Although not a new phenomenon, resistance has
become a more pressing issue over recent years
as approximately 70 per cent of known
bacteria have developed resistance to one or
more antibiotics, threatening a return to the
pre-antibiotic era.
The ability to remain one step ahead of infectious
diseases has relied to a large degree on the
pharmaceutical industry’s ability to synthesise new
antibiotic and anti-viral medicines. However,

diseases that were once associated with urban poverty
such as tuberculosis (TB) are again beginning to take
hold on vulnerable groups including those affected by
HIV, malnutrition, diabetes and homelessness as well
as those living in damp and overcrowded housing
conditions, tobacco smokers, drug and alcohol
dependents and the destitute. Unsurprisingly, 95 per
cent of TB deaths occur in the developing world
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where drug-resistant mutations of the disease are
becoming increasingly hard to treat. During the
2000s in Iran and India physicians identified totally
drug resistant (XDR) strains of TB (Udwadia et al.,
2012), and the World Health Organization (WHO)
estimates that China and India had approximately
100,000 cases of multiple drug resistant TB
(MDR-TB) out of a total world MDR-TB population
of 380,000 in 2008. Despite a growing awareness of
the problem and more targeted interventions by
public health authorities and NGOs in East, South
and Central Asia, according to the WHO (2010:
26–27) inadequate health infrastructure and
treatment programmes remain a major obstacle in
tackling drug resistant infections.
High-mortality diseases such as malaria that were
thought to be an entirely rural problem are now
becoming a more common problem in towns and
cities because the anopheline mosquito can find
standing water in poorly drained urban slums in
which to breed.99 Higher rainfall and flash
floods, which have been associated with climate
change, are exacerbating the problem of water
dependent and water-borne diseases in tropical and
sub-tropical urban settlements. Climate change is
also thought to be a factor in the spread of previously
more contained infectious diseases such as Dengue
Fever and West Nile virus, which is occurring with
increased frequency even in more temperate urban
geographies (Baker, 2012: 48–49). As Scott Weaver
explains, West Nile virus (WNV; Flaviviridae:
Flavivirus),
circulates in an avian–mosquito cycle and has
caused small epidemics for many decades,
because of spillover, in the Old World.
However, in 1999 WNV was introduced into
CITIES UNDER STRESS
New York, where it amplified and spread
rapidly to cause the largest epidemic of arboviral
encephalitis ever documented in the USA, fol-
lowed by a major resurgence in 2012.
(Weaver, 2013: 360)
According to McCormick and Whitney the WNV
was the first disease-based public health emergency
to be declared in the United States at the federal
level. Yet in the year that the disease was first
detected in the State of New York mortality rates
were relatively low (7 fatalities from 62 reported
cases in 1999) (McCormick and Whitney, 2013:
269). In addition to these naturally occurring threats,
the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
sees the intentional spread of human pathogens and
toxins as a potential major public health risk and lists
bioterrorism, radiation emergencies, chemical
emergencies and mass casualties among the risks and
hazards for which public authorities and the public at
large need to prepare. However, although the US
Federal Bureau of Investigation noted that ‘bombings
accounted for nearly 70 percent of all terrorist
attacks in the U.S. and its territories between 1980
and 2001’, the risks that urban citizens face from
intentional physical and social harm are certainly not
limited to actions carried out on behalf of non-state
actors.100
CONFLICT, VIOLENCE AND
THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
War between states and violent conflicts within
states are an ever-present threat for millions of
affected people around the world. Cities can
offer places of refuge to those fleeing from con-
flict in the countryside but they can also be tar-
gets for attacks and battlegrounds for opposing
armed forces. Bishop and Clancey’s account of
the ‘city-as-target’ (2003) provides a necessary
corollary to the literature on world cities which
generally sees such spaces in terms of the terri-
torialisation of international political economy.
What is often left out of such analyses is that with
size, density and strategic significance comes
195
 CITIES UNDER STRESS
vulnerability to large-scale natural and human
disasters.
(Pieterse, 2009: 290)
There is no generally accepted definition of
‘terrorism’, and because the term is often used to
delegitimise the resort to particular forms of violence
for political ends and to define such acts as beyond
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the confines of ordinary criminal law (and often
therefore to the rights and procedures available to
ordinary criminal suspects engaged in acts of
homicide, attempted homicide and grievous bodily
harm), its use as a neutral term in criminology and
social science remains problematic. Nevertheless, it
is undeniable that both state and non-state actors
have long used violence and the threat of violence in
indiscriminate ways against civilian populations in
order to pursue political, religious or ideological
objectives. The clear intention behind such acts of
violence is to make one’s organisation, movement or
forces feared and to disrupt the lives and routines of
the enemy population.
Most ‘counter-terrorist’ strategists – the vast major-
ity of whom work for or on behalf of governments –
regard terrorists as non-state actors who are engaged in
acts of asymmetric war where the aim is often to
cause the maximum degree of civilian casualties
while not excluding law enforcement and military
targets where they can be attacked. As Sophie Body-
Gendrot writes, since ‘the greatest successful terror-
ist attack in world history’, on 11 September 2001,
‘terrorist attacks have been carried out by different
groups, despite the tendency to rally about the brand
name of Al-Qaeda’. But why do three out of four
terrorist attacks target cities (Body-Gendrot, 2012:
68)? Put simply, ‘Terrorists target global and major
cities because these offer the best returns: lives,
resources and media attention’ (ibid.). Capital cities
are disproportionately favoured for this reason, but
in all countries Savitch found that over a period of
eight years, 27 cities experienced 1,652 incidents –
with the degree of lethality increasing year on year
(H. V. Savitch, 2008 in Body-Gendrot, 2012: 68).
During the 1970s when both nationalist and far
left and far right revolutionary armed groups were
196
active in several countries in Europe (and to a much
lesser extent in North America), with the exception
of the clandestine armed Palestinian groups (Black
September, the PFLP etc.), organised terror
campaigns in cities of the Global South were relatively
uncommon. By the 1990s this pattern had begun to
reverse, with a rapid growth in urban terrorist attacks
targeted at cities in Asia, the Middle East, Africa,
Latin America and the former states of the Soviet
Union. No one common theme explains this growth
and there are considerable variations in terms of the
make-up and motives of different armed groups
even within the same region. At the same time,
greater access to weaponry, explosives and associated
command and control technology along with more
sophisticated reconnaissance and evasion training has
made it easier for terror organisations to operate
clandestinely and to carry out increasingly more high
intensity and devastating attacks with more numbers
of participants than in the past.
According to the Milken Institute, ‘terrorism is
. . . associated with adverse economic effect. In gen-
eral, terrorist incidents have a negative and signifi-
cant impact on economic growth’. In the case of the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
on 11 September 2001 ‘the International Monetary
Fund (2001) estimated the direct costs as equal to
$21.4 billion (or 0.22 per cent of GDP), while
Navarro and Spencer (2001) indicate that the loss of
capital stock was $50 billion to $53 billion (or 0.51
to 0.54 per cent of GDP)’ (Barth et al., 2006: 6).
Testifying in front of the Committee on Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs of the United
States Senate, Brian Jenkins on behalf of the RAND
Corporation, argued that the Mumbai terrorist
attacks of 26–29 November 2008 represented a step
change in terms of the capacity of terror groups ‘to
achieve multiple objectives’.
They were able to capture and hold international
attention. They sought to exacerbate communal
tensions in India and provoke a crisis between
India and Pakistan, thereby persuading Pakistan
to redeploy troops to its frontier with India,
which in turn would take pressure off of the

Taliban, al Qaeda, and other groups operating
along the Afghan frontier. All terrorist attacks
are recruiting posters. The Mumbai attackers
established their terrorist credentials and now
rival al Qaeda in reputation.
(Jenkins, 2009: 1–2)
Caren Kaplan appears to concur with this analysis
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The attacks in Mumbai in late November 2008
could be viewed as yet another eruption of vio-
lence in an escalating series of such events in one
of the more iconic sites of metropolitan moder-
nity in South Asia. But defense analysts have
argued that the attacks demonstrated a shift in
tactics from the more common hostage situation
EXHIBIT 10.5 ‘INDIA’S 9/11’: THE MUMBAI ATTACKS OF
26–29 NOVEMBER 2008
On 26 November 2008, according to the Indian autho-
rities, after capturing an Indian fishing trawler and
subsequently executing four of its crew, five pairs of
armed militants from the Pakistan based jihadist
group Lashkar-e-Taiba transferred to a high speed
dinghy off the coast of Mumbai and successfully entered
the city just before 9.00 pm local time. In the ensuing
bomb, grenade, and firearms attacks, the Mumbai
Police Department’s Chief Investigating Officer’s
report recorded that a total of 166 citizens from India,
the UK, the United States of America, Israel and other
countries were killed and 304 citizens were wounded
(although other news sources have reported a final
death toll ranging from 164 to 173). Damage to
public and private property was extensive and was esti-
mated at over $482 million, not including the virtual
destruction of the Taj Mahal hotel where 36 guests
including nine foreign nationals died. It took India’s
National Security Guard Commandos 59 hours to sub-
due the attackers and to release the remaining staff and
guests from the hotel. In the attack on the Hotel Oberoi
and Hotel Trident 35 people, including nine foreigners
CITIES UNDER STRESS
or suicide bombing to highly orchestrated
multiple actions made possible by mobile net-
works and technologies.
(Kaplan, 2010: 303)
Although the Mumbai attackers’ communications
technology and weaponry was not of a sophistication
available to most national military personnel, it was
certainly sufficient for 10 men to pin down an entire
city for several days (see Exhibit 10.5).
In September 2013, a well-organised armed attack
on a popular upscale shopping mall in Nairobi was
attributed to the Somalia based Al-Qaeda affiliate Al
Shabab who were thought to be acting in revenge
against the coordinated campaign launched by the
Somali and Kenyan military in 2011 to eliminate the
were killed and 24 guests including five foreigners and
four security staff were injured. A further two German
tourists were killed and nine more tourists were injured
in the attack on the Leopold Café, while five Israeli
nationals were killed at a Chabad House popular with
young Israeli backpackers. Indian police and security
forces reported that the attackers stayed in regular
contact with their commanders through the use of a
satellite phone and cell phones. False reports were
circulated to the local media by the attackers in an
effort to confuse the security forces and to cause the
maximum panic and disorder. At the end of the three-
day sustained attack, which involved a lock-down of
large parts of Mumbai, the security forces killed nine of
the attackers. The one survivor, Mohammed Ajmal
Kasab, was found guilty of multiple counts of homicide
and other related offences. He was sentenced to death
by the court and hanged on 21 November 2012, nearly
four years after the Mumbai attacks.
Sources: Compiled from various media sources and ‘Final
Report: Mumbai Terror Attack Cases’ by Ashok T. Duraphe
Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mumbai, 26th November
2008’, 25th February, 2009.
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 CITIES UNDER STRESS
Islamist insurgents in the southern region of Somalia.
The assault on the Westgate Mall followed a similar
pattern to the Mumbai attacks in that it involved
several gunmen using high calibre assault weapons
(AK47s) and grenades to overpower lightly armed
security guards, the deliberate targeting of non-
Muslim civilians and foreigners, hostage taking, the
outbreak of fires (in this case most likely due to
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security force explosives) and a protracted shoot out
with security forces (for more than 80 hours) aimed
at causing maximum injury and loss of life. The
attackers also appear to have been using an Al Shabab
social media account from a ‘command and control’
centre in the basement car park of the mall to publicise
the ongoing attacks. In total 61 civilians were killed,
18 of whom were foreign nationals, along with six
security personnel and, according to the Kenyan
authorities, four of the estimated eight attackers
(three of whom appear to have died from smoke
inhalation). A further 175 people suffered injuries.101
Cities in the Global South are more prone to
terrorist attacks and suffer greater casualties than the
more effectively policed and defended skies and
streets of the Western metropolis – 9/11 being a
spectacular exception. As one investigation into the
2013 Nairobi Westgate Mall attack by the Guardian
noted, there was ‘a woefully disorganised response
from authorities, where infighting and a clash of egos
left a handful of Kenyan officers, an off-duty British
soldier and an Israeli security agent, backed by
Kenyan-Indian vigilantes, to fight heavily armed
militants in a bid to rescue hundreds of shoppers’.
Urban populations outside the West are also
victim to nearly all of the counter-terrorist violence
that is directed against threat targets by domestic and
foreign (predominantly US) military and intelligence
commands. Because it is relatively easy for armed
non-state actors to operate clandestinely in large
cities and to choose the time and the means of attack
to suit their purpose, military strategists have argued
that the urban environment has the effect of evening
up the disadvantages that anti-state insurgents face in
terms of personnel and materiel (Graham, 2010:
xiv–xv). In order to successfully prosecute an
increasingly urbanised ‘war on terror’ such strategists
198
argue that terror suspects must be made to feel that
the urban environment offers them no protection
from, for example, unmanned combat aerial vehicles
(UCAVs or drones) which have been used extensively
by the US military in combat operations targeting
Al-Qaeda and its offshoots and affiliates in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and the Yemen
as well as by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories and Lebanon. Stephen Graham quotes
American military theorist, Thomas Hammes, who
argues that the key to fighting ‘fourth generational
war’ is to understand that ‘superior political will,
when properly employed, can defeat greater
economic and military power’, to which the solution
in Hammes’ view is to coordinate
the entire ‘battlespace’ of the city – addressing
civilian infrastructure and the shattered eco-
nomy, strengthening cultural awareness, and
using ‘the controlled application of violence’ to
try to secure the city.
(Graham, 2010: 27–28)
The key to urban battlespace dominance is what
Weizman (2007) calls ‘the politics of verticality’,
which allows for a constantly updated panoptic
survey of the territory that is generally denied to
adversaries who are forced to operate in two-
dimensional space (Wall and Monahan, 2011).
Hence the increasing use of surveillance helicopters
and aircraft by police forces and the use of remote
satellite imaging devices by the world’s military. The
consequences of using UCAV mounted military
weaponry in densely populated urban settings has led
to a massively high preponderance of associated
casualties in relation to US alleged high value
terrorist targets – by a factor of 50:1 according to
one report.102 This is more than fifteen times higher
than the ‘Pi collateral damage’ quotient that Daniel
Reisner, the ex-head of the International Law
Division of the Israeli military, calculated as being an
acceptable threshold for collateral deaths in targeted
assassination operations (Weizman, 2011: 13).103
Mary Ellen O’Connell, a law professor at Notre
Dame University contends that CIA drone operations

in Pakistan violate international law and that, ‘The
United States has gone far beyond what the U.S.
public – and perhaps even Congress – understands
the government has been doing and claiming they
have a legal right to do.’104 State conducted urban
warfare on foreign targets has therefore created a per-
manent ‘state of exception’ (Agamben, 2005)
wherein homicide can be conducted by executive
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order without the prospect of any judicial sanction or
even indictment in a court of law. ‘When boundaries
become this porous, and when the United States and
its allies claim an unlimited right to undermine abso-
lute sovereignty’, writes Stuart Elden, ‘internal com-
petence cannot be preserved’ (Elden, 2009: 177).
The populations that surround suspected terrorist
targets often feel themselves to be more at risk from
counter-terrorist operations than from local armed
groups. The fact that their governments – elected or
not – are unwilling or unable to stop drone killings
and other forms of targeted assassinations, provides
justification to those who claim that the state has
neither authority nor legitimacy and must be
replaced.
In the case of drone surveillance in combat set-
tings, the exclusionary politics of omniscient
vision not only harm ethnic and cultural others
with great prejudice, but they also instigate an
additional violence of radically homogenizing
local difference, lumping together innocent
civilians with enemy combatants, women and
children with wanted terrorist leaders.
(Wall and Monahan, 2011: 243)
Yet even in this critical assessment of modern urban
counter-terrorism there is an implied assumption
that the differences between ‘terrorists’ and ‘civil-
ians’ are meaningful and robust, when in fact such
labels are intrinsically normative and prone to expan-
sion or contraction depending on strategic military
and political priorities. How we measure the ‘terror-
ism’ resilience of a town in northern Waziristan to,
for example, London or Boston, Massachusetts
would require very different assessments as to who
or what poses a violent threat and whether local and
CITIES UNDER STRESS
international state purveyors of violence are benign
or malign in their intentions.
To those who have lost loved ones and neighbours
to hellfire missile attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and
the Yemen, the United States is regarded as a terror
state.105 Whereas to many of the families of the
victims of the September 2001 attacks in New York
and Washington, the July 2005 public transport
bombings in London and the Boston Marathon
bombing of April 2013, the counter-terror response
of national security services has been seen as
insufficiently robust, leaving the city’s population
exposed and vulnerable to the soft-targeting of both
foreign and home grown jihadists.
In contrast to New York, Boston or London,
however, the ordinary resident of Baghdad,
Damascus or Kabul lives with the daily threat of a car
bomb or improvised explosive device (IED) killing
or injuring them or their friends and family. Indeed
in consideration of the threat to life that asylum seek-
ers may face if returned to conflict zones such as
Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia or Syria courts in coun-
tries that are signatories to human rights, refugee and
humanitarian protection treaties must give regard to
the risk of death or injury from non-state or state
violence that a returnee would face (UNHCR,
2013).
In 2013, the United Nations Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported a total of 8,615
civilian casualties including 2,959 deaths and 5,656
injuries. These attacks were predominantly carried
out in urban areas, which accounted for 2,311 civilian
deaths and 4,063 civilian injuries. Despite the
continuing presence of ISAF (International Security
Assistance Force) military forces in Afghanistan, the
number of civilian casualties has steadily increased
since 2009. While most of the casualties resulted
from indiscriminate and unlawful use of IEDs, pro-
government forces are believed to have caused 11 per
cent of all civilian casualties in 2013 amounting to
956 civilian casualties (341 deaths and 615 injured),
a 59 per cent increase compared with 2012. The
remaining conflict casualties were attributed to
ground fire exchange between the combatants and
targeted killings by Anti-Government Elements. To
199
 CITIES UNDER STRESS
put these figures for just 12 months into perspective,
the cumulative total of deaths resulting from the
actions of Republican and Loyalist armed groups and
the British security forces in Northern Ireland over
the span of four decades from 1969–2010 amounted
to 3,568.106
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CIVIL WAR AND INTER-
COMMUNAL VIOLENCE
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo region of
central Africa, a continental war has been raging
since the mid-1990s at the cost of an estimated
5.4 million lives and the displacement of more than
2.2 million people. The prospects for de-escalating
this violence are remote given the large numbers of
regular and irregular armed forces that operate with
little apparent interference by the UN forces that are
meant to be protecting the civilian population. Mass
rapes and summary executions have been widely
reported in rebel occupied territories, and cities
which once offered a sanctuary to vulnerable
populations now appear to be little more than prison
camps where the powerless populations wait
anxiously to see which armed faction will take
control of their fates and collective futures.107
Even the DRC capital, Kinshasa, which should be
a stronghold of government security forces is regu-
larly subject to rebel attacks including the airport and
state television station.108 Many other sub-Saharan
African cities have become battlegrounds for com-
peting warring factions, prompting in some cases the
military intervention of former colonial powers in
the case of Sierra Leone (Britain) and Chad, Mali and
the Central African Republic (France). A combina-
tion of weak states, powerful mobilising ideologies
such as radical Islam (in the case of Al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb [AQIM], Al Shabab, Boko Haram
and Ansar Dine), resource conflicts over minerals
and precious stones, and the ready availability of
weaponry combined with the lack of employment for
Africa’s large population of young, single men has
created plentiful opportunities for entrepreneurs of
collective violence to threaten, attack, control and
exploit vulnerable urban populations.
200
Thus when we talk about vulnerability and
resilience to state and non-state violence in the urban
context we have to pay close attention to broader
geopolitical dynamics – the extent to which the
territorial state enjoys an effective monopoly of
violence, the ability of the state to enforce its
sovereignty vis-à-vis other states and their militaries,
the degree to which civilians are protected from both
state and non-state perpetrators of violence and how
life limiting the presence of violence is for different
urban communities (Fluri, 2011) – especially those
for whom there is no green zone to work and play in
behind the compound walls.
Although terrorism and targeted military violence
has made the idea of the ‘city of refuge’ increasingly
questionable, for those escaping war, persecution and
economic hardship, despite the risks and dangers, it is
to the city that those seeking sanctuary continue to
turn. One of the major obstacles to the right to the
city is hostility to newcomers from ‘settled popula-
tions’ (even though only a small fraction of the popu-
lation of the world’s metropolises can claim a constant
intergenerational presence within a particular city).
The greater economic and educational opportunities
as well as access to better healthcare and other welfare
services explains why both internal and international
migrants are more likely to seek residence in towns
and cities. Because larger cities tend to be more
culturally diverse and to have pre-existing migrant
populations, migrants are also likely to find a greater
degree of acceptance and tolerance than in more rural
and culturally homogenous environments.
However, the increasing degree of mobility and
urbanisation is leading to pressures on infrastructure,
environment and labour markets that cities,
especially in the Global South are struggling to
manage. Even in post-apartheid South Africa, where
the ruling ANC government has declared its enduring
commitment to the constitutional principle of non-
racialism, the 2006 Southern African Migration
Project’s (SAMP) Xenophobia Survey found that
South Africa exhibits levels of intolerance and
hostility to outsiders that were more elevated than in
other parts of the world. Rather disturbingly for
advocates of a tolerant and inclusive South Africa,

attitudes appear to have hardened in the post-
apartheid period (Crush et al., 2013).
Many South Africans according to the 2010 SAMP
survey wanted to see immigration stopped altogether,
while 30 per cent of the population supported a
complete ban on all migration to the country for
work – a figure that was higher than for any other
country surveyed. There is some evidence that
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support for the exclusion of migrants may be
diminishing in certain aspects, however. In 2010,
SAMP reported that close to one-third wanted
refugees to live in border camps. Support for this
discriminatory policy has dropped from nearly 50
per cent in the previous survey (Crush et al., 2013:
3). Yet at the same time more than 60 per cent of
respondents thought that violence against migrants
occurred because of migrants’ involvement in crime
or because they take jobs from South Africans or are
culturally different.109 That this sentiment should be
expressed so soon after the communal violence
against refugees in Greater Johannesburg in May
2008 when over 40 migrants lost their lives,
underlines a widespread tolerance of the use of
violence against non-South African residents in
unprotected urban and peri-urban locales.110 The
survey also found that a quarter of South Africans
‘were willing to prevent migrants from moving into
their neighbourhood and some 20 percent would
take action to prevent the enrolment of children
from migrant families in the same schools as theirs’.111
This aversion to immigrants among the general
population is also echoed at an official level in terms
of the absence of support and even the institution of
a deliberately hostile environment for urban
migrants. The South African Ministry of Trade and
Industry’s Licensing of Businesses Bill aimed at giving
‘the police and citizens new powers to harass and
destroy the operations of migrant-owned small
business’, and this state sanctioned attack on the
ability of migrants to earn a livelihood comes in the
wake of arson attacks on migrant businesses, violent
assaults and even murders.112
State sponsored xenophobia is one area of state–
society relations in which the Global South and the
Global North appear to be converging. In many
CITIES UNDER STRESS
countries of the Global North, the rights of non-
citizens to employment, housing, education, welfare,
legal advice and health care – especially those
designated as not lawfully present – have become
systematically eroded. This has particular
consequences for the right to the city due to the
greater concentration of migrant populations in
metropolitan centres, as we noted in Chapters 3 and
5. At the same time, support for anti-immigrant
parties is rising in Europe and many other parts of the
world, and calls for limits on the rights of migrants
and for tougher sanctions on those migrants and
asylum seekers who the state considers ‘illegal’ are
becoming more common across the European
Union.113 As a consequence, the routes for legal
migration and humanitarian protection have become
increasingly closed off so that migrants who are
desperate enough to make the journey are forced to
put their lives into the hands of traffickers. Those
who survive detection or injury and even death along
the way are obliged to live in the margins of society,
in the grey or black economy, ever fearful of
discovery (Bloch, 2010).
ECONOMIC VULNERABILITY
AND SUSTAINABILITY
The global financial crash that unfolded with such
speed and drama in September 2008 (see Chapter 12)
had some unexpected and certainly unintended con-
sequences for the cities of the developed world. The
long-term consequences of the financial crash are only
just beginning to reveal themselves in the urban con-
text, but it is now clear that those cities and regions
that were at the top of the global urban hierarchy have
become even more dominant and in command of a
larger share of GNP, whereas cities and regions that
were faring badly prior to the crash have experienced
an accelerated decline. In other words, the sudden
tightening of credit and more austere fiscal regimes in
many national contexts has served to exacerbate the
uneven geographies of labour markets, regional
investment, infrastructure development, property
values and inward migration in and between diverse
urban regions.
201
 CITIES UNDER STRESS
As Jamie Peck (2012: 627) notes, ‘[t]he US
Government Accountability Office has estimated
that property-tax receipts (which historically account
for around one-third of local government revenues)
will not return to 2009 levels until 2039’. In order
to close the income gap, the GAO estimates ‘that
local government expenditures will have to be
reduced by 12.7% per year, every year to 2062’.
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This puts in prospect an extraordinary, inter-
generational commitment to continuing austerity for
the municipalities of the world’s richest nation. It
means that there will be a progressive and significant
loss of public services and amenities, which will
become increasingly geographically stratified. As
Lobao and Adua write
The future response to downturns is likely to
involve increasing stratification among local
governments within the same region/state and
in turn stratification of populations into places
that offer high capacity, expert government and
strong protection of public well-being versus
those that do not.
(Lobao and Adua, 2011: 433
cited in Peck, 2012: 632)
The disinvestment in declining cities by both public
authorities and private sector enterprises not only
results in a contracting economy, it also leads to loss
of population as residents are forced to relocate in
search of jobs, better education and training, more
adequate local services and amenities, and business
opportunities. As many as 370 cities around the
world with populations of more than 100,000 have
seen their population shrink by at least 10 per cent
over the past 50 years (Oswalt and Rieniets, 2007 in
Hollander, 2013: 133).
Detroit, Michigan is one of the United State’s
fastest shrinking cities. As Richard Florida notes
(Florida, 2010: 73), the city has lost nearly a million
inhabitants since its peak in the middle of the
twentieth century, and in 2000 the population of the
City of Detroit fell just below a million and lost
another quarter of its population in the ensuing
decade. 70,000 abandoned properties are testimony
202
to the economic collapse of the central city, and
without residents and businesses able to pay taxes a
vicious spiral of declining income has combined with
the continuing high costs of servicing a highly
deprived population while seeking to maintain an
ageing infrastructure designed for a much larger
population. After several months of state imposed
emergency government, in July 2013 Detroit finally
decided to file for bankruptcy, citing $18 billion
worth of debt. Its state-appointed emergency
manager, Kevyn Orr threatened ‘haircuts’ for
municipal bond holders but also redundancies and
pension withholdings for municipal workers. By
the following December a federal judge gave
the go-ahead to the City of Detroit to shed its debts
and the city’s manager declared his intention ‘to
monetize the Detroit Institute of Arts’ – in other
words to sell off the city’s most valuable art holdings
including unique works by Van Gogh, Matisse and
Rivera.114
Vast movie theatres, towering art deco office
buildings, even the city’s main railway station now
lie abandoned to the elements, their crumbling
architecture a ghostly reminder of a city that
epitomised the mass production model of auto-
motive engineering that was to assure its corporate
behemoths – Ford, Chrysler and General Motors –
dominated not just American car showrooms but the
global demand for automobiles from the 1920s to the
1970s. The story of the Detroit auto industry is also
inevitably the story of the crisis of the mode of
regulation to which the city’s most famous son lent
his name – Fordism. Although the American car
buyer has been unusually loyal to the large, heavy,
fuel hungry automobiles that Detroit has traditionally
manufactured, the arrival of less expensive, more
reliable and more economical cars from Japan and
Korea, many of which are now manufactured in less
unionised, smaller cities in the south and in
neighbouring states such as Indiana and Ohio, has
encouraged American manufacturers to offshore
more of their production, and to reduce salaries and
benefits in order to cut costs. Richard Florida claims
that Detroit’s problems can be summed up fairly
straightforwardly:

The devastation of Detroit may be rooted in
the inability of the U.S. auto industry to remain
competitive, but the city’s sprawling, highly
segregated economic landscape allowed the tre-
mendous misery to become concentrated in the
city’s almost completely hollowed-out core.
(Florida, 2010: 78–79)
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Or to put it in terms that students of William Julius
Wilson and Loïc Wacquant would be more familiar
with, the ghettoisation of the urban black working
class in the industrial metropolises of the United
States and their lack of social and economic mobility
allowed the ‘hollowing out’ of the metropolitan core
of cities like Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland to occur
with far less political repercussions than would have
been the case in more economically and racially
diverse communities (see Chapter 5).
CONCLUSION
In the light of the 9/11, 7/7 and 26/11 terror attacks
in New York, London and Mumbai, the devastating
impact of severe weather events and natural disasters
such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane
Katrina and Super Cyclone Haiyan, the advent
of global disease pandemics such as SARS, and the
ongoing impact of the 2008 global financial crash,
there has been an increased interest and focus on
how policy makers and urban stakeholders can
make cities more resilient to a range of environ-
mental and human threats that appear to be increas-
ing as a consequence of longer term trends such
as climate change, urbanisation and globalisation.
Resilience is defined by the International Panel on
Climate Change as
the ability of a system and its component parts
to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover
from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely
and efficient manner, including through ensur-
ing the preservation, restoration, or improve-
ment of its essential basic structures and
functions.
(IPCC, 2012: 3)
CITIES UNDER STRESS
Another way of thinking about resilience is in terms
of adaptive capacity, which draws attention to the
ability of actors to utilise social and physical resources
to make changes, thereby linking resilience to vul-
nerability (Nelson et al., 2007). Although resilience
and adaptive capacity are associated with a contested,
complex and multi-dimensional range of variables,
there are four key characteristics that planners and
policy-makers would generally recognise:
(1) Learning to live with change and uncertainty
(learning from crises and expecting the unex-
pected).
(2) Nurturing diversity for reorganization and
renewal (sustaining and enhancing social and
ecological resources and memory).
(3) Combining different types of knowledge for
learning (experiential and experimental, formal
and informal).
(4) Creating opportunity for self-organization
(recognizing cross-scale dynamics and account-
ing for external drivers).
(Folke, Colding and Berkes, 2002)
The threat of violent terrorist attack remains a major
source of concern for urban governments, public
authorities and law enforcement agencies around the
world, especially with regard to the potential use of
chemical, biological and nuclear weaponry (Coaffee
and Rogers, 2008; Moran et al., 2008). At the
same time, human rights and civil rights organisa-
tions warn that international law and basic civil
liberties are being regularly compromised in the pur-
suit of counter-terrorism, even by countries that
present themselves as champions of freedom and
democracy. The quest for urban security is increas-
ingly presented as an asymmetric war fought by state
agencies against opponents that seek to appear as
everyday civilians in order to avoid detection. The
city is therefore both a refuge and a target for non-
state organised violent groups as well as the new
front line in what George W. Bush announced as the
‘war on terror’ in the aftermath of September 11
2001. But the consequences of the exceptional state
force and surveillance unleashed by 9/11 extend far
203
 CITIES UNDER STRESS
beyond the deaths and casualties of terrorist suspects
and their associates to include potentially entire
urban populations.
The risks to urban information and communi-
cation systems, and to transport and energy supply
systems from cyber attacks, whether by hostile state
or non-state actors, is a mounting concern for those
tasked with safeguarding the integrity of networked
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infrastuctures. Increasingly sophisticated computer
viruses and remote intrusion technology are capable
of switching off a city’s power supply far more
quickly and effectively than the deployment of kinetic
military force. Non-deliberate systems breakdown
resulting from key component or software failure or
from the over-stressing of weak links in the network
can also lead to cascading failures that are potentially
just as devastating as deliberate acts of sabotage. As
Peerenboom and Fisher write
The August 14, 2003, blackout, in which
large portions of the Midwest and Northeast
United States and Ontario, Canada, experienced
an electric power outage, dramatically illus-
trated the enormously complex technical
EXHIBIT 10.6 CHARACTERISTICS OF RESILIENT SYSTEMS
„ Flexibility and diversity: The ability to perform
essential tasks under a wide range of conditions,
and to convert assets or modify structures to
introduce new ways of doing so. A resilient system
has key assets and functions physically distrib-
uted so that they are not all affected by a given
event at any one time (spatial diversity) and has
multiple ways of meeting a given need (functional
diversity).
„ Redundancy, modularity: Spare capacity for con-
tingency situations, to accommodate increasing
or extreme surge pressures or demand; multiple
pathways and a variety of options for service
delivery; or interacting components composed of
similar parts that can replace each other if one,
204
challenge that we face in preventing cascading
impacts.
(Peerenboom and Fisher, 2007: 1)
Michael Welch, a Deputy Assistant Director of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that in 2011
the municipal infrastructures of three US cities were
compromised by cyber attacks, describing the breach
as ‘an ego trip for a hacker who had control of a major
city’s critical systems’ (Rudner, 2013: 465). As
Rudner goes on to observe, ‘the protection of critical
infrastructures and information systems against
cyber-threats is now rapidly being re-conceptualized
as constituting the defense of an information-based
society as a whole – a national security consideration’
(ibid.: 469). Coping with multiple and compounding
threats to the viability or urban systems has promoted
a greater focus on the vulnerability and resilience of
urban infrastructures, environments and their
respective populations.
Tyler and Moench identify three broad
characteristics of ‘resilient systems’ (see Exhibit 10.6)
which cities under stress need to manifest in order to
survive the range of hazards and challenges that
or even many, fail. Redundancy is also supported
by the presence of buffer stocks within systems
that can compensate if flows are disrupted (e.g.
local water or food supplies to buffer imports).
„ Safe failure: Ability to absorb sudden shocks
(including those that exceed design thresholds) or
the cumulative effects of slow-onset stress in
ways that avoid catastrophic failure. Safe failure
also refers to the interdependence of various sys-
tems, which support each other; failures in one
structure or linkage being unlikely to result in
cascading impacts across other systems (Little,
2002).
Source: from Tyler and Moench, 2012: 313.

confront urban societies in the twenty-first century.
However, we can see how exposed and vulnerable
even cities and urban regions in the Global North are
to extreme weather and seismic events (cyclones,
droughts, earthquakes, floods, landslides and
volcanoes) (see Table 10.1 above).
As we noted earlier in this chapter, the Fukushima
nuclear power plant failure was a textbook example
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of unsafe failure, despite seismic analysis that showed
the high risk of a major tsunami overwhelming that
part of the Japanese coastline. In New Orleans, the
failure to adequately strengthen the levee system and
to implement mass evacuation plans in the days
before Hurricane Katrina struck, significantly
contributed to the loss of life and the mass
displacement of flood affected residents (Moreau,
2006; CREW, 2007). But when Hurricane/Super
Storm Sandy battered the coastline of New York
State, the relatively small number of casualties and
the successful evacuation of the most exposed
residents by the civil and military authorities proved
that with the right political will and resources, severe
life threatening weather events can be successfully
overcome.
The increasing focus in the urban planning and
policy literature on vulnerability and resilience is not
the brash, utopian language of high modernism that
we encountered in Chapter 4 with its ambitious
visions for the tamed and manicured landscapes of
the Garden City and the functionally planned
metropolitan region. Rather it heralds a more
resigned – even fatalistic – acknowledgment of the
exhaustibility of natural resources, the threats posed
to human habitats by the natural environment, the
inherent nature of human conflict and the need for
cooperative stewardship of the global urban
commons.
As earthquakes and severe weather events,
networked disease outbreaks, civil disorder and
political violence appear to be increasing the risk of
threats to lives, environments and infrastructure in
many urban centres,115 city authorities are beginning
to routinise civil protection measures that were once
regarded as war time emergencies such as the
evacuation of entire urban populations, rapid
CITIES UNDER STRESS
reaction mass vaccinations, food and fuel rationing
and the introduction of emergency police and
military powers.
At the same time, more structural features of
urban stress such as rising income inequality and the
geographical concentration of poverty are also
becoming entwined in a discursive formation of
resilience that critics regard as a neoliberal short-
hand for abjuring state responsibility for the provision
of welfare and public goods.116 ‘While the existence
of engaged social networks help foster adaptive
capacity and enhance transformative resilience’,
Simin Davoudi argues, this ‘is not a substitute for
responsive and accountable governance’.
Advocating the rolling back of the state’s sup-
port for vulnerable communities in the name of
resilience is a misguided translation of self-
organisation in ecological systems into self-
reliance in social systems: it advocates a kind of
social Darwinism.
(Davoudi, 2012: 305)
Writers like Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore and Neil
Brenner would certainly see such Social Darwinist
justifications for urban triage as a dominant motif
within urban public policy discourses that identify
uneven spatial development and urban ‘creative
destruction’ as inevitable and necessary for the
purposes of economic growth and labour market
restructuring (Peck et al., 2009).
But amidst all the somewhat Cassandra like
predictions of environmental, economic and civic
catastrophe, can we still imagine cities as potentially
giving rise to a renaissance of human civilisation as
modernist visionaries such as Howard and Le
Corbusier and Wright believed?
While there is an ample and growing literature on
all of the major challenges facing cities that we have
explored in this chapter, urban studies has been less
successful in developing tools for understanding the
cascading effects of these multiple threats to urban
vulnerability. So, for example, we do not know if the
effects of climate change in forcing more people off
the land and into already overcrowded cities will
205
 CITIES UNDER STRESS
further impoverish these urban populations leading
to greater conflict and violence – some of which may
take a terrorist form and circulate to other parts of
the globe. Despite these risks, James Lovelock – the
inventor of the Gaia hypothesis – believes that the
only way human life on earth can survive the impact
of climate change on natural resources and food
production is to concentrate its population within
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cities (Lovelock, 2014). If more effort is put into
supporting and sustaining good government and to
empowering local populations – especially women
– there is good evidence to suggest that such a vicious
spiral is far from inevitable and that collective
solutions to conflict driven, environmental,
economic and public health threats can be successfully
implemented.
Notes
85 Michael Safier pointed to no fewer than 30 cities around the
world that had recently experienced or were experiencing
collective cultural conflicts in the 1990s (Safier, 1996).
86 According to a 2013 Transparency International survey,
‘54 per cent of people think that the government is either
largely or entirely captured by self-interested groups,
rather than being run for the benefit of the public at large’.
The police, judiciary and political parties are most often
cited as corrupt institutions, while 1 in 5 respondents
reported paying a bribe for land services in the past 12 mon-
ths. Transparency International (2013) Global Corruption
Barometer 2013, Berlin, pp.11 and 14.
87 Partners & Youth Section, Urban Secretariat, UN-HABITAT,
‘UN-HABITAT’s Policy Statement on Partnerships with
NGOs & Civil Society Organizations’, January 2003, http://
www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/372-UN-
HABITAT_S_POLICY_ON_PARTNERSHIPS_WITH_
CIVIL_SOCIETY-cso_policy.doc.
88 UN-Habitat/UNEP Press Release, 8 February 2000.
89 Victoria Transport Planning Institute, 2003. Based on
reports by the Texas Transportation Institute which sho-
wed that in the 68 major urban regions in the US in 1999,
congestion costs were $78 billion – equivalent to 4.8 billion
hours of delay and 6.8 billion gallons of excess fuel con-
sumed. The figure of $100 billion is arrived at by estimating
the congestion costs for the areas not covered by the study.
See David Schrank and Tim Lomax, Urban Mobility Study,
Texas Transportation Institute, 2001.
90 International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
Societies, ‘Typhoon Haiyan’, http://www.ifrc.org/what-
206
we-do/disaster-management/responding/ongoing-opera-
tions/typhoon-haiyan/.
91 ‘Evacuation Saves Whole Island from Typhoon Haiyan’,
http://www.unisdr.org/archive/35524.
92 ‘IPCC Report: Australia can Expect 6C Rise on Hottest
Days’, Guardian, 27 September, 2013, http://www.
theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/27/climate-
change-report-hotter-australia.
93 Economist Intelligence Unit, ‘Breaking New Ground:
A Special Report on Global Shale-Gas Developments’,
2011.
94 Amnesty International, ‘Haiti: Three Years on from
Earthquake Housing Situation Catastrophic’, 11 January
2013, http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-
releases/haiti-three-years-earthquake-housing-situation-
catastrophic-2013-01-11.
95 Ibid.
96 S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS),
Nanyang Technological University, Seminar on ‘Lessons
from Disaster – Risk Management and the Compound
Crisis Presented by the Great East Japan Earthquake’, 4
May 2012, http://www.rsis.edu.sg/nts/article.
asp?id=208.
97 ‘Tokyo Threat: Is a Massive Earthquake on the Way?’ The
Irish Times, 30 January 2014, http://www.irishtimes.
com/news/education/tokyo-threat-is-a-massive-ear-
thquake-on-the-way-1.1672212.
98 Dmitry Travin, ‘Rich Cities and Dying Company Towns’,
openDemocracy, 6 February 2014, http://www.opendemo-
cracy.net/od-russia/dmitry-travin/rich-cities-and-dying-
company-towns.
99 ‘Cities and Emerging or Re-Emerging Diseases in The
XXIst Century’, June 1996, WHO information factsheet,
http://www.who.int/inf-fs/en/fact122.html.
100 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ‘Preparing for
a Bombing: A Common Sense Approach’, http://
emergency.cdc.gov/masscasualties/preparingterrorist-
bombing.asp.
101 Daniel Howden, ‘Terror in Westgate Mall: The Full Story
of the Attacks that Devastated Kenya’, Guardian, 4 October
2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/
2013/oct/04/westgate-mall-attacks-kenya-terror#
undefined.
102 ‘Outrage at CIA’s Deadly “Double Tap” Drone Attacks’,
The Independent, 25 September 2012. A McClatchy Report
which claims to have been based on US intelligence reports
of drone strikes between 2006 and 2008 and 2010 and 2011
found that only six out of 482 deaths were senior Al-Qaeda
figures. Others were ‘assessed’ as Afghan, Pakistani and
unknown extremists, Jonathan S. Landay, ‘Obama’s Drone
War Kills “Others”, not just al Qaida Leaders’, http://
www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/09/188062/obamas-
drone-war-kills-others.html§orylink=cpy http://www.

mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/09/188062/obamas-drone-
war-kills-others.html.
Civilian victims of drone attacks appear not to feature in
official reports but the United Nations Special Rapporteur
on the promotion and protection of human rights and fun-
damental freedoms while countering terrorism, Ben
Emmerson, reported Pakistan government claims that ‘at
least 400 civilians had been killed as a result of remotely
piloted aircraft strikes and a further 200 individuals [killed]
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were regarded as probably non-combatants’, adding that
Pakistan officials believed the figures to be an underesti-
mate due to ‘underreporting and obstacles to effective
investigation’, http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/
sections/news/UN_Drones_Report.pdf.
103 After consulting with a number of experts in law and mili-
tary ethics, Reisner asked his colleagues to write down a
number that they believed was a justified proportion of civi-
lian to militant deaths. The numbers were counted and
calculated and the resulting average turned out to be
3.14 or the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its
radius, more commonly expressed as r (Weizman, 2011:
13). In the two most recent military operations in Gaza –
Operation Cast Lead and Operation Protective Edge – the
civilian to combatant ratios appear to have fluctuated
between just under 4:1 to just over 2.5:1 but with higher
overall civilian casualties, infrastructure damage and forced
displacement in the most recent conflict. These include
352 combatant to 1,398 non-combatant deaths in 2008 and
558 combatant to 1,417 non-combatant deaths in 2014
(up to August 15). However, since the Israeli government
disputes the classification and counting of conflict deaths by
the Palestinian authorities (and vice versa), it is very
unlikely that the two sides will ever agree on the number of
combatant to non-combatant casualties. Sources: http://
www.unrwa.org/newsroom/emergency-reports/gaza-
situation-report-38, http://www.btselem.org/statistics/
fatalities/during-cast-lead/by-date-of-event.
104 Landay, op. cit.
105 For a revealing account of how such attacks are experienced by
the targeted communities, see Jeremy Scahill’s Oscar nomina-
ted documentary, ‘Dirty Wars’, http://dirtywars.org/.
106 ‘Deaths in the Northern Ireland Conflict Since 1969’,
Guardian Data Blog, 10 June 2010, http://www.
theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jun/10/deaths-
in-northern-ireland-conflict-data.
107 International Rescue Committee, ‘Special Report: Congo’,
http://www.rescue.org/special-reports/special-report-
congo-y. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), ‘2013 UNHCR Country Operations Profile –
Democratic Republic of the Congo’, http://www.unhcr.
org/pages/49e45c366.html.
108 Bienvenu Bakumanya, ‘Congo’s Army Repels Attacks in
Kinshasa, Dozens Killed’, Reuters, 30 December 2013,
CITIES UNDER STRESS
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/30/us-congo-
democratic-idUSBRE9BT05I20131230.
109 Jonathan Crush, ‘Xenophobia Still Deeply Entrenched’,
Weekend Argus, 1 June 2013, http://www.cigionline.org/
articles/2013/06/xenophobia-still-deeply-entrenched.
110 ‘Special Rapporteur on Racism Dismayed at Xenophobic
Violence in South Africa’, issued by the United Nations
Special Rapporteur on Racism, 30 May 2008, http://
www.queensu.ca/samp/migrationresources/xenophobia/
responses/racism.htm.
111 Jonathan Crush, ‘Shocking Anti-Migrant Sentiment
Exposed’, Pretoria News, 3 June 2013, http://www.iol.
co.za/pretoria-news/opinion/shocking-anti-migrant-
sentiment-exposed-1.1526510#.UrQq1o1YbIY.
112 Ibid.
113 John Palmer, ‘The Rise of Far Right Parties Across Europe
is a Chilling Echo of the 1930s’, Guardian, 15 November
2013, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/
2013/nov/15/far-right-threat-europe-integration.
114 “‘Detroit Art City”: The Story of a Town on the Verge of
Losing More Than Just Its van Gogh’, Detroit Free Press,
11 December 2013.
115 For a rather more optimistic but controversial account of
the risks of violence over time, see Stephen Pinker (2012).
116 Tom Slater, ‘The Resilience of Neoliberal Urbanism’,
28 January 2014, openDemocracy, http://www.open
democracy.net/opensecurity/tom-slater/resilience-of-
neoliberal-urbanism.
FURTHER READING
Climate change, environmental risk, natural
disasters and urban hazards
Climate Change, Disaster Risk and the Urban Poor edited
by Judy Baker (2012) for the World Bank provides a
detailed assessment of the risks facing slum-dweller
communities in the face of increasing environmental
vulnerabilities brought about by climate change. It
also includes detailed case studies from the cities that
comprise the Mayors’ Task Force on Climate
Change, Risk and the Urban Poor including Dar-es-
Salaam, Jakarta, Mexico City, and São Paolo,
together with examples of good practice designed to
develop and implement more sustainable solutions.
Esnard and Sapat’s (2014) book Displaced by Disaster:
Recovery and Resilience in a Globalizing World focuses on
the human displacement consequences of disasters
and it devotes attention specifically to urban dis-
207
 CITIES UNDER STRESS
asters and their long term consequences. Christine
Wamsler’s Cities, Disaster Risk and Adaptation (2014)
focuses on planning for disaster and aims to show
how urban communities can become more disaster
resilient and counteract increasing disasters and
other climate change impacts.
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Political violence, terrorism
and armed conflict
Sophie Body-Gendrot’s Globalization, Fear and
Insecurity: The Challenges for Cities North and South
(2012) offers an excellent analysis of how cities have
been affected by political violence and organised
crime and how fear of further attacks has shaped
discourses around urban security, surveillance and
diversity in the globalised city. Stephen Graham’s
(2010) Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
focuses on how the world’s most powerful militaries
and security apparatuses have identified cities and
their urban populations as the new battle ground for
a permanent asymmetric war. Stuart Elden’s (2009)
Terror and Territory also looks at the way in which
territorial integrity has been undermined by the
208
so-called ‘war on terror’ leading paradoxically to
weaker states and hence greater opportunities for
violent non-state actors to emerge.
Networked disease, infrastructure failure,
economic vulnerability and sustainabilty
Harrison Ali and Roger Keil’s (2008) edited volume
on the SARS global urban pandemic, Networked
Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City, is one of
the only collections of essays on this under-studied
but important topic from an urban studies
perspective. Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails
edited by Stephen Graham (2009) contains a number
of key essays on the infrastructural vulnerability of
cities from power failures to ‘fatbergs’. Simon
Marvin and Mike Hodson’s edited volume After
Sustainable Cities? (2014) includes a number of
relevant essays on sustainable urbanism and
vulnerability. Of particular note is the chapter by
Brian Gleeson, ‘Disasters, vulnerability and resilience
of cities’, which begins with an acute analysis of the
impact of Hurricane/Super Storm Sandy on the east
coast of the United States.