UNIFYING GEOGRAPHY

It is argued that the differences in content and approach between physical and
human geography, and within its subdisciplines, are often overemphasized. The
result is that Geography is often seen as a diverse and dynamic subject, but also
as a disorganized and fragmented one, without a focus.
Unifying Geography focuses on the plural and competing versions of unity
that characterize the discipline, give it cohesion and differentiate it from
related fields of knowledge. To ensure a balanced approach, almost all of the
chapters are co-authored by a leading physical and a human geographer. Space,
place, environment and maps are identified as the essential core components
of Geography derived from its common heritage. Their importance for the
future of Geography is addressed through a wide range of unifying themes.
Topics covered include: fieldwork, geographical information systems, environ-
mentalism, sustainability, globalization, landscape and culture, natural hazards,
conservation and heritage, science and policy.
In its identification of unifying themes, the book provides students with a
meaningful framework through which to understand the nature of the geo-
graphical discipline. Unifying Geography will give the discipline renewed
strength and direction, thus improving its status in an increasingly inter-
disciplinary world.

John A. Matthews is Professor of Physical Geography and David T. Herbert

is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Wales, Swansea.
 UNIFYING
GEOGRAPHY
Common heritage, shared future

Edited by John A. Matthews

and David T. Herbert
 First published 2004
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon,
Oxfordshire OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Selection and editorial matter © 2004 John A. Matthews and David T. Herbert;
individual chapters © the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage
or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Unifying geography : common heritage, shared future / [edited by] John
A. Matthews and David T. Herbert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Geography–Philosophy. 2. Geographical perception. I. Matthews,
John A. (John Anthony), 1947– II. Herbert, David T.
G70.U54 2004
910′.01–dc22
2003025770
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 12
NATURAL HAZARDS ON AN
UNQUIET EARTH
David E. Alexander

INTRODUCTION

As spatial variation is a fundamental aspect of natural hazards, extreme

phenomena have long been a fruitful subject for geographical study (White,
1973). Landslides, floods and volcanic landscapes have occupied geomor-
phologists, storms have been a focus of enquiry by climatologists and hazard
perception has been investigated by social geographers. Resource analysts have
considered natural hazards as environmental extremes, while political geog-
raphers have looked into risk management policies (White, 1974). Described
in this way, geographical approaches appear broad but fragmentary, and yet
geographers, with their skills of synthesis, have probably done more than
any other group of academics to define natural hazards as a distinct field of
study. Although specialized studies of hazardous phenomena occurred right
from the earliest days of Geography’s existence as a separate discipline, so did
the synthesis of physical and human aspects, due to a strong fascination with
environmental influences on human spatial organization (Holt-Jensen, 1988).
This chapter will first define the concept of ‘natural hazard’ with respect to
its theoretical and geographical underpinnings. It will then consider the origins
of modern hazards studies in Geography and examine the developing roles of
physical and human geographers in this interdisciplinary field. Next it will
evaluate the opportunities for unification and consider the extent to which they
have been exploited. Finally, the barriers to integrated hazards studies will be
discussed and future opportunities for synthesis will be described.

WHAT IS A NATURAL HAZARD?

Over the decade 1992–2001, some 2730 natural disasters killed 535,000 people
and directly affected the lives of more than two million citizens around the
world (at least two billion were indirectly affected). Estimated damage
amounted to US$684 billion at 2001 values. Floods and tropical storms were

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 NATURAL HAZARDS ON AN UNQUIET EARTH

the most numerous disasters, while droughts were the most lethal. Floods
affected the most people and earthquakes were the costliest events (IFRCRCS,
2002). Though death tolls have remained relatively stable or have fallen over
recent years, owing to intensifying mitigation efforts (principally evacuation of
populations from the paths of extreme phenomena), the cost of disasters has
rocketed (Munich Re Group, 1999). Despite increasing attempts to reduce the
toll of natural disasters, the world is becoming a more hazardous place: climate
change, population increases, technological development and the concentration
of more people into larger cities are all contributing to the rising scope of
impacts (Ernst, 2001). Each year there are now about 50 more significant
disasters than there were a decade ago (IFRCRCS, 2002). However, the statistics,
which are inherently unstable and of disputable accuracy, depend on how one
defines the concepts of ‘natural hazard’ and ‘natural disaster’ (Alexander, 1993:
chapter 1).
Consider the following comparison. As a result of the Great Alaska Earth-
quake of 27 March 1964, 29 million cubic metres of rock material slid down
the Sherman Valley, which is located in the centre of the state. The debris
travelled more than 5 km at an estimated maximum speed of 180 km/hr (Shreve,
1966). But as this mass movement occurred in an uninhabited area and had
no human consequences, it was a mere geological curiosity, not a disaster.
Even ecologically, its effects were very much part of the natural order of things.
In contrast, the Aberfan (South Wales) landslide of 21 October 1966 (which
occurred on a mining spoil tip heap) involved one-hundredth as much debris,
and it travelled one-twelfth of the distance at one-twentieth of the speed,
but it ran through two schools and an area of housing, and so killed 144 people,
116 of them children (Aberfan Tribunal, 1967). In human terms it was a very
significant disaster. This shows that anthropic vulnerability is an essential part
of both disaster potential and the eventual seriousness of impact.
Thus, hazard (H), like vulnerability (V), is a component of risk (R):

R = H ⫻ V.

A hazard is not a hazard unless it threatens something; vulnerability does not

exist unless some elements at risk are threatened by something (Figure 12.1).
Like friction, which is not called upon to exist until it is mobilized by work,
the risk of disaster is a purely notional concept until it is transformed into
impact by the spontaneous manifestation of hazard, which therefore acts
as catalyst (Alexander, 2000: 14–16). The relationship between hazard and
vulnerability is complex enough to render simple measures of ‘hazardousness’
inoperative. Again, a comparison can be made. Earthquakes quite frequently
occur in the Tonga trench with magnitudes of 7.5 or more. Yet, as they have
very deep foci, in some cases as deep as 700 km below the surface, the seismic
waves have usually attenuated to the point of being harmless by the time they
reach the surface (Duda, 1965). In contrast, 4000 people died in the magnitude
5.6 earthquake that struck Managua, Nicaragua, on 23 December 1972 (Kates

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 DAVID E. ALEXANDER

A hazard is not Release An asset is not

hazardous unless rate vulnerable unless
it threatens it is threatened
something by something

Elements
Hazard RISK Vulnerability at risk

Background Exposure
levels Dose
rate

Figure 12.1 The role of hazard and vulnerability in defining risk.

Notes
The listed qualifying factors (all of which are drawn from nuclear radiation studies) are as follows:
background levels, i.e. inherent natural or normal risk levels in the absence of any specific factor
that might raise them; dose rate, i.e. impacts per person per unit time; exposure, the length or
proportion of time that a person, building or other entity runs a risk; and release rate, which is
usually expressed in terms of the frequency and return period of hazard impacts.

et al., 1973) and which had a very shallow hypocentre. Yet the energy released
by a magnitude 5.6 seismic event is many thousands of times less than that
released by a magnitude 7.5 event, as points on earthquake magnitude scales
are geometrically, not linearly, related to one another (Alexander, 1993: chapter
2). This illustrates the problems associated with relying on a single physical
measure when estimating the size or seriousness of a disaster. One would go so
far as to suggest that physical force is a misleading measure of hazardousness.
In consequence, the location and timing of events are critical. In some
earthquake scenarios the predicted death toll could vary by two or three orders
of magnitude depending on aggregate patterns of human activity – worship in
vulnerable churches or mosques, travel to work across vulnerable bridges,
sleeping at night in vulnerable houses, and so on (Lomnitz, 1970). Thus some
of the scenarios for the next major San Francisco earthquake give estimates for
the death toll that vary from 3000 to 16,000 people (Cochrane et al., 1974;
RMS, 1995).
Hewitt (1997: 53) argued cogently that disasters are quintessentially
geographical phenomena. The annihilation of place and cultural identity, the
inertia involved in rebuilding damaged property in situ, and the enforced
displacement of survivor populations are all responses to spatial discord, often
underpinned by increasingly extreme natural phenomena (Alexander, 1993:
5). The extent to which physical extremes have shaped human actions and
settlement patterns is infinitely variable from place to place. So is the opposite
relationship: the extent to which human activities have altered physical

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 NATURAL HAZARDS ON AN UNQUIET EARTH

extremes. Both processes are extremely subtle and elusive. This therefore
presents a challenge of interpretation for both physical geographers, who must
consider the spatial dimension of the Earth’s workings, and human geographers,
who must consider the social responses to environmental constraints. An even
greater challenge is offered by the complexities of integration between these two
approaches.
One indication of the subtlety of relationships is that attempts to quantify
the definition of hazards and disasters have not met with much success.
Proposals of this kind have been advanced by Foster (1976), Keller et al. (1992),
Burton et al. (1993) and Bachman (see Keown-McMullan, 1997). In a further
attempt to impose quantitative definitions, Tobin and Montz (1997) adopted
a value of casualties and damages for disaster (at least 25 deaths) and catas-
trophe (at least 500 deaths and $10 million in damages). I prefer to regard the
two terms as synonyms, as it seems artificial to impose arbitrary thresholds
in order to maintain a semantic distinction, especially as the thresholds have
little to do with the actual amount of suffering or disruption caused by hazard
impacts.
Having considered the definition question, it is now appropriate to examine
how natural hazards have been studied by geographers, starting with the birth
of scientific approaches.

ACADEMIC ANTECEDENTS

Natural hazards studies emerged in the mid-twentieth century from two

kindred fields: cultural ecology (originally known as human ecology) and
resource geography, which was then known as ‘man and environment’. The
former was promoted in the United States by the Chicago geographer Harlan
Barrows. In a presidential address to the Association of American Geographers
in 1923, he argued that Geography is human ecology in that it deals with
people’s modes of adaptation to the natural environment that surrounds them
(Barrows, 1923). Resource geography, on the other hand, had its heyday in
Britain with the work of L. Dudley Stamp, who was a pioneer in the art of
making Geography useful to decision makers, especially those who are respon-
sible for deciding how natural resources, land and environments are to be
exploited or preserved (Stamp, 1948). To a certain extent in these works the
synthesis of physical and human geography occurred right from the earliest
days of scientific geography.
Since the term ‘ecosystem’ was coined in 1935 by the British botanist Sir
Arthur Tansley, human ecology has come to mean the consideration of societies
as a series of interlocking human ecosystems characterized by information and
energy pathways and distinct trophic levels (Odum, 1983). Human ecologists
have long focused on the study of imbalances in the relationship between people
and nature and on the challenges and constraints of harsh physical environments
with respect to the human communities that inhabit them. Many cultural

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 DAVID E. ALEXANDER

anthropologists, especially those working with traditional or indigenous

societies, have espoused human ecology, which offers a methodology for concep-
tualizing resource usage at the level of households and other economic units
(Butzer, 1989).
The origin of modern applied environmental studies in Geography rests
with the ‘man and environment’ school of resource studies. This stems from the
seminal work of George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), Man and Nature, or
Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864). Marsh dealt eclectically
with both historical and contemporary aspects of pollution, resource depletion
and the human impact on landscapes. His legacy in North America can be
found in two landmark volumes: the proceedings of the Princeton conference
of 1955 entitled Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Thomas, 1956), and
that of the Clark University conference of 1987, The Earth as Transformed by
Human Action (Turner et al., 1990). The British counterpart of Marsh’s book was
R.L. Sherlock’s Man as a Geological Agent (1922), which revealed the exceptional
power of humanity to modify environments physically, a power mitigated only
by our relatively brief tenure as a species.
It should be noted that ecological geography, resources geography and, to
some extent, cultural ecology were in origin explicitly neither human nor
physical subdisciplines, but hybrid attempts to bridge the gap. The same is
therefore true of their collective protégé, natural hazards studies.
Philosophically, the parallel fields of applied geography and human ecology
stretched from possiblism to determinism, according to the prevailing currents
of thinking in Geography at various times in the twentieth century (Holt-
Jensen, 1988). It could be hypothesized that the stronger the relationship
between human and physical geography the greater the leaning towards
determinism, especially when dealing with environmental extremes such as
natural hazards. Nevertheless, in practical terms, it was soon recognized that
natural phenomena can be both resources and hazards, depending on their range
of values. Water, for example, is a primary resource but its absence leads to
drought and in excess it causes flooding (Smith, 2001: chapter 1).
By the mid-twentieth century, environmental determinism had been roundly
discredited, even with regard to environmental extremes. Latterly, determin-
ism has resurfaced in a new form linked to genetics. The study of inherited
characteristics in humans makes it clear, however, that environment only has
a significant effect on people’s physical make-up after a population group
has undergone many centuries of exposure. All that remains of environmental
determinism is the direct impact of contamination, contagion and injury
– determinism if these become inevitable, risk under less predictable
circumstances.
For most of the twentieth century, the root causes of casualties and destruction
in hazards geography were deemed to be natural forces, not human vulnera-
bility and the effects of decisions concerning the use of natural environments
(Zebrowski, 1997; Bell, 1999). Physical geography therefore enjoyed a primacy
over human geography in this field, and this was redressed only very slowly

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 NATURAL HAZARDS ON AN UNQUIET EARTH

and only from the 1960s onwards. Let us therefore consider first the contribution
of physical geographers.

APPLIED PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

All branches of physical geography have been applied to practical problems of
land occupancy, resource exploitation, environmental management and land-
use planning (Scheidegger, 1975; Cooke and Doornkamp, 1990). Chorley et al.
(1984: 574) defined a geomorphic hazard from the geomorphologist’s point of
view as ‘any change, natural or man-induced, that may affect the geomorphic
stability of a landform to the adversity of living things’. They regarded energy
of relief, rate of evolution and climatic change as the most significant causes
of such hazards. Most of the hazards they identified were connected with the
behaviour of rivers, though coasts (erosion and sea flooding) and slopes (land-
slides) were also significant. Wright (1984: 245) observed that applied
geomorphology is an essential element in the prediction and managerial
perception of natural hazards. He noted that floods and landslides are the hazards
most amenable to analysis from this point of view.
Much work remains to be done at the local level, for example in micro-
zonation – the division of a small area into zones that express future hazards,
vulnerability or risks on the basis of field survey of past impacts and present
dangers. Despite this, and due in part to the dedicated work of physical
geographers, the regional pattern of physical hazards is now well known around
the world (Munich Re Group, 2002).
The strength of the geomorphologists’ early contributions to the natural
hazards field tended to vary with the agent concerned. With respect to land-
slides, Blackwelder’s seminal 1928 study of mudflow processes (Blackwelder,
1928) and Sharp’s analogous work in the 1940s and 1950s are notable (Sharp
and Noble, 1953). For floods, Luna B. Leopold’s encyclopaedic work from
the 1950s to the 1970s stands out (Leopold and Dunne, 1978), while for
volcanic landscapes, pioneering studies were conducted in the 1940s by Charles
Cotton (Cotton, 1969) and the 1960s by Cliff Ollier (Ollier, 1988). Other
hazards, such as earthquakes, were not particularly the focus of geographical
or geomorphological enquiry, and so they have been slow to develop a distinctive
physical geography (Doornkamp and Han, 1985).
The natural hazard research that physical geographers have conducted can be
summarized as follows:
• understanding meteorological, hydrological and geomorphological
processes;
• monitoring them;
• predicting developments in the immediate and longer-term future;
• understanding humankind as an agent of change in the natural
environment;
• ascertaining how to mitigate hazards with structural measures.

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 DAVID E. ALEXANDER

From this it is clear that there is considerable overlap with the work of
geophysicists, volcanologists, seismologists and engineers. But a more vital
question for the purposes of this book is the degree of overlap with human and
social geographers.

APPLIED HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

For comparison with the physical geographers’ list, the problems that human
geographers have tackled in the natural hazards field can be summarized as
follows:

• how hazards and their impacts are perceived;

• how society organizes itself to tackle hazards;
• how society is affected by disaster impacts and the threat of calamity;
• how policy can be developed to mitigate hazards.

No one has more successfully considered the metamorphosis of resources

into hazards than the distinguished American geographer Gilbert F. White.
Many of the bases of theory in natural hazards studies were laid down in the
1960s and 1970s by White and his colleagues and students, especially Ian
Burton, Robert W. Kates, Thomas Saarinen and the sociologist J. Eugene Haas
(White and Haas, 1975; Saarinen, 1982; Burton et al., 1993). Collectively they
produced the first comprehensive body of geographical work on the four themes
just listed. Emphasis was placed on adjustment of environmental extremes
where they could be modified and adaptation of human activities to them where
they could not. The latter are increasingly regarded as the majority of cases
(White, 1973).
White’s model or the ‘orthodox model’, also known as the Chicago school
model (see Figure 12.2), which is still widely used, relies on a linear progression
from physical hazard through human vulnerability to risks and disaster impacts
(Alexander, 2000: 35). As such, it offers a straightforward way of relating
studies of the physical geography of hazards (the meteorology of severe storms,
the spatial pattern of landslides and earthquakes, and so on) to work on the
susceptibility of communities to casualty and socio-economic loss – i.e. analysis
of vulnerability (UNDRO, 1982). However, this framework does little to unify
the two components, as the hazard studies, conducted primarily by physical
geographers and other natural scientists, often merely form the input to the
human geographers’ investigations of how society reacts to hazard situations,
and are not part of the substance of the latter. Moreover, it is increasingly
being suggested that vulnerability is as much a creation of power structures
as a product of natural extremes (Wisner, 1996; Boyce, 2000; Bankoff, 2001).
The antecedents of this conclusion can be seen in Robert W. Kates’s pioneering
work on seismic geography as human ecology, especially in Nicaragua, where
vulnerability reigns supreme (Kates, 1970; Kates et al., 1973).

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 NATURAL HAZARDS ON AN UNQUIET EARTH

'ORTHODOX' MODEL
Human consequences
Physical event Human vulnerability of disaster

'RADICAL CRITIQUE'
Human consequences
Human vulnerability Physical event
of disaster

PROPOSAL FOR
A NEW MODEL

Human
vulnerability
Human consequences
of disaster
Culture Physical History
events
C on ces
te xt an d c o n s e q u e n

Figure 12.2 Comparison of models of hazard and disaster (simplified).

Despite the power of the engineering and technology lobbies, White’s human
ecological approach led inexorably to a policy model that bypasses much
expensive and ineffective civil engineering for control of floods. As such, it was
welcomed in the United States, where flood control has proved an expensive
failure (Costa, 1978; Myers and White, 1993). Policy decisions were thus
shaped by better information on physical hazards. The Whitean model became
generalized for particular regions as follows: mitigation is initially lacking until
a hazard surpasses the threshold of tolerance; reliance is then placed on structural
mitigation, with projects largely determined by physical scientists and their
engineering counterparts; and, finally, there is a transition to mixed structural
and non-structural (administrative, regulatory and organizational) measures, as
structural approaches alone tend not to control hazards adequately. Essential
ingredients of this are the geographical distribution, timing, intensity and
effects of physical events and their implications for processes of hazard
modification (Kates and Burton, 1986). Throughout the process, there is a need
for experts on physical aspects of landslides, floods and storms to give advice in
emergency situations. There is also an increasing need for studies of physical
hazard to take account of political and social constraints on, and opportunities
for, mitigation (Smith, 2001). However, in a world increasingly governed by
management and decision making, it appears that the role of physical science
may need to be redefined in the light of the dictates of policy (Dynes and
Drabek, 1994).

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 DAVID E. ALEXANDER

One fundamentally unresolved question concerns the future role of structural

mitigation. Human geographers working in Bangladesh have argued for a switch
from the classical progression, in which structural mitigation comes first, to a
‘grass roots’ approach based on public participation in land-use decision making
(Westcoat et al., 1992).
A more radical interpretation than that of White – the ‘radical critique’ (see
Figure 12.2) – promoted in the 1980s by Kenneth Hewitt, Ben Wisner, Piers
Blaikie, Terry Cannon and their colleagues, is that the hazards should be
considered merely as a trigger for impacts and losses, which are mainly
determined by vulnerability (Hewitt, 1983; Blaikie et al., 1994). Hewitt (1983:
chapter 1) argued that too much causality has been attributed to geophysical
processes, and human awareness and decision making are not dependent on
(or at least not wholly correlated with) nature and the magnitude of physical
forces. Indeed, perception studies teach us that populations tend to mis-estimate
physical forces and hazards. The linear model of the Chicago school (which
Gilbert White founded) thus becomes a feedback system in which human
communities sustain risks caused by their vulnerability states, or in other words
that losses are largely predetermined by vulnerability (Wisner, 1996). This,
which is the favoured model in development studies, tends to marginalize
physical geography and to emphasize regional and topical human geographical
specialities (Hewitt, 1997: 21–54).
One wonders whether it is extreme to regard vulnerability as the determinant
of disaster, and to take physical hazard for granted, as if it were a fixed quantity
(which it very seldom is). The vulnerability approach is a reaction to the ‘quick
fix’ of the technocrats, with their unjustified confidence that if only we
understood the physical forces, we could abate the risks (see Zebrowski, 1997).
Social geographers, who for decades have not had the upper hand in the struggle
for funding and recognition, have resented this approach and those who work
in development studies have seen it as a potential instrument of oppression
of marginalized, poverty-stricken populations, part of an overall strategy of
hegemony by the technological countries (Bankoff, 2001).
White’s model is regarded as providing a firmer theoretical base for
applied physical geography studies than Hewitt’s model does (Haque, 1988).
Geomorphology, climatology, meteorology, volcanology and earthquake
geography have all been applied to the natural hazards field using this model
(Kates and Burton, 1986, volume 2). Each of these subfields has proved adept
at identifying the pattern (magnitude, frequency and location) of physical
extremes – i.e. threats and past impacts – and the requisites for monitoring
physical processes. The Hewitt model has tended to take many physical aspects
of hazards for granted and concentrate on the human ecological adaptations
to them (Hewitt, 1983: chapter 1). To some extent this reflects a disparity
between technocentric approaches and ecocentric ones: White’s model tends
to support the former (though that is certainly not what it was designed for),
and Hewitt’s model the latter.
The problem of slope stability in Hong Kong provides a good example, not

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 NATURAL HAZARDS ON AN UNQUIET EARTH

merely of the effect of anthropogenic feedback upon natural hazard occurrence

(in the sense of the Hewitt model), but also of the different problems of applying
physical and human sciences to practical issues. Briefly, the territory and former
colony of Hong Kong occupies 1092 km2 and has a population of 6.3 million,
with a high average density of 5800 persons per km2 but much higher spot
densities. Each year in the period June–October five or six typhoons saturate
the land with rainwater (Forth, 1996). The highly urbanized peninsulas and
islands of Hong Kong abound in steep, unstable slopes cut in deeply weathered
granite which has high infiltration capacities and poor stability characteristics
(Figure 12.3). Floods and mass movements in June 1966, for example, left
64 dead, 2500 homeless and 8000 evacuated. In this disaster, 70 per cent of
landslides were associated with road sections, buildings and land disturbed by
cultivation (So, 1971). Two of the 185 debris flow-avalanches of June 1972
(which were associated with tropical storms) killed 138 (Lumb, 1975). Further
fatalities in 1976 led to a major programme of slope stability management
which, at great expense, has substantially reduced the risk (Zhou et al., 2002).
In that squatter settlements have proven to be most at risk, the problem has been
rather less tractable socially than it has in a geotechnical sense. Reliance on
technological solutions rather than non-structural ones has emphasized the role
of geomorphologists as analysts of landslides, rather than social geographers
as convincing analysts of vulnerability. The gulf between the two branches of
enquiry remains unbridged.

Figure 12.3 Steep slopes with tropical vegetation and highly urbanized bases on Hong
Kong Island: a physical geography problem that is under control but a
human geography that has run wild.

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 DAVID E. ALEXANDER

The Whitean model, which does little to heal the breach, was formulated and
developed from 1942 until 1978. The changes that have been wrought in
society and economy since then have made a new model imperative. The signs
are that it will be based more on recognition of the role and constraints posed
by socio-political context and human cultural traits than is White’s etic
(i.e. universalist) model (Brislin, 1980), which is designed to be applicable, or
at least adaptable, to all cultures (Mitchell et al., 1989; Alexander, 2000: chapter
9; and see Figure 12.2). It may thus offer a new framework for physical
geography studies of essentially human problems.

BRIDGING THE GAP

Tobin and Montz (1997) placed hazards geographers on a physical–human

continuum. Since the 1970s their position has become progressively more
human and less physical. Do physical geographers with hazards interests
thus collaborate more easily with geophysicists, volcanologists, seismologists
and meteorologists than with social geographers, who are perhaps reluctant
to collaborate with them because they appear not to have the answers to why
society reacts in certain ways to hazards? What can be done to create a
rapprochement without returning to a technocentric approach?
Sadly, works that substantially bridge the gap between the physical and
human geographies of hazards are relatively uncommon. One such work is by
Brookfield (1999), who sought to distinguish natural from anthropogenic causes
of environmental destruction leading to increased rates of natural hazards
such as flooding, accelerated erosion and landslides. This example should not
be so uncommon, but interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies remain
much less numerous than the opportunities that exist to create them (Alexander,
1991). In any case, theory has tended to stagnate since the 1970s (Alexander,
2000). In the meantime, society and economy have undergone considerable
changes and empirical knowledge of hazards has accumulated, altering our view
of both the phenomena involved and their impacts on society.
The problem is not merely one of cross-disciplinary communication involving
physical and human geographers, but involves a much more long-lasting – and
perhaps wider – gulf between physical and social scientists in general. In 1992
a conference was held in Perugia, Italy, in an attempt to discover the common
ground between physical and human scientists who study hazards and disasters
(Nemec et al., 1993). Though there was much goodwill and a strong desire to
appreciate alternative points of view, the results of this and several other
contemporary initiatives were slight in comparison with the magnitude of the
problem. Nevertheless, a communication process was set in motion.
By the turn of the millennium, significant progress had been made, but from
the engineering side, rather than the physical sciences. For instance, three of the
journals most recently founded by the American Society of Civil Engineers deal
with the policy and managerial implications of engineering practice and one of

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 NATURAL HAZARDS ON AN UNQUIET EARTH

them, Natural Hazards Review, is directly relevant to this chapter (and despite
the engineering imprint, geographers are involved). This reflects a gradual
realization of the need to look beyond scientific monitoring and civil engineer-
ing for solutions to hazard problems (Myers and White, 1993). The difficulty
with persistently rising losses lies, not so much in the failure of scientific and
engineering methods, but in their misapplication through ignorance of the
social, economic and political problems that they inevitably mesh with.
It is time for a fresh approach to natural hazards studies. Through holistic
analysis, the nature and demands of the problem should determine the choice
of methods and disciplinary viewpoints adopted in the quest for solutions
(Alexander, 2000: chapter 5; McEntire, 2001). There must be a new emphasis,
in which physical extremes are considered in the light of broader cultural,
historical and socio-economic contexts than those that went into the making
of the prototype models described above (Figure 12.2). For instance, culture
offers opportunities for and puts constraints upon the management of land.
It represents one of the human contexts in which modern environments develop
and change (Oliver-Smith, 1986). And traditional human cultures are changing
fast as they metamorphose with new economic and technological realities. Thus
future interpretations of the ‘hazardousness of place’ (Hewitt and Burton, 1991)
must take account of a new global reality with respect to the physical hazards,
the flow of data on them and the human consequences of disaster. Fortunately,
through their knowledge of human ecology, geographers are well placed to read
the signs.
In this context, ‘holistic analysis’ means that the problem, not the disciplinary
viewpoint, should determine which questions are asked and what steps are
taken to answer them. Geographers, the pre-eminent synthesizers, should seek
out the connections: accelerated erosion, for example, is often a cultural problem
as much as it is an agronomic or a geomorphological one (Blaut, 1959), for in
many places the reasons why it occurs are rooted in socio-economic and belief
systems associated with land husbandry (Butzer, 1990).
One wonders whether priorities and issues identified by society (populations,
residents, politicians, decision makers and administrators) are likely to be the
same as those identified by academics? If not, is this because of failure on
the part of academics to see the really significant issues, or is it the converse,
their special ability to foresee what will become important? At Nevado del
Ruiz volcano in Colombia in November 1985, scientists had prepared an
accurate and fairly complete hazard map and instituted a programme of
intensive monitoring of the precursors of an eruption. On 13 November 1985,
23,000 people lost their lives in a series of devastating lahars (volcanic mud-
flows) that followed the melting of Ruiz’s snowcap during a summit eruption.
The warning communication process failed spectacularly (Voight, 1990).
This is an example – albeit an extreme one – of how serious the consequences
of compartmentalizing approaches to hazards can be.

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CONCLUSION

1 Because natural hazards studies deal with the most severe impacts of the
physical environment on its human occupants, they offer exceptional
opportunities to reunite Geography as a discipline. This will require a
new appreciation of, on the one hand, the problems that applied physical
geography can solve and, on the other, the way that physical hazards interact
with human systems.
2 The twin challenges for geographical studies of natural hazards and disasters
are to take full account of the contexts in which these phenomena and events
take place, and to consider them in the light of cultural factors that
profoundly influence perception and resultant decision making. On the
face of it, this seems like a call to exclude physical geographers and build
a new human geography of natural hazards. In point of fact, both challenges
are as pertinent to physical as to human geography.
3 Despite the modern emphasis on vulnerability at the expense of hazard,
and abundant evidence that the same level of hazardousness can have widely
differing impacts in different contexts of vulnerability, knowledge of
physical processes is still fundamental to the interpretation and manage-
ment of natural hazards. However, it needs to be gathered in a broader
operative context: for better response to hazards and disasters, those who
study and monitor landslides, floods, storms and so on may need to increase
their knowledge of what such knowledge is to be used for and how it is to
be employed.
4 We should do all we can to consider natural hazards as multifaceted, multi-
dimensional problems and to avoid ‘academic territoriality’ (Alexander,
2000: 30–36). If single researchers and practitioners do not have the
capacity to develop holistic solutions to them, then they should be studied
in a contributory manner, in which each specialist brings expertise to a
common pool.
5 There is no doubt that physical geographers need to be drawn further into
the societal debate. To accomplish this, we need to do more to ascertain how
much information on physical geography is necessary in order to concep-
tualize hazards and risks adequately. We should also ascertain the extent
to which information on physical hazards enables us to manage risk. In
synthesis, physical geographers must provide information on hazards
that is useful to students of vulnerability, while human geographers should
not assess vulnerability without the best available knowledge of physical
hazards that underpin it. These are powerful arguments for the unity of the
discipline.

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 13
URBANIZATION,
DEVELOPMENT AND THE
ENVIRONMENT IN AN
UNEQUAL WORLD
Ian Douglas and Alan G. Gilbert

THE WORLD’S URBAN POOR

The world is hugely unequal. The average Japanese lives until he or she is 81
years old; the average person in Sierra Leone survives only until he or she is
37 (World Bank, 2002: 232–234). In terms of such basic indicators, the gap
between many of the poorest and the most affluent has become greater in recent
years. While the poor in China seem to have improved their quality of life,
it is likely that the poor in most parts of Africa and Latin America became
poorer during the 1990s (Stewart and Berry, 1999). In 2000, some 1.5 billion
people in the world were living on less than one dollar per day (UNCHS, 2001:
14).
At the same time, the world is rapidly becoming more urbanized and,
between 1975 and 2000, the urban population almost doubled. Most of the new
urbanites are living in poorer countries; whereas 52 per cent of the world’s urban
people lived in developing countries in 1975, by 2000 the proportion had
grown to 69 per cent. Most of the world’s urban growth has been occurring
in a context of poverty. Currently, cities contain some 525 million poor people
and between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of the world’s poor now live in cities.
In places, of course, the proportion is much greater; around 50 per cent of the
urban population in Africa lives in poverty and in Latin America around 40
per cent. In Kolkata, India, 70 per cent of the population is classified as poor.
The mixture of urbanization, poverty and the environment is all too frequently
producing a deadly cocktail. While urbanization can generally be regarded as
a benign process leading to improvements in poor people’s lives, the combi-
nation of unregulated, unequal and rapid urban growth creates major problems
(Gilbert and Gugler, 1992). This chapter explores some of the interrelationships
between those variables with illustrations from two major cities, Metro Manila
and Mexico City. It demonstrates: first, how an integrated human and physical

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