chapter 4 - DRK

Strictly under embargo until Wednesday 22 September at 00:01 GMT (02:01 Geneva time)A young boy leansover a balconyoverlooking aninformal settlementin Cape Town,South Africa.© IFRCThe crisis of urban poverty, rapidly growing informal settlements and growing numbersof urban disasters arises from the failure of governments to adapt their institutionsto urbanization. It stems also in part from the failure of aid agencies to helpthem to do so – most aid agencies have inadequate or no urban policies and havelong been reluctant to support urban development at a sufficient scale. Governmentsfail to stop urban disasters when they fail to help local government structures in citiesand metropolitan areas to provide the web of institutions, infrastructure and servicesnoted above. In so many cities, disaster risk is produced over time by the failure of citygovernments to ensure that neighbourhoods are not built with bad-quality housingand on dangerous sites without adequate infrastructure. Often this failure is linked totheir weak financial status, lack of trained staff and lack of capacity due to the refusalof central and provincial governments to provide them with resources commensuratewith their responsibilities. Perhaps the most important issue that runs through all thechapters in this report is that city and municipal governments should be working withtheir low-income populations and other vulnerable groups to take disaster risk out ofurban development and expansion. We have enough examples to illustrate that this ispossible, despite the constraints that city governments face.If national and international databases on disasters become more precise and comprehensiveas to the impact on individual cities, it is certain that the observed trends would18