URBAN AREAS IN low-income countries around the world increasingly appear to be affected by environmental disasters, which can be especially catastrophic in places that are densely occupied. Rather than focusing on engineering responses and physical infrastructure, this book looks at the social characteristics of cities and communities that are at risk of disaster, and explores the ways in which these characteristics affect the vulnerability of those living there.

The first section of the book provides background on the scale and nature of environmental risk faced by urban populations, pointing to the special vulnerability of those who are economically poor and politically marginalized. It looks at the history of the concept of vulnerability, and discusses its social context and the need to determine what makes individuals more or less prone to the negative impacts of disaster and stress. The concept of adaptive potential is introduced and used to discuss the actions that can capitalize on social and political assets in order to enhance resilience.

The second section of the book consists of three case studies that examine adaptive potential in three different urban political contexts. The first case study, in Bridgetown, Barbados, describes how modernization and macroeconomic growth in a liberal democracy have coincided with a weakening of community development and civil society to undermine adaptive potential. In Georgetown, Guyana, which has passed through a centralized “socialist” regime, there is tension between the need to rebuild civil society and adaptive potential, and the need for short-term mitigation of the effects of disaster. In Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, with its right-wing government, a well-developed civil society is described as being in competition with itself and the state, which has constrained cooperation and adaptive potential. The final section synthesizes the case study material and the theoretical discussion, and identifies priority areas for further study.