Urban risks

This is the first blog post for the course Sustainable Global Technologies given Aalto University, in Fall 2010. Let’s see how it goes.

First class was on urban risks and it was given by Philipp Schmidt-Thomé.

One of the first things we did was to define what an urban risk is. We saw the of accidental deaths in US with percentages; motor vehicles were number one whereas natural hazards are not mentioned in the list as they do not constitute a significant amount of the statistics. Then we saw what lifetime odds of dying in the U.S are; hearth-diseases and cancer were on top with rates 1-in-5 and 1-in-7, whereas natural forces (heat, cold, storms, quakes, etc.) first appear in number 8 in the list, with odds 1-in-3,357.

It turns out that if you define “risk” based on human health, you have to find solutions to fast food, stress and transportation instead of natural hazards. But the lecture was about natural hazards and urban risks. So, what is the reason to focus on natural hazards when discussing urban risks? This is easier to understand after answering the question: Why urban risks are so important? Because there are high concentration of infrastructure, capital, trade, commerce, industry, and population in the urban areas. So here is what I understand: the word “risk” in urban risks doesn’t necessarily represent human health. That is why governors, who have to deal with urban risks, have to take into account the infrastructure, capital, etc. as well as human life when planning their actions.

In the class, we did a discussion on weighting of hazards assess the risks associated with different kinds of hazards such as droughts, earthquakes, floods, etc. We didn’t have any idea how to asses these, so in our group, everybody assessed the risks individually and then we took the average. The point of this exercise was to simulate a real-life decision making process. What I understood is that there is no holistic approach to assess the risks associated to all natural hazards (ranging from avalanches to tsunamis) in a specified region. So professionals from different areas and officials discuss with each other, to find out a mediocre way.

Some other remarks;

• · It is a common practice, even in Europe, to rebuild a city, or a single house at the very same spot in the very same way, after it is damaged due to a natural hazard.

• · Major churches in Mediterranean are still standing after hundreds of years. Reason is that when they were built, people working for the churches were the most educated ones; hence they knew that the soft rock is safer for construction than the hard rock.

• · Cities are historically located to cross rivers on the trade routes, they are prone to floods.