Open House International: Volume 31 Issue 1

Editorial: Managing Urban Disasters

Christine Wamsler

Imagine, for a moment, human settlements that are organised to overcome and withstand earthquakes or hurricanes, infrastructures that reinforce themselves and seal cracks of their…

Building Resilient Urban Communities

Ian Davis, Yasamin O. Izadkhah

Many societies in the world live with different types of risks and the threat of disasters has always presented a major challenge to devise ways to achieve sustainable development…

Sustainable Disaster Mitigation: Ecomaterials in Reconstruction Projects in Cuba

Fernando Martirena, Andrés Olivera

Cuba has recently endured the impact of hurricanes Lili (1996), George (1998), Irene (1999), Michelle (2001), Isidore (2002), Lili (2002), Charlie and Ivan (2004). The provinces…

Cries in the Dark: Reconstruction after Hurricane Mitch in Honduras

Kurt Rhyner

Disasters are always caused by a combination of factors, and the natural phenomenon that brings them on is usually just a catalyst. The underlying cause of most disasters is…

Post-Disaster Housing Reconstruction for Sustainable Risk Reduction in Peru

Pedro Ferradas

Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) recently completed the systematisation of their reconstruction projects which were implemented between the early 1990s and the…

Reconstruction of Satisfactory and Culturally Appropriate Neighbourhoods in Turkey

Gülsün Saglamer, Selim Velioglu, Handan Dülger Türkoglu, Atilla Dikbas, Gülden Erkut, Özlem Berk

In the year 2000, a team from Istanbul Technical University (ITU) developed the “Urban m³ - Respect for Life Project”, which was aimed at providing shelter for those people who…

Getting Tsunami Recovery and Early Warning Right

Ben Wisner, Peter Walker

The massive human and economic impact of the Asian tsunami in later 2004 is mirrored in the aftershocks felt among humanitarian organisations, development agencies, and policy…

Geo-Information Support in Management of Urban Disasters

Sisi Zlatanova, Peter van Oosterom, Edward Verbree

Within the management of urban disasters, geo-information systems (GIS) are used in any of the phases of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery as most of the required…

Integrating Risk Reduction, Urban Planning and Housing: Lessons From El Salvador

Christine Wamsler

Increasingly, attention has been given to the need to mainstream risk reduction in development work in order to reduce the vulnerability of the urban poor. Using El Salvador as a…

Legislation as Vulnerability Factor

Jorge Gavidia, Annalisa Crivellari

A study conducted in Central America in 2003 shows that in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch noticeable progress was made in introducing new legislation for disaster management…

Saving Shimla, North India, From the Next Earthquake

Manu Gupta, Anshu Sharma, Rajesh Kaushik

Shimla is a teeming city, with a population of 140,000. It is located in the north Indian Himalayas, in an area of high seismicity that was rocked by a devastating earthquake a…

Fire Risk in Informal Settlements: A South African Case Study

James Morrissey, Anna Taylor

With the increased concentration of populations in urban areas and the consequent occupation of marginal land, largely by the poor, the need for effective means of understanding…

Integrating Slum Upgrading and Vulnerability Reduction in Mozambique

Mathias Spaliviero

Due to its location, Mozambique suffers from cyclical flooding associated with heavy rains and cyclones. In recent years, extreme flood events affected millions of people…

Evaluating and Reducing Earthquake Risks of Squatter Settlements in Istanbul

Gülçin Pulat Gökmen, Yurdanur Dülgeroglu Yüksel, Fatma Erkök, Yasemin Alkiser, Berna Keskin

In Turkey, the process of squatterisation can best be traced to the increase in its urban population from 24 percent in 1950 to 59 percent in 2000. In the periods up to the…

Measuring Urban Vulnerability to Natural Disaster Risk: Benchmarks for Sustainability

Mark Pelling

The Millennium Declaration and the Hyogo Framework for Action point towards the need for methods to identify urban vulnerability to disaster risk as a pre-cursor for the…

Tools for Analysing Disaster Risk in Designing and Evaluating Projects

Charlotte Benson, John Twigg

As the human and financial costs of disasters rise, there are increasing demands for evidence that mitigation “pays”. Until this proof exists, many development organisations…

Building Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia: A Way Forward

Earl Kessler

Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) was established in 1986. It was restructured in July 2003 to focus on specific technical areas: climate variability and change…

The New Latin American Network "Habitat at Risk"

Aurelio Ferrero, Daniela Gargantini

Latin America is recurrently affected by natural disasters. It is in the poorest populations where the damage combines disastrously with the vulnerability of these communities…

New African Urban Risk Analysis Network

Djillali Benouar, Khady Diagne, Fred Lerise, Helen Macgregor, Manoris Meshack, David Satterthwaite, Jacob Songsore, Andre Yitambe

With many disasters taking place in urban areas of Africa on a regular basis, affecting millions of people each year, there is an increasing need to understand the processes by…

Reconstruction and Risk Reduction: A Project Example from El Salvador

René Peter Hohmann, Thomas Schaef

In January 2001, large parts of El Salvador were devastated by two earthquakes that occurred in quick succession. More than 1,200 people lost their lives. Some 150,000 houses were…

Book Review

Julia Koschinsky

METHODOLOGIES IN HOUSING RESEARCH