Bücher der Reihe Catastrophes in Context

Disaster Upon Disaster illuminates the numerous disjunctions between the suppositions, realities, agendas, and executions in the field and advances solutions and the matter of outcomes.

Contextualizing Disaster argues that, while disasters are increasingly represented by the media as unique, exceptional, newsworthy events, it is a mistake to think of disasters as isolated or discrete occurrences.

Disaster Upon Disaster illuminates the numerous disjunctions between the suppositions, realities, agendas, and executions in the field and advances solutions and the matter of outcomes.

This book catalogues a wide and diverse range of case studies of such disasters and human responses. This heritage of past disasters serves as inspiration for building culturally sensitive adaptions to present and future calamities, to mitigate their impacts, and facilitate recoveries.

Reviewing current policies and practices, the book assesses the financial, economic and physical risk of building in hazardous areas, and looks at how societies approach economic development while trying to create a more resilient built environment in spite of the dangers. It examines the vulnerability of economic and social infrastructure to natural hazard events, looks at policies which imperil infrastructure, and proposes new development approaches to be undertaken by sovereign states, international development banks, NGOs, and bilateral aid agencies.

Disaster research has been studied from many angles, seldom targeting its implications for vulnerable territories in Africa. Entities most subject to the effects of climate change are often undeveloped and located in disadvantaged regions. Post-disaster communities need to scrutinize the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that stagnate sustainable growth. Acknowledging that low economic development and high climate costs cannot coexist, this collected volume interrogates the challenge for disaster-prone territories to determine strategies for restructuring and redesigning their environment. This book proposes the creation of knowledge economies, whereby empowered communities may produce innovative knowledge translatable across the African diaspora.

Drawing on the Pakistan Earthquake Reconstruction and Recovery Project (PERRP), this volume explores the sociocultural side of post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction. As the latter is often fraught with delays and even abandonment--one cause being ineffective interactions between construction and local people--PERRP used anthropological and participatory approaches. Along with strong construction management, such approaches led to the rebuilding being completed on time. As disasters are increasing in number and intensity, so too will be the need for reconstruction, for which PERRP has lessons to offer.