AHI working symposium: Housing and urban renewal entities in the context of disaster risk mitigation

Context

1. Urban renewal authorities as vehicle to reduce disaster risk and improve cities

Housing improvement and urban renewal are activities that change the city environment in ways that can reduce disaster risk. Large-scale planned city improvement often uses an urban renewal authority (URA) or entity that is vested with a clustered set of powers delegated to it by national, state and other municipal agencies. What forms of urban renewal entity, authority, programs and actions have had the best impact on strengthening cities' resilience? What are the examples to avoid?

2. AHI's symposium: a place where a group tackles a real and specific problem

As part of a program funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Affordable Housing Institute (AHI) is sponsoring two symposia. In each1, AHI brings together a hand-picked group of 20-25 thought leaders, chosen for maximum hybrid vigor across disciplines, perspectives, and geographies, for two days of intensive brainstorming exploring provocative questions in regard to the symposium topic.

This symposium will use a 2+1 structure:

• 2 days of brainstorming (closed session) to explore a theory of change. 
• 1 day of presentation (open session) examining the two-days' thinking in a Turkish context. 

3. Can urban renewal be used to capture disaster-riskmitigation resources for strengthening the city predisaster?

After a disaster, vast aid flows and the political/ legislative space can be suddenly open and fluid. Conversely, before a disaster intractable political and administrative barriers make rationalizing urban areas difficult. Cities in the global north have used urban renewal authorities (URAs) as a means of cutting across administrative boundaries to reshape and improve cities. Can that thinking, applied to disaster-vulnerable places, accomplish two goals at once? Make them better cities when there is no disaster. Less at risk should a disaster strike. 

We want to understand the political and economic dynamics of such entities, with and without disasters, and to ask whether pre-disaster activities can make post-disaster work much more valuable in the long term or reduce the risk of disaster in the first place. We offer the thesis that if to activate risk mitigation in an urban environment, one may be well served by creating an urban redevelopment authority and imbuing that entity with certain powers from inception.

Goals, structure, and content 

4. Context: urbanization means greater disaster risk and loss

As the world continues urbanizing, the cost of natural disasters – tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes and typhoons – continues to rise in both human and economic terms. Because they are unpredictable, disasters are great human tragedies; yet they also trigger a second wave event – an outpouring of money, volunteer activity (both public and private), new innovations, and an interval in which human communities can be comprehensively remade. Can any of this be harnessed before a disaster?

5. Urban renewal authorities as a positive change-maker

Centralizing urban planning/ infrastructure/ disaster-risk-mitigation via a URA can have two benefits:
• URAs as important actors for change, particularly in regard to disaster preparedness and community participation, particularly in reshaping the current city.
• URAs as a channel and coordinator for post-disaster resource inflows. The aid that arrives often focuses short-term, and on restoring the status quo ante. It should rather focus on making of the disaster an opportunity to remake the city for the better.
Pre-disaster action can improve the housing situation after a disaster. This action should be economically and physically doable and socially feasible.

6. Disaster mitigation is also urban renewal and redevelopment

Making rapidly growing cities more resilient to disaster risk inevitably involves elements of urban renewal: rationalizing streets, re-designation of uses, upgrading economic base and social organization of communities, strengthening infrastructure, private residences, and so on.
There is an intrinsically municipal and governmental activity, and environmental safety, of renewing and reconfiguring the urban environment. This hits issues of financing, property rights, judicial rights, upgrading environmental quality and design, multiple levels of governance (particularly municipal) and it is an area where global-north nations have had experience (both good and bad). Thus this
topic can benefit from both southern and northern experience. 

7. AHI's goals for the symposium

• To bridge the divides among the disparate groups: the 'shelter cluster' (as it is known), the water and sanitation cluster, the housing and urban development cluster, risk-mitigation analytical studies, local development practices, and the architecture of international aid.
• To find common-ground principles that can lead to an intervention-oriented set of actions with practical participatory implementability.
• To report examples from all around the world in regard to disaster mitigation and the tasks of redevelopment agencies

8. What the symposium will be about

Formation of redevelopment authorities as agents of change; appropriate predisaster and post-disaster powers; role in reshaping the urban infrastructure; risks and necessary checks, balances, and community participation; lessons for interface with higher levels of domestic government; implications for international aid. The gathering shall draw on:

• Proceedings of AHI’s first symposium, Irresolution versus Amnesty, which explored the challenge of formalizing informal residential settlements. Most of these are located in poor land, on steep slopes, close to riverbanks and ravines, and most vulnerable to natural disaster. Unauthorized and nonengineered structures, they can still be multi-storey and at tremendous risk in a disaster.
• Lessons from disaster (natural and man-made): study coordination of efforts and how Mission Entrepreneurial Entities (NGOs, CBOs, CSOs, CDCs, etc) and government were (or weren’t) effective when dealing with a post-disaster situation. Implications for pre-disaster urban renewal entities.
• Disaster recovery/rehabilitation with focus on international aid and the roles of MEEs and local/regional/national government.
• The aid tsunami: funds, military/ UN, the local government’s varied capacity to deal with the situation.
• Formation of redevelopment authorities, necessary changes in jurisdiction, power and participatory processes facilitated by these agents. 

9. What the symposium will not be about

• Whether climate change or AGW are causing increased natural disasters, or any geopolitical debate on the economics of who should pay.
• A deconstruction of government's response in New Orleans, Haiti, or any specific place.
• The engineering of disaster reconstruction.
• The relief period/ during the time the aid workers flood the disaster area, except insofar as these activities can be coordinated or improved through a pre-existing URA.

10. Questions to be considered

If preventive measures are such a good idea, why are they not implemented? Are such proposals totally unrealistic, or are they only in need of special coordination, a little incentive, and demonstrated pilot examples? 

In other countries (like Haiti, the Philippines, etc) can one have a rapid intellectual-response in place, so that as physical resources arrive, they can be integrated into an overall strategy? 

What would we do differently if we knew a particular disaster would strike a particular place at a particular time? 

How can we learn from the history of redevelopment authorities and participatory processes in other countries in order to make them agents of change? What powers do we need to equip them with so they can facilitate housing and urbanization processes that take into account risk preparedness (avoidance, reduction, and sharing)?

Conversely, what are the risks of runaway or unaccountable URAs usurping functions, money, and decision authority and disenfranchising local people, especially poor people? 

11. Structure of the event

Two days of intense brainstorming punctuated by case-study examples drawn from current real-world environments, one extra day that will focus on Turkey.

Elements may include:
•  Case studies, particularly around urban re-gridding and formalizing of slums, prospective urban development, such as: Ex-ante activities (preparing for the possibility)
• US or UK redevelopment authorities (e.g. Boston, San Francisco, Liverpool, Manchester) and their composition, powers, and experience  with large-scale projects.
• South Africa redevelopment authorities in anticipation of the recently completed World Cup.
• Examples from 2010-2011 ‘resilient cities’ campaign of ISDR.

Ex-post (recovery after the event):
• New Orleans after Katrina and the Louisiana Recovery Authority (contact Lindsay Jonker); Fire in Joe Slovo, Cape Town (South Africa) – 475 shacks destroyed, 2,000 homeless (contact: SDI); Floods in the Philippines – (contact: SDI), South Texas after Hurricane Ike (contact: TxLIHS), Earthquakes in Gujarat (contact: TCGI); Kashmir, Haiti, etc; Post 2004 tsunami efforts in Jakarta (Banda Aceh: contact Arup).