Urban risk in Freetown’s informal settlements: making the invisible visible

This policy brief reflects on the participatory approaches adopted to improve knowledge of small-scale and everyday urban risks in Freetown, Sierra Leone, a city that continues to experience rapid urban development and population growth. The participatory approaches used include settlement timelines, community-led mapping, and DRM wheels. Through these approaches, urban risk traps were captured to assess mitigation efforts by a range of actors, revealing the embedded 'capacities to act’ on the captured risks. Case studies focus on the hillside informal settlement of Dwozark and the coastal informal settlement of Cockle Bay.