Disaster Recovery in Urban Environments

Disaster recovery, not least in urban environments, is a complex process. Because of high population densities and the presence of many societal and infrastructural dependencies, urban areas are prone to severe loss of self-reliance in case of a disaster. Rebuilding such areas to a self-sustaining state is a daunting task, and requires a high degree of community effort and comprehensive knowledge about the affected environment. All too often, these requirements are not properly met, leading to a long recovery trajectory and misalignments between recovery efforts and community needs.

In Proceedings of the 10th International ISCRAM Conference – Baden-Baden, Germany, May 2013 T. Comes, F. Fiedrich, S. Fortier, J. Geldermann and T. Muller, eds, Neef, van Dongen and Rijken suggest that most issues in disaster recovery stem from ‘collaboration gaps’: flawed organisational structures between stakeholder parties that exist between levels of operation and between phases in the recovery process. They introduce two innovation pathways to close these gaps, and present the COBACORE project that will explore these pathways, and create a collaborative platform for effective community-based comprehensive disaster recovery.

A very interesting paper which can be found on the COBACORE Virtual Dissemination Environment…

To view this paper click the link below!