Urban Planning for Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation: A Review at the Crossroads of Research and Practice

This review aims to understand what urban planning and management can do and how to reduce disaster risk and adapt to climate change impacts in cities. In order to do so it examines different streams of literature, as the topic lies at the interface of different disciplinary fields that have insofar developed quite separately but are all relevant to respond the initial question. Such disciplinary fields include urban planning (in hazardous areas), recovery planning, disaster risk reduction that itself is an umbrella including various disciplines from engineering to geography and sociology, and more recently climate change adaptation. In order to navigate in such vast realm of knowledge a conceptual framework is proposed to guide in the selection of relevant literature and the strategy for selecting the latter is described in a methodological section. This review shares elements of a critical and theoretical review in that it does not aim at being comprehensive nor systematically search each of the disciplinary domain that are addressed. Whilst acknowledging the limitations and some biases in the selection of articles and books, it does reflect a certain evolution in the discourse on urban planning for resilience. It is discussed how the latter concept has emerged as useful to bridge between disaster risk reduction, sustainability and climate change adaptation, especially as cities experience increased exposure and vulnerability to stresses that have become more compound, multihazard and cascading. In the conclusions gaps and challenges that must be addressed by researchers, practitioners and policymakers are discussed.