Dynamic Flood Typologies for Urban Resilience: Toward Equitable and Adaptive Risk Governance

Traditional flood classifications are increasingly inadequate for managing urban flood risk, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions of the Global South. Rigid typologies such as fluvial, pluvial, coastal, and flash flooding fail to capture the complex, cascading, and context-specific flood events that frequently impact cities. This review synthesizes emerging insights across hydrology, urban systems, and disaster governance to propose a dynamic, multidimensional flood typology tailored to urban environments. The framework integrates five axes: primary driver, trigger onset, interaction logic, system context, and temporal behavior, enabling a more accurate understanding of hybrid flood risks affecting the built environment. Drawing on case studies from Jakarta, Dhaka, Houston, and the Sahel, we show how typological misalignment leads to urban planning failures, ineffective infrastructure, and delayed adaptation. Rather than assigning fixed responses to predefined flood types, the framework supports multidimensional encoding of flood conditions that improves alignment between hazard characterization and planning-relevant decision variables. We argue that more context-sensitive flood typologies are essential for equitable, adaptive urban governance under accelerating climate and land-use change.