Risk Governance: Application to Urban Challenges

Urban areas face multiple risks: they range from natural hazard-induced disasters, fires, and building code violations to social risks such as vandalism, crime, and social disorientation, among others. These risks often interact with each other and cannot be dealt with in isolation. As a means to identify, assess, and manage multiple risks, the concept of “risk governance” has been developed, which promises to provide integrative and comprehensive tools to deal with the many manifestations of risks. In this article, risk governance concept has been specifically applied to complex risk situations in urban areas. The concept of risk governance pertains to the many ways in which multiple actors, individuals and institutions, public and private, deal with risks. It includes formal institutions and regimes and informal arrangements. The article first develops an adaptive and integrative model of risk governance and applies this model to the urban environments. After a short summary of the roots of risk governance, key concepts, such as simple, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous risks, are discussed. The main emphasis is on each of the five phases of risk governance: pre-estimation, interdisciplinary assessment, risk evaluation, risk management, and risk communication.