Abstract:
Africa is the world’s most rapidly urbanizing continent. Already there are more
people living in urban settlements in Africa than all of Western Europe or North
America (UN-HABITAT, 2006). Most of this urban growth is unplanned and
driven by natural growth among already marginalized urban populations and inmigration of the poor and displaced. Migrants come from smaller towns or rural
villages and often cross international borders, sometimes illegally, generating
new excluded and vulnerable populations. Riots and street violence targeted at
urban in-migrants in South Africa in 2008 demonstrated the challenge for
integration when international migration reaches high levels.
Urban migrants seek an escape from the economic, environmental and political insecurity of life. The tragic deaths of sea-borne migrants attempting to
cross from West Africa to Spain also show the desperation created by such push
factors. Increasingly though, through poverty, lack of basic needs and human
rights and the extension of cities into unsafe land, urban centres are becoming
hotspots of disaster risk. This is clear for anyone living in or visiting Africa’s
growing cities, but has hardly been acknowledged by the international policy and
academic communities – a gap that this book seeks to take a first step towards
filling.
This study supports the emerging view that places adaptation to shocks
associated with climate change as a subset of disaster risk reduction. A review of
climate change impacts on urbanization by the International Institute for
Environment and Development (Huq et al, 2007) found that floods are already
having very severe impacts on cities, smaller urban centres and rural areas in
