URBAN EARTHQUAKE RISK REDUCTION FOR THE 21ST CENTURY:The Way Forward for the Middle Income and the Low Income Countries

摘要

Recovery and reconstruction experiences following major earthquakes in developing countries havehighlighted the need for re-examining strategic approaches to preventing earthquake disasters happeningin the densely built urban environment. Given the evidence that poor residents of low income countriesare disproportionately more seriously affected by earthquakes, other natural disasters and extreme eventsthan their more affluent neighbors, it is proposed that the ad hoc approach to urban earthquake preventiongive way to a more concerted, systematic and sustainable seismic prevention in the urban areas of the poor(low income) and middle income countries. As disaster vulnerability is closely related to development,this paper proposes strategies for earthquake prevention in the cities of these two categories of developingcountries, as urban susceptibility to earthquakes may jeopardize in the long term, and sometimes evenreverse, the results of the development process. At the onset of the new millennium and the global questfor poverty reduction, two strategic urban earthquake prevention approaches, deeply linked to thedevelopment process, are proposed for the middle and low income developing countries, respectively.