This chapter focuses on how urban development relates to riverine flood risk. It begins with an overview of flooding and related riverine processes (e.g., sediment transport, floodplain formation, channel migration). It then presents the urban development and flood histories of Vienna (Austria) on the Danube and Calgary (Canada) on the Bow River, including the latter’s 2013 flood disaster. The cases are assessed and compared using the Urban Risk Dynamics framework. Vienna and Calgary demonstrate several key themes, including the “levee effect.” Each city’s relationship with the river has been one of technological control, intensifying over time. During periods of major population growth, flood protection investments are made that allow the city to expand into hazard lands. Once set in motion, the reliance on technology for flood protection becomes self-reinforcing, difficult to reverse as more of the city comes to depend on it. Over time, there is a loss of collective memory about flood risk. The role of government becomes increasingly important. Disaster events lead to learning and adaptation but do not fundamentally alter processes of urban development that give rise to risk.

This chapter focuses on how urban development relates to coastal flood risk. It begins with key concepts related to coastal geomorphology and flooding in river deltas and estuaries (e.g., processes of landscape formation, protective benefit of wetlands, storm surge, human impacts on coastlines). It then presents the urban development and flood histories of New Orleans (including Hurricane Katrina) and New York City (including Hurricane Sandy). The cases are assessed and compared using the Urban Risk Dynamics framework. Both demonstrate how urbanization in coastal cities often entails extensive loss of wetlands, construction of navigational waterways that inadvertently funnel storm surge, and floodplain expansion through land subsidence or building out the waterfront. Urban expansion into more hazardous lands may be intentionally enabled through construction of flood protection structures. Generally, the least economically valuable land was occupied by the most socially vulnerable populations. Catastrophic events like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy spur mitigation but reinforce ongoing urbanization trends. Lower density areas, however, provide opportunities for strategic retreat.

Cities are economic entities. Their location, functioning, growth, decline, and internal structure are all heavily influenced by economic forces. This chapter draws from the fields of urban economics, economic geography, and regional science in order to present some core concepts of urban growth and change organized around three questions: Why are cities where they are? What drives urban growth and change? And how does a city grow across a landscape? Foundational concepts (e.g., first and second nature, competition between cities, agglomeration economies, density gradients, transport technology and urban form, the monocentric city model, nonmarket forces) are explained narratively and illustrated through examples from cities around the world. A key message is that the economic logic of urban development is constrained by geography, enabled by technology, and shaped by human institutions, including urban planning. The chapter emphasizes that the urban built environment at risk from hazards is a tangible accumulation of the city’s economic history.

This chapter focuses on how urban development relates to earthquake risk. It draws connections between earthquakes and floods, then introduces key technical concepts (e.g., magnitude v. intensity, liquefaction, structural response to shaking). It presents the urban development and disaster histories of Kobe (Japan; including the 1995 earthquake) and Christchurch (New Zealand; including the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence), assessing and comparing them using the Urban Risk Dynamics framework. Findings resonate with themes from the flood chapters. Urbanization often involves modifying lands (e.g., draining wetlands, expanding waterfronts, constructing islands), which are susceptible to ground failure in earthquakes. While newer structures are less prone to damage because of technological and building code advances, many older buildings are concentrated in neighborhoods that are hotspots of physical and social vulnerability. Postdisaster reconstruction and recovery accelerate prior trends. Catastrophic events trigger learning and instigate diversification in risk reduction strategies. Retreat from hazard lands is possible, as exemplified in Christchurch’s residential red zone.

In order to understand how urban disaster risk changes, it is essential to understand how cities change. This chapter argues that cities are continually evolving entities whose past and present dynamics provide insights into future trends and possibilities. The chapter first reviews global trends in disaster losses, along with well-established definitions and frameworks about disaster risk. It explains why these are inadequate for understanding how a city’s disaster risk changes over time. It then proposes a simple conceptual framework, the Urban Risk Dynamics framework, to help guide empirical study of evolving disaster risk in any city. The framework is based on several premises: that local geography, or landscape, is vital to understanding urban disaster risk; that cities must be understood as economic entities; and that technological change is a key driver of urban change. The chapter then introduces and justifies the selection of the six case studies to be analyzed using the framework in Chapters 3–5.

The concluding chapter provides a synthesis and reflection on insights from this book. It first summarizes the main findings regarding how disaster risk today is a legacy of urban history, drawing on salient examples from the six case study cities and cautioning that risk becomes very “path dependent” as future options are constrained by past decisions. After discussing limitations of the study and further research needs, the chapter suggests that the Urban Risk Dynamics framework and findings from the six cases are relevant to any city, demonstrating this for Vancouver (Canada). It then reflects on the practical significance of the book. It argues that the findings demonstrate why disaster risk and risk reduction should be viewed dynamically; why understanding risk should start with the city, not the hazard or disaster; and why interdisciplinary approaches are critical for reducing risk. Recognizing this can help analysts, planners, and policy-makers, for example, to not only identify current risk hotspots but anticipate future ones, to consider risk from a multihazard standpoint, and to develop strategies and solutions that are effective in the long term.

Thus far it is evident that the rural livelihoods in southern Morang are embedded within a deeply inequitable agrarian structure, with dual surplus appropriation by landlords and merchant capital. However, it is important to remember that feudalism, like capitalism itself, is not a static system, but is dynamic and subject to evolution and flux. While changes to the feudal system over the last few centuries were explored in Chapter 3, this chapter explores the contemporary trajectory of change. The last three decades in particular have marked a new era in Nepal's agrarian political economy. As noted earlier in this book, pre-capitalist inequalities have not been undermined, and these in part contributed to the 10-year civil war and waves of more recent ethnic unrest. However, at a national level, Nepal has also undergone significant economic change following neoliberal restructuring.

Within this context, capitalism is articulating with rural pre-capitalist economic formations like never before. A key argument is that there is growing ‘agrarian stress’ associated with climatic-ecological pressures, expanding capitalist markets with an associated wave of monetisation and cultural change. In its wake, farmers are becoming more dependent than ever before on off-farm labour in the capitalist sector both locally and overseas, to supplement the meagre returns gained from the land under feudal agriculture This has intensified throughout the 17 years within which this research has taken place. We explore these changes in turn below.