projected growth will not take place in the megacities of Asia, but in “middleweight” cities such as Foshan in China and Surat in India (Dobbs et al., 2012). These cities are projected to contribute two-thirds of global growth by 2025 (ibid.) and to host more than half of the world’s middle or “consuming” class (ibid.).12 The combination of speculative urban development for a wealthy minority with informal urbanization for a low-income majority in cities with weak capacities for urban planning and management is likely to continue to drive urban disaster risk. In the coming decades, most urban growth is likely to occur in regions like South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (Figure 11.8); without radical change, it will epitomize the growth in segregated disaster risk. Many countries in these regions have relatively weak urban governance. Governance and system failures to support regulatory functions have undermined the quality of building controls and created significant vulnerabilities. These include the insufficient quality
of underlying laws and regulations;13 ineffective administration; insufficient qualifications on the part of local building code officials, local designers and contractors; an inadequate focus on risk management; opaque, bureaucratic procedures; and corruption (GFDRR and UN-Habitat, 2014). For example, India is projected to see its number of urban dwellers increase by 404 million over the next 35 years, which means that around 50 per cent of the country’s population will live in cities by 2050 (UNDESA, 2014b). In sub-Saharan Africa, similar growth rates mean that 55 per cent of the region’s population will live in urban areas by 2050 (ibid.). This represents what has been described as a tsunami of urbanization.14 Unless planned and managed, this development is likely to be accompanied by an equally powerful tsunami of disaster risk.
Figure 11.8 Urban growth in geographical regions
(Source: UNDESA, 2014b.)
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