Urban areas and flooding

OVERVIEW OF PART I

The predominance of almost exclusively technocratic and piecemeal approaches has led to the development of less effective and less efficient means of responding to floods and flood-related disasters. In current practice there is a clear evidence of a lack of interaction between social aspects and engineering and this appears to be a major hindrance for solving some of the greatest problems associated with floods and flood-related disasters. There are many such examples of dealing with various flood-related projects whereby large amounts of human and financial resources have been thrown into technical developments without regard to their related social interactions. It is now obvious that flood risk mitigation processes require multiple approaches and disciplines and the aim of this part of the book is to bring into a synergic relation a range of aspects concerning both social and technical issues that can provide states of social justice.

In the following sections we illustrate the nature of flooding in the case of a 2007 Jakarta flood event and we bring other related aspects from different places in the world. We introduce a new holistic view of looking at root causes of urban flood risk. We touch upon the evolution of flood mitigation practice and current state of risk assessment work. We also introduce social justice as an important dimension within the flood risk mitigation process. At the same time, we observe that further examples can be seen on our television programmes on an almost everyday basis, even if there is rarely any explanation of the causes and effects in these presentations.

1.2 URBAN AREAS AND FLOODING - WHAT CAN WE CONCLUDE SO FAR?

Urban areas are usually defined as geographic locations where secondary (industrial, manufacturing) or tertiary (service) sectors dominate over the primary (agriculture, forestry, mining, etc.) sectors, which display high population density or size, constitute an administrative region and where all land uses and activities lying within such a metropolitan district are referred to as "urban". In urban areas, society is popularly perceived as being in control of a physical environment where natural hazards such as floods can be managed to a larger extent by the means of technical (or engineering) measures.

Floods are commonly defined as an overwhelming flow of water onto land that is normally dry and which under certain circumstances can cause unprecedented losses and devastation. These can result from a wide range of events and processes. These factors can be diverse (natural, human or technology related) as well as site-specific. Amongst others they can include heavy rain, storm surges, tsunamis, overtopping river banks and raised groundwater levels. A review of natural catastrophes between 1950 and 2000 and economical losses can be sourced from Munich Re (2002).

The threats from floods and other natural disasters were initially described as "those elements of the physical environment harmful to man and caused by forces extraneous to him" (Barton and Kates 1964). Such a perception has led to the preference for physical rather than social treatment of floods with urban societies being allowed to live under the shadow of increasing risk. Certainly, there is much to be gained from physical engineering-based interventions, but without an appropriate inclusion of social and ethical aspects into the analysis our interventions into the physical environment are in danger of ignoring differences in the influence of individual and social characteristics on the susceptibility or response to urban flood risk. It is the objective of this part of the book to explore not only the technical and natural but also the closely interacting social dimensions of at-risk elements and examine the ways in which such interactions shape the vulnerability to floods that take place in urban areas in developed as well as developing countries. Perhaps, the following example of Jakarta 2007 flood illustrates best the fundamental characteristics of urban flood risk and highlights the greater susceptibility to losses of those living in the cities.

On 2nd February 2007 there was a major flood event in the city of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, which affected not only the central area but also several other areas around the city, such as West Java and Banten. This flood is considered as one of the worst floods that took place in Jakarta in the last three centuries, including the 1996 and 2002 flood events. On that day in 2007, over 70,000 homes were flooded, resulting in the displacement of some 200,000 people: see Figure 1.1. This event has caused almost US$1 billion in tangible damages. Approximately 190,000 people have fallen ill due to flood-related illnesses and the officially reported death toll was close to 70. This was one of the greatest flood disasters that had ever occurred in Jakarta. What stands out is that the residents of an officially illegal neighbourhood - a squatter (or slum) area on the flood plain - suffered an unprecedented impact. This flood event illustrates some of the fundamental characteristics of urban flood risk and vulnerability which forms an important theme for discussion in this chapter. It certainly reminds us that urban areas are not immune to the forces of nature, but more importantly, it indicates that some community groups are more exposed to threats from flood disasters (i.e., they are more vulnerable) than others as they continue living and working on floodplains as well as other hazardous areas.

The same flood event also proves that flood-related disasters are not only the result of natural events. They are also the product of social, economic, historical, political and even cultural issues. People live in different socio-economic situations which often dictate their choice of regions and places for living. Some of these regions and places are often affected by floods, and to such an extent that hardly anybody would ever expect that they could be considered as habitable. However, due to political, economic and some other reasons these areas are not only partially occupied but they are in many cases even encouraged for full scale developments. This can only aggravate the situation and cause even more severe impacts of floods. In the case of Jakarta, the slum areas represent home to more than half of its inhabitants. The informal sector comprised a majority section of the inhabitants involved in plantations with tofu and in temporary industrial units, while many earn their livelihood working in metal shops or numerous small-scale factories and vending food. Battling through heavy traffic congestions, smutty rivers, recurring flooding, air reeking of diesel odours and living with unfenced rail lines, the residents of areas such as Ciliwung and Galur continue to endure, work and raise their children.

Another important aspect to note in the Jakarta 2007 flood event is the perception of flood risk. Siringoringo et al. (2008) observed that the perception of flood impact on life and daily activities is significantly different amongst Jakarta's inhabitants and that the level of knowledge and understanding of flood risk in a given area is directly related to people's decisions to either adjust their living to such a risk or simply to ignore it.

In addition to the above observations we can also note that in some other parts of the world the gender, race and ethnicity issues represent yet another aspect which in certain conditions may contribute to disastrous outcomes. All these observations suggest that the development of effective flood mitigation measures requires not only sound engineering knowledge but also a much deeper understanding of social and ethical aspects, while any ignorance, either intentional or unintentional, of such aspects is likely to create not only ineffective solutions but also conditions for ever increasing risks and greater disasters.

What can also be observed from the same example of the Jakarta 2007 flood event is that the process of flood risk reduction and the associated social and institutional responses to such events represent an immense challenge, and then not only to planners, engineers and scientists but to urban societies as a whole. The resources that are available at the city level are often limited, and the task of setting up priorities, so that even making the right choices so as to achieve some measure of "distributive justice" in distribution of risks and allocation of flood protection funds has been a difficult, and in many cases unachievable, task. This is mainly due to the technocratic and piecemeal way of thinking which has been dominated by engineering problem-solving and misplaced applications of cost-benefit analyses.

The same Jakarta 2007 flood event also demonstrates that dealing with floods is a sociotechnical endeavour through and through: that very few flood-related problems are purely technical or purely social, but they are for much the greater part sociotechnical. In dealing with flood-related problems, sociotechnology constitutes a particular species of conjunctive knowledge, which is one that joins together two (or more) different and otherwise separate knowledges (i.e., social, technical, economic, environmental, etc.), thereby providing a new field of knowledge with qualitatively different properties than those of its constituent parts. Therefore, the study and practice of sociotechnology for the purposes of dealing with flood risk mitigation problems is essential if one wishes to understand how technical measures have social consequences and how the resulting social changes react back again on the technical developments, and so on, again and again, in what has the potential to become a sequence of positive feedback cycles.

The debate that arose in the aftermath of the Jakarta 2007 event not only posed a number of social and technical questions but it also posed hard questions of morality and justice. How are flood protection standards generally defined and by whom? Do they reflect the needs and concerns of all community members? Which parts of the community are more protected and which parts are less protected and why? What kinds of standards can be regarded as ethically and socially legitimate? Who should be involved in setting such standards? If we cannot provide an equal level of protection to all residents in the city, how can we decide who should be protected first? What is the fair and just distribution of risks? How should the community assess and perceive risk and how should the victims be treated and compensated when disaster strikes? What are socially-just considerations in judging the acceptability of residual risk (i.e., a risk that remains after a particular flood protection measure has been implemented)? Is the application of cost-benefit analysis to identify protection measures the best approach to reaching a decision or do we need to introduce additional considerations that cannot easily be incorporated into the current framework? In order to answer these and other such questions, we have to first explore and understand the meaning of social justice that is applicable in our field of endeavour and then to seek for the right principles that need to be incorporated into our practice. In fact, by raising these questions we have already begun to provide answers! Our intention here is not to try to provide a universal answer to these questions but to present the readers with the theoretical and practical backgrounds that may assist them in posing such questions themselves and so come up with their own answers and judgements. Therefore, the book aims at rethinking our work practices and developing of skills and knowledges based upon social justice considerations that are needed to take practical actions for change within the current practice.

The book introduces the notion of social justice in the context of what has popularly been referred to as "flood risk management", but then in a context in which management itself is placed directly in the hands of the most active stakeholders rather than being in the hands of what have so far passed as "professional managers". Furthermore, if we recall that the meaning of management has to do with establishing and providing order it then becomes doubtful whether it is appropriate to use the word "management" in a combination with the term "flood risk" at all, since neither a person nor a group can ever be in a position to bring an order into something that is intangible and which contains a complex mix of social, technical and natural phenomena. Hence, we prefer the term "flood risk mitigation" over the term "flood risk management".

1.3 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS

As illustrated by the 2007 Jakarta flood event, the overall consequences of such events highlight the position of flooding as the most deadly and destructive of all natural disasters. These more general observations must however be broken down into their particular instances, as the measures that are being put into place to reduce the impact of flooding are now changing at an historically unprecedented rate in some countries even as so little attention is currently being given to these measures and its successes elsewhere. There is in the current English-language literature an almost total concentration on a few "western" nations whose investments in infrastructure generally are really quite small and piecemeal, amounting to only a few percentage points of the world total, even as urban flooding in the much greater regions of the so-called third (or developing) world is given only a cursory "headline" treatment with only a negligible attention being given to the true magnitude of these disasters and only a miniscule amount of assistance being proffered. At the same time, in other parts of the world again, among the so-called "emerging economies" which are often far better organised, this investment has long been some orders of magnitude greater and appears to have been in certain instances substantially more successful, even as it has received only the most perfunctory and superficial attention in the western media, with such attention as has been given being concentrated on a relatively few specific and particularly tragic failings. To take the most dramatic and recent examples at this time of writing, the averting of the floods following upon landslides that could have had much more disastrous consequences than actually occurred during the Great Sichuan Earthquake of 2008, as well as the fact that not one of the 139 major dams in the region failed, indicated the capability of engineers in that nation. Similarly, the speedy and effective responses to the flooding that struck southern China in 2010 have graphically illustrated the magnitude of the resources that could be brought to bear in reducing the loss of life and property in reasonably well-organised, well-equipped and efficient operations. In both instances these actions were led on the spot by the President of China, himself a well-qualified hydraulic engineer, and with the authority, for example, to deploy army helicopters to deliver powered assault boats with their crews to otherwise isolated villages and individual families, as well as to organise effective emergency food supplies and temporary shelter. In this case there was a very adequate television coverage of events which even showed heavy earth- and rock-moving equipment being parachuted off rear-facing ramps, presumably from Russian heavy-lifting aircraft, into otherwise inaccessible areas.

One of the first priorities in this book is to take some distance from the current largely- Eurocentric view of the sociotechnical dimensions of flood risk and its mitigation. Alongside the now currently ongoing lament in the west about the necessity of "drawing the contours of a new world order" in economic terms, there is a lack of understanding of the developments of cities and other urban areas, within the context of this new world order. It should be enough to understand that China alone now accounts for about half of all the world's investment in infrastructure to realise the importance of comprehending something of the driving forces that are at work within that newly emerging economy. Alongside this, it should be understood that the industrial development of China remains the principal motor behind the development of the ASEAN region generally, even as its influence also filters further again into African and Latin American environments, catalysing further new developments in these regions also. Corresponding to this sea change in economic developments that must ultimately alleviate, even if not obviate, flood risk, we shall first concentrate in this section of the book upon the way in which socioeconomic development in China is currently proceeding in the direction of mitigating the effects of flooding.