This lecture introduces the Tomorrow’s Cities Decision Support Environment (TCDSE), a participatory, people-centred approach to risk-informed decision making to help minimise future urban risk creation. The negative impacts of natural hazards are particularly pressing for low-to-middle income countries which are set to be impacted ever more disproportionately during future natural-hazard events if the “business as usual” urban-development approach continues unabated.

The TCDSE approach is enabled by using state-of-the-art procedures for physics-based hazard and engineering impact modelling, integrating physical and social vulnerability in a unified framework, and expressing the consequences of future disasters across an array of stakeholder-weighted impact metrics that facilitate democratisation of the risk concept.

Operation of the TCDSE leads to a risk-sensitive future visioning scenario (consisting of an urban plan and a set of pertinent policies) owned not only by the planning authorities, municipalities, the government or the private sector, but also by the communities who will live in these future cities. It therefore represents a significant advancement in the state of the art towards inclusive, people-centred disaster risk reduction, as advocated by global policies and world-leading international agencies like the United Nations, the International Federation of Red Cross, and the World Bank.

This lecture will primarily cover:

> the successful deployments of the TCDSE in the city of Rapti, Nepal, a rapidly expanding urban area that lacks formal planning and is increasingly exposed to floods, earthquakes, and landslides
>the promising potential of the TCDSE to help minimise future urban risk creation in this context
>an open discussion on the general capabilities of the TCDSE to shape policy changes that ultimately lead to risk-informed urban futures

Speakers

>Roberto Gentile – Associate Professor of Catastrophe Risk Modelling, UCL

>Vibek Manandhar – Consortium Manager, People in Need

Detail’s here..