Local, regional, national and global levels are interconnected, though in different ways for metropolitan and central areas on the one hand, for small-medium towns and marginal and non-central areas on the other. Actually the situation is much more diversified and complex than the dichotomy between central and peripheral may hint at: cities may be central in a global perspective, but they can also be central to a nation or to a region, given the services and the type of functions they offer to other cities gravitating on them. Cities that are at the margin of global networks can be still central to a region. The different scales are in tension with each other, and this tension owes a lot to the type of existing networks (both physical and nonphysical, hard and soft).
Understanding those complex interrelationships and interlinkages is key to detect the ripple effects a disastrous event may have on social and economic systems. A disaster nowadays is seldom only local: immigrants from South East Asia have become a supportive communities for the countries hit by the tsunami in 2004; the 2011 earthquake affected some economic sectors in the USA depending on specific products that were produced in Japan. The fact that distances count differently in a globalized world means that regions and cities are closer or farther depending on their position and centrality in the various transport routes. This has implications also for the way in which aid and support can be provided once a disaster has hit in a region. Often aid arrives quicker to the airport of a capital city or to the regional central district than it takes from there to be moved to the areas that have been most affected, if the latter are located in detached, sparse and remote locations.
Scales that are relevant for cities may therefore vary from closely local to global, depending on the relative position of such cities, on their role as a service provider and as an economic actor in regional, national and international contexts. This does not necessarily imply that only core central cities must be protected, but rather that differential risk mitigation policies are needed to acknowledge for the diversity and the degree of relevance of cities within and across spatial scales.
Cities’ specialization as they position themselves at different spatial scales
Cities’ culture, resulting from past trends and present choices, shape the way in which cities position themselves locally and globally, also through designed strategies.
Cities were initially mainly a market place or a political centre, but have become in the modern times a place of production, offering services ranging from basic to high level, such as educational and driving technological and economic innovation. In today’s context, some cities have become very specialized, such as trade cities, port cities, finance cities, political and administrative nodes, religious destinations, etc. Every type of specialization entails a different city culture, with important consequences as to how cities interact with each other and in the way they interact with “nature”.
Specialization entails prevalence of certain types of patterns, both in the two and three dimensional spaces, reliance on predominant types of infrastructures and services.
The city’s specialization should orient decisions on what to protect most and first, on what are viable means of protection, on how they can be implemented without constraining the activities and operations that are mostly needed for the specialized city.
Figure. 3.1.4. Volos – The major economic function of a city shapes its structural pattern and physical artefacts. Considering the ex-industrial role of Volos in Greece helps us to understand the huge fabric blocks in the city and the city’s functional grid pattern.
Damage due to business and services interruption may be suffered miles away from the epicenter of the disaster; the network of cities to which the affected area pertains may feel the repercussions of the event in terms of unavailability of goods, lost customers (at least for some time), lost gateways for their products. Strategic choices will have to be made in order to restart those activities that are crucial for the city’s position in the network they pertain to, guaranteeing that it will not loose its role. However the issue must be looked at also at other scales, as what one city can loose may be gained by another, that is already well positioned before the impact of the event. How to account for those shifts is a matter that needs to be considered by national governments. Methods and tools to measure indirect impacts are still in their infancy and there is still much to be unveiled and explained in order to make pertinent analyses at different scales.
Modern cities’ culture orient choices towards specializations that can be permanent overtime or confirm the capacity to host for a certain period important events, exhibitions, games. In this respect, mega-events such as Olympic games, Expo exhibitions, universal fairs have become the object of both policies aiming at competing at the global level and of controversies depicting such events as disruptive of citizens’ everyday life and well-being. The capacity to host such events, though, is important nowadays as it may boost local economy and generate new networks and exchanges (De Steffani, 2011).
Mega-events, cities and organizational cultures
Mega-events are marketing tools for cities to make them globally significant and attract national and international interest from all over the world. Mega-events are also engines for the structural development of cities, as economic resources gained by mega-events are used to activate urban development. If the mega-events are handled well politically, organizationally and structurally, they provide great advantages to meet social, structural and economic challenges.
Mega-events include the notion of culture in terms of two perspectives; organizational culture and culture in hard infrastructure. The former is about the cooperation of several national and international organizations to achieve a successful mega-event. The latter is about improving the structural condition of a city, as to obtain a mega-event, a well-maintained infrastructure system is a must.
Having good quality infrastructure is not sufficient for being a part of this worldwide competition and hosting a mega-event. Hosting a mega-event brings a major challenge to meet resilience targets, meaning, the increased exposure of the population, including both inhabitants of the city and tourists/visitors coming to the event. Guaranteeing the safety and security of such events has become a critical point, especially after September 11, but also prior to it. That tremendous increase of exposed population from different cultures does not necessarily add new risks, but concentrates the current risks in the city in one place. Therefore, disaster risk reduction (DRR) that considers these cultural diversities must be a part of the investment to increase the resilience of the infrastructure systems, leveraging efforts on the three layers existing in the territory: spatial, organizational (public institutions or private, depending on the owner of the infrastructure system) and social (the users of the system).
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