Jeroen Warner, Helena de Jong, Elena López-Gunn, Manuel Bea, Marta Rica
A warm welcome to you, reader, practitioner, policymaker, researcher or interested browser.
To our knowledge, this is the first handbook of its kind covering urban disaster and culture.
Culture, we claim, is not only a hindrance and a source of misunderstandings, but also an asset that can bring creative solutions and save lives. Cultural networks, we find, have communication lines and repertoires of action that help them survive in and learn from disaster. Systems theory teaches us that there is strength in diversity. Socio-cultural diversity however is mighty puzzling. This is a guide for the intrigued and perplexed by disaster and culture. It is not a recipe book, but gives you the “what”, “why” and, where possible, “how” on working with cultural diversity and urban social networks when adversity strikes.
But culture is not so easily identified; you only notice culture when you trip over it. The present book aims to help you at four levels:
- To recognise
- To analyse
- To instrumentalise
- To act
In cross-cutting thematic sections local and specialist knowledge on urban disaster and culture converges. These sections relate the experiences, procedures and tools developed and collected by the participant EDUCEN city teams and experts. We thank the non-team colleagues inside EDUCEN as well as external experts who kindly contributed inputs. Apart from drawing liberally on the city manuals, the handbook relies on the State of the Art report developed for and with EDUCEN.
The final, sixth section outlines the methods we developed, adapted, tested and transferred on the ground, while a state of the art glossary that helps you get acquainted with our thinking and key concepts.
Many of our examples draw on our own experiences. In the two-year EDUCEN Coordination and Support Action, funded by the European Communion (www.educenproject.eu), we exchanged, tested, adapted, and learned from each other in seven disaster-prone European cities and urban regions: L’Aquila, Dordrecht, Istanbul, Lorca, Milan, Umbria and Volos. This handbook provides local experiences and ‘manuals’ on the seven European pilot cities comprising EDUCEN – L’Aquila, Dordrecht, Istanbul, Lorca, Milan, Umbria, Volos. These manuals exemplify the EDUCEN approach (see below), and the development and implementation of the different approaches and tools developed.
“We” are a diverse group of European researchers and practitioners, many not trained and steeped in social sciences but stumbling on culture and finding ways of handing it in our daily work (qui link al consorzio).
The book has two main elements:
- a substantive element (the ‘what’), in a series of Sections and thematic chapters on how to integrate culture into Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR);
- a procedural element (the ‘how’), on tools, methods and steps to identify and include elements of culture in DRR.
A word of warning: it can get a bit complex in places. To help you along, we start with an easy-access part with some definitions and key starting points to orient you on the topic. From there you can move on to the trickier stuff: how to do social network analysis with mathematical modelling; the debates on whether there is such a thing as a ‘community’. Each section in the handbook consists of a practical and accessible ‘front end’ and a more in-depth ‘back end’. The front end starts with more general sub-sections, which are divided into a number of paragraphs (including boxes, photos, etc.), that resonate with the interests of disaster (risk) managers and city planners (see below for Detailed Index). In some cases, the sections are further divided into sub-topics. The back-end of the handbook provides users with the opportunity to gain more in-depth knowledge on theories, methods, discussions and experiences underlying the questions, tools and methods of the front end. This information is retrieved through ‘read more’ buttons throughout the handbook.
We also bring to the table practical tools – games, social network analysis, focus groups, exhibitions that may serve as points for professional reflection. We aim to provide decision-makers, planners and trainers with knowledge and tools on integrating culture in DRR and DRR in urban planning, throughout the stages of the Disaster Risk Life Cycle – prevention, mitigation, preparation, response and rehabilitation. While many of our tools and insights are “all-hazard”, our focus has mainly been limited to earthquakes and (pluvial and fluvial) floods.
Disaster and Culture literature
Disaster and culture had its heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, with American scholars like Moore, Anderson and Wenger and Weller, but fell out of fashion, except for a great book by Hoffmann and Oliver Smith on Cultures and Catastrophe in the late 1990s.
The theme returned to the limelight when the Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies made it its theme in the 2014 World Disasters Report and its companion volume, ‘Cultures and Disasters’ edited by Fred Krüger et al. We acknowledge and build on their excellent work, taking it to Europe and seeking to give it some practical ‘hands and feet’.
As none of these books pays a lot of attention to urban disaster or to Europe, we hope our handbook goes some way towards filling this gap.