Community resilience and vulnerability to disasters: Qualitativemodels and megacities - a comparison with small towns

摘要

This paper contrasts the resilience to disasters of megacities with small towns, using vulnerability as a key variable. As aninstrument of this comparison a formal model of the communities' vulnerability, further deconstructed into a set of specificmodules, is developed and used. It is argued that the megacities' high resilience capacity in the main ensures only a debilitating(although undoubtedly major) effect on them by disaster agents. Meanwhile, the impact on the small towns is often disastrousand sometimes turns into a real catastrophe with some communities totally devastated. However, this observation does notpreclude some notable exceptions. To corroborate and highlight the key findings above, empirical data from the Russianexperience of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries are provided, supplemented by some international illustrations.