PRUV · Preparedness and Resilience to address Urban Vulnerability

Preparedness and Resilience to address Urban Vulnerability

The challenge posed by urban vulnerability is immense and is being compounded by rapid unplanned urbanisation, climate change and resource pressures. While the realisation that there is a fundamental shift in the landscape of crises to cities is no longer contested, aid actors are nonetheless grappling with the complexities of adapting their approaches to the urban context. The Preparedness and Resilience to address Urban Vulnerability (PRUV) Consortium aims to inform the pressing need to reshape how humanitarian action and development aid is undertaken in urban areas to address the challenge posed by urban vulnerability. Assembled within the PRUV Consortium is an exciting mix of actors with considerable experience and expertise in urban contexts that will transcend disciplines and sectors to frame a new resilience and preparedness paradigm to respond to urban challenges. It seeks to combine existing best practice with innovative thinking and technology to challenge current state of the art thinking in order to arrive at a novel approach with affected urban populations at the centre. By combining legal, social, cultural, political and public health perspectives in a holistic manner, considerable purchase is added to the research around preparedness and resilience, which, while not new within the aid sector more generally, has not been focussed sufficiently on the urban context to date. The opportunities to carry out the research in test-bed sites in Africa, Asia and Latin America adds to the potentially broad utility and transferability of the findings globally. The objectives of the project are as follows: 1. To advance the state of the art by exploring the relationship between resilience and socio-economic issues across a range of societal institutions. 2. To advance the state of the art by addressing the theoretical and practical gaps in the protection of crisis-affected communities and vulnerable groups in urban settings in order to acquire new evidence-based knowledge to foster resilience. 3. To advance the state of the art by determining the contribution of existing legal frameworks at different levels of governance to urban resilience and how they can be improved. 4. To advance the state of the art by positioning urban resilience within the human security paradigm. 5. To advance the state of the art by modelling the effectiveness of public health preparedness interventions in urban settings for improving household, community, and local government resilience to humanitarian crises.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union