WORLD ASSEMBLY OF URBAN INHABITANTS

Make our voices heard
Rethinking the city from the grassroots

Mexico City, 2-6 October 2000

Workshop: Safe City (Disasters)

Experiences were presented from Turkey, Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela, and were enriched by contributions and comments from delegates from Brasil, Senegal and the Dominican Republic among others. It was established that disasters are not only associated with natural phenomena but also with social processes, and that they are closely linked to the differential vulnerability that predominates especially in developing countries, and which generates risk conditions. For that reason, disasters, their intensity and their massive effects can not be explained only by the geographic location of the human settlements.

The economic processes and the political decisions propiciate exclusion, which in turn generates the situation where important sectors of the population live or survive in dangerous zones vulnerable to the occurance of earthquakes, floods, landslides, hurricanes and technological accidents. At the same time, they lend to the existance of other problems that we can also include in the category of disasters and that until now have been treated as separate issues. We refer to situations of hunger, generalized violence or epidemics.

Seen this way, disasters derive from a complex structural situation that has its origins in marginality, the modernization of exploitation and the globalization of poverty. This translates into economic and social policies that don't respond to the true needs of the population.

The existance of authoritarian or semi-democratic governments further explains their paralysis, corrupt practices, and application of policies and actions that respond only to the moment without attending the root problems, in the face of macroemergencies. This is reflected in disaster prevention and response programs that lack strategic and operative bases in order to have a real applicability and that have no relation with the existing urban, environmental and health policies. These programs in general don't consider the active participation of the affected communities or the rest of society, much less incorporate them in decision-making within the processes.

Following these reflections, the group developed the following proposals:
· Organizational processes should be promoted based on human settlements in a broad context of habitat and housing, incorporating risk prevention and disaster mitigation.
· Emergency management plans should therefor not be technocratic or bureaucratic and should include broad social participation of the affected communities themselves.
· These programs should not be managed in secretive or exclusionary ways, rather they should be public domain and be put into action from the bottom up, including the affected themselves, whose organizational, initiative and action capacities should be taken into account.
· Emergency and post-emergency assistance should respond to the real needs of the population, contributing to long-term recovery and reconstruction processes.
· Territorial management by the inhabitants should include the self-diagnosis of vulnerability and risk, as a form of territorial recognition and as an instrument for the design of projects for training and for the socialization of experiences.

An important strategy is the development of productive projects that promote communal actions backed-up by the community's own resources. This does not mean, however, that the state should abdicate from its responsabilities to guarantee the safety of the population.

To reduce vulnerability and risk conditions it is important to develop urban and rural improvement programs based on participative projects in health and environmental protection.

It is also important to highlight the importance of the invaluable role of international solidarity both during emergencies as well as afterwards.

The safe city is a goal that requires the commitment and participation of society as a whole, of the social organizations, of the academics and researchers as well as the civil society and non-governmental organizations. Therefore, we propose the creation of an international network of social, civil, and non-governmental organizations for the prevention, attention and mitigation of disasters.

Together we can make cities not only safer but also more solidary and human.

Drafting Team: Cuauhtémoc Abarca, Daniel Rodríguez