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Managing Urban Floods
As cities and regions around the world are getting incorporated into the globalisation and urbanisation processes, they simultaneously exhibit characteristics that are more diverse and complex due to the relations of their local and regional bases. It holds for many Indian cities, which are restructuring themselves under the process of urbanisation, but with their unique regional–cultural aspects or dimensions.
In recent years, Indian cities and their neighbourhoods have been constantly changing under the guise of urban development. The rapid growth of a city and its built-up areas lead to the continuous absorption of surrounding villages and agricultural lands. As a result, these surrounding villages, which are known as peri-urban areas, show structural and functional changes over a period of time. An understanding of the links between the city and its peri-urban areas is important in the evolution of urban areas. Urbanisation, only in terms of its growth or planning, is not enough, but imbibing the experiences of these peri-urban areas is equally important to acknowledge the ongoing rural–urban transformation in India.
Such rural–urban transformation has led to many positive changes together with frequent disasters. While events like floods, earthquakes, cyclones, and tsunamis are generally identified as natural events, their impact on human society makes people come together to shape their environments. The capacity of human systems to deal with such events depends on a variety of factors that include the nature of public institutions, ideological positions, quality of human resources, and the available technology within specific social systems at a given point in time. In addition, the geomorphological characteristics of areas affected by such events add to variations in the coping abilities of people across these areas.
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