ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the conceptual landscape used in this book to analyse urban disaster and climate change risk. As well as providing working definitions to be taken forward in subsequent chapters, it discusses the implications for urban adaptation and mitigation agendas of current debates surrounding the concepts of risk, vulnerability, resilience, transformation and development. Each term brings its own challenges, manifest in urban contexts (Bulkeley and Tuts 2013). Further, this chapter examines how different modes of thinking about risk may be framed and harnessed to promote socially and ecologically effective and just urban responses to climate change. In this sense, the objective is normative: the chapter outlines concepts of risk that can be applied in cities in order to promote particular social and environmental ends (Klein et al. 2003), and against which current efforts to reduce climate-change-related risks and impacts can be benchmarked.
