Meeting the challenge of risk-sensitive and resilient urban development in sub-Saharan Africa: Directions for future research and practice

At the heart of the papers in this Special Issue is the call for research and practice to move to understand and act on the direct and indirect interlinkages between urban development and risk accumulation processes; a broader conception of risk on a continuum from everyday to extreme events and a critical view of urban risk governance as a project that implicates multiple formal and informal actors at difference scales. Out of this focus emerges a research frontier that demands sustained, detailed studies of the links between multi-faceted and multi-scalar development processes and risk but also the re-thinking of scale and jurisdiction as ordering concepts; a stronger understanding of the linkages between environmental/public health risks and small and extreme disasters, and relative changes in manifestations of these forms of risk and in their social differentiation; and better theorisation of governance innovations. For practice, the issue stresses the over-riding need to move beyond a narrow focus on hazard or disaster events and the immediate actors involved to engage a much wider set of actors in integrated planning processes; to develop data to enable holistic policy-making and to build on the emergence of demand-led planning to re-frame the practices of risk-sensitive and resilient urban development.