Managing multi-hazards risk of urban deprivation in the context of urban planning and design

Development of urban resilience is largely determined by the planning and design strategies proposed for managing the risk of vulnerable places exposed to different hazards. These places are commonly occupied by poor dwellers or known as deprived areas. However, efficient planning and design strategies are difficult to identify and evaluate even the exposure of urban deprivation is known. It is mainly because the knowledge about the exposure of vulnerable urban elements in deprived areas is not explicitly interpretable in the context of planning and design practice. This work is set upon the rationale that environmental and ecological patterns within urban areas can be interpreted by the morphology of cities, so that the exposure of different urban areas including those deprived can be interpreted by explicit measurements of urban forms, which can potentially inform planning and design practitioners. A workflow is proposed and exemplified for the entire city of Nairobi, Kenya, where several technical steps are involved including mapping and measuring the morphology of basic urban elements such as buildings, relating the measurements to potential hazards, and finally obtain an explicit characterization of multi-hazards exposure of urban deprivation.