Understanding Risks and Building Enhanced Capabilities in Latin American Cities: Vulnerability and Risk Perception Data - El Pacifico Case Study, 2019-2021

Porto De Albuquerque, Joao and Ulbrich, Philipp (2024). Understanding Risks and Building Enhanced Capabilities in Latin American Cities: Vulnerability and Risk Perception Data - El Pacifico Case Study, 2019-2021. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857002

URBE Latam addresses the implementation gap between sustainable development and equitable resilience. It will do so by using a transdisciplinary research approach aimed at empowering residents of disaster-prone urban poor neighbourhoods, which will underpin the co-production of enhanced, context-specific understandings of local risks and the integration of the resulting data into decision-making procedures in disaster risk reduction and sustainable development monitoring.

The project is conducted by a highly skilled multi-disciplinary research team (including social sciences, engineering and physical sciences) and adopts a dialogic co-production approach to citizen-generated data which relies upon well-established partnerships with community-based initiatives for local development, education and disaster risk reduction in Rio de Janeiro and Medellin, as well as with governmental agencies involved in disaster risk reduction and local planning and development.

URBE Latam proceeds in four integrated components that seek an enhanced understanding of risks, vulnerabilities and local capabilities in disaster-prone urban areas: first it is centred on the engagement of citizens to generate data to expand understandings of risks at the neighbourhood level; second, citizens engagement in risk will be pursued alongside an analysis of socio-spatial inequalities in resilience and development indicators and policies at city and national level; third, this will lead to the recalibration of environmental risk mapping with citizen-generated data; fourth, these components are articulated and integrated within a framework to facilitate dialogic transformations across the different levels and stakeholders involved.

The process of advancing these outputs will further enable capacity development in local communities and the governments of Rio de Janeiro and Medellin; a process which will be augmented by improving the awareness of stakeholders in other Latin American cities and countries through broader dissemination. Insights from collaboratively produced citizen-generated data will be integrated into the practices of disaster risk management and development monitoring (e.g. SDG reporting) in collaboration with international policymaking agencies, thus enabling transformations towards more equitable disaster risk reduction and sustainable development. As an overarching outcome, the project will enable the transformation of practices, improve knowledge among a diverse range of stakeholders and enhance capacity to promote equitable resilience.

Data description (abstract)

This dataset includes information about the physical vulnerability and risk perception in the self-constructed neighbourhood El Pacífico in Medellín, URBE Latam's case study neighbourhood in Colombia. The GIS data results were created through participatory data collection with the local community, where participants used printed maps and the questionnaire to indicate their views on physical vulnerability and risk, drawing on the expertise of project team members from the British Geological Survey.

The community risk perception data includes the community’s perceptions regarding several types of geohazards and memories of past hazard events in their neighbourhood.

Guided by the community’s priorities for data collection, the GIS data contains occupants’ perceptions of the building conditions, as well as memories of past disaster events and damages to the buildings. These datasets result from multiple interactions between the local project team and the community leaders.

The co-production of the physical vulnerability and risk perception data led to two outcomes:

1) Fine-grained and richer data on factors of vulnerability and risk in the neighbourhood. Prior to the project, the neighbourhood had been unmapped. The project produced detailed and geospatial risk data.
2) The co-productive activity further strengthened the community’s ability for self-empowerment for risk reduction. Due to the co-productive nature of the data creation process, the data was directly relevant for community initiatives, such as the community’s own training curriculum for disaster risk reduction. It also enabled the community to proactively engage with the municipal government to negotiate policy interventions for risk reduction and post-disaster recovery. The data deposited here are thus a result of a novel collection protocol to generate trusted data for municipal disaster risk reduction policy-making and community self-organisation.

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