ABSTRACT
Vulnerability is generally described as a product of hazard exposure and the characteristics of the community it strikes. Although vulnerability is most often thought of as the exposure of the built environment to a natural hazard, the differences in how people and households are able to anticipate, cope with, respond to, and recover from disasters is equally important.
As disaster strikes, its impact is not just a function of its magnitude and location, but the ways in which the population is distributed throughout the community. People and households are not randomly distributed in space. They are concentrated in fairly predictable spatial patterns characterized by sprawl, concentrated poverty, and segregation that interpret individual household characteristics in ways that distribute households according to advantage. In many if not most communities, these development patterns interact with the physical geography to expose vulnerable populations to greater risk, more severe impacts, and longer recovery trajectories. These disadvantages accumulate over time, undermining community efforts to become more resilient.
