Development of the Manual of Disaster Risk Reduction Applied to Urban Planning

Abstract

The National Policy of Protection and Civil Defense, established by Law 12,608 of 2012, divides the actions related to disaster management into the categories of prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery actions and incorporates the planning of urban expansion as a prevention tool of natural disaster. Given the low expertise of Brazilian governments and institutions in integrating urban planning and risk management, the Ministry of Cities in partnership with other Ministries, and the Japanese Government represented by JICA, built the "Project for Strengthening National Strategy of Integrated Natural Disaster Risk Management-GIDES." The main goal of the Ministry of Cities in the GIDES Project is the development of urban planning methodologies applied to sediment disasters prevention. The final product of the GIDES Project is the consolidation of manuals of the themes developed in the project. These manuals will serve as guides, with specific guidelines for risk management policies and actions, and will be available by the Ministries involved in the project. Each manual is associated with the disaster cycle as expressed in Table 1. This paper presents the methodology that is being developed for the Urban Expansion Planning Manual. 2. URBAN POLICY IN BRAZIL 2.1 The urbanization process Brazil is one of the countries that most quickly performed the transition of its population (Fig. 1), from rural majority to urban majority. The only countries that had similar processes were Japan and Venezuela. However, only Japan has similarities in terms of absolute population migration from the countryside to the urban areas. As can be seen in Fig. 1, in 1920 less than a fifth of the Brazilian population lived in urban areas. In 1960, more than two thirds of Brazilians were living in cities and towns, and in 2010, the urban population exceeded 80%. The Brazilian urbanization process was also concentrated in the territory (as shown in Fig. 2), fact