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Environmental Hazards

Environmental Hazards 8 (2009) 23–37

research paper

Community resilience and vulnerability to disasters: Qualitative models and megacities – a comparison with small towns

Boris Porfiriev

This paper contrasts the resilience to disasters of megacities with small towns, using vulnerability as a key variable. As an instrument of this comparison a formal model of the communities’ vulnerability, further deconstructed into a set of specific modules, is developed and used. It is argued that the megacities’ high resilience capacity in the main ensures only a debilitating (although undoubtedly major) effect on them by disaster agents. Meanwhile, the impact on the small towns is often disastrous and sometimes turns into a real catastrophe with some communities totally devastated. However, this observation does not preclude some notable exceptions. To corroborate and highlight the key findings above, empirical data from the Russian experience of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries are provided, supplemented by some international illustrations.

Keywords: natural hazards; disasters; vulnerability; resilience; megacities; small towns; models

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