Responding to Urban Disasters: Learning from previous relief and recovery operations

This paper was written for those involved in planning and implementing relief and early recovery operations in urban areas. Focusing mainly on earthquakes and flooding, it attempts to capture what is currently known about disaster response in urban contexts taking into account recent urban disasters such Typhoon Ketsana in the Philippines (2009), the Haiti earthquake of 2010 and the Northeast Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011.