Resilience or resistance? Negotiated mitigation of landslide risks in informal settlements in Medellin

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Urbanisation continues to drive the growth of informal settlements on land exposed to hazards, increasing risk particularly among low-income populations, and heightening the need to improve the resilience of such communities. Informal settlements growing up steep hillsides and ravines are particularly exposed to landslides, which are a major cause of death in developing countries. In order to reduce disasters, we need to anticipate these through managing risk. Many ways of managing landslide risk are known, ranging from building physical protection barriers to raising awareness to prepare communities. However, in developing countries these measures are often difficult to implement, not only because of lack of resources but also due to complex social, economic, political and institutional reasons. This project aims to explore the scope for, and acceptability of, landslide risk-reducing strategies for informal settlements from the community and state perspectives; to understand the barriers to landslide risk-reducing strategies; and identify politically and practically viable approaches to landslide risk-reducing strategies within a wider and more complex context of social and physical risk.We will explore these issues in the city of Medellin, Colombia, which has received many accolades for its urban planning and design and has become a 'model' for cities elsewhere. Despite the city's successes, informal settlement growth on land at risk of landslides continues to be a major problem due to its topography. Lessons learnt about landslide risk management in this city have the potential to be easily disseminated across the developing world.In Medellin, despite the awareness of risk raised by key tragic landslides in its recent history and the arguments used by the City Administration to relocate parts of informal settlements based on geological studies, the residents of these areas resist relocation and protest that the local government has other motives. The project will work in NE Medellin, where there is a high concentration of 'at risk' settlements, and in particular in Comuna 8, where disagreements between community and public agencies are most pronounced.Using focus groups and semi-structured interviews in Comuna 8, we will explore the perceptions of risk and related narratives within the community and among relevant public sector agencies, and the implications of such perceptions and narratives for the adoption of risk-mitigating strategies and actions. This will help us understand the differences between these perceptions which may hinder agreement over risk-mitigation measures. We will then train community members from selected 'at risk' neighbourhoods in order to pilot and test simple landslide risk monitoring and mitigation techniques at the community and individual household level, and the participants will evaluate the experience together with other agencies. The findings from these activities will then be reflected on by workshops bringing together community, public sector and third sector across what has been designated as a 'Strategic Intervention Area' (NE Medellin) in order to explore viable ways of achieving joint decision-making around landslide risk mitigation. The project will provide: (1) a functioning pilot community-managed landslide risk mitigation monitoring scheme, which will serve as a model to be replicated elsewhere after improvements based on the evaluation; (2) pilot individual house risk-mitigating improvements as exemplars in the (informal) community; (3) raised understanding and awareness of perceptions of risk and techniques and strategies that can mitigate landslide risk in informal settlements through collaborative action; (4) and identification of key questions around the interaction between technical, social, cultural and organisational knowledges to address in further research on landslide risk mitigation.