International research network on Alarm procedures and hazard mitigation in urban areas

linking hazards mitigation to sustainable development

( also see the research programme ALARM)

Hazards issues, whether environmental, bio-health and medical, technological or normative, and warning systems that respond to them, were always part of the way human beings manage and organize their urban areas. Today, fear of catastrophic events has a strong influence on urban planning, specially as far as sustainable development policies are at stake. The importance of these issues for urban societies embodies in the the diversity of warning systems, disaster management and hazard mitigation, more or less all over the world. It is thus crucial to wonder about the type of social fears which serve as a basis for the construction of these alert procedures.

We focus on the gap between fears and real dangers. Actually, what is the true meaning of all these procedures which assume to protect us from dangers ? Aren't they just incantations ? The working hypothesis is that nowadays our societies develop an addiction to fear, elevating fear to the rank of resource. A distortion in risks perception ensues from this situation which ends in totally inappropriate procedures when the disaster finally occurs.

Fear entails various and ambivalent individual and collective reactions. They have territorial repercussions since they emphasize differentiated actors' strategies based on the confrontation between conflicting territorial policy frames, conflicting space representations and conflicting fields. Alert procedures also question efficient timescales. In urban development this issue becomes the main field of a political confrontation between the priorities of representative and participative democracy in the risk management. It concerns the respective efficiency and contents of the caution and the prevention principles, as well as their connection to sustainable policies.

Such research topic raises four questions :

• How can a urban alarm system fit in a sustainable city ?
• How do collective fears interfere with the acceptability of the hazard ?
• How does the complex hazard-alarm-sustainability determine local government actions schemes and referentials ?
• What tools can be used to optimize alarm systems ?

Contextual and spatial variety in alarm systems interfere with the huge heterogeneity in the expression of sustainable development to require, prior to any global understanding, a long lasting international scientific cooperation to share knowledge and practical experiences. The ambition, here, is to create a perennial platform for university exchanges in the field of alarm procedure and risk mitigation. Such a cooperation could find concrete expression in an agreement between all the research units involved in this project.

This agreement should meet the following requirements :

• All research units commit to work together on the topic of "alert, alarm systems and risk mitigation in urban areas from a sustainable development's point of view" .
• All research units accept to mention the commitment in this platform in all publications related to the topic noted above .
• All research units commit to create an information ring concerning conferences, symposiums, publications and other academic and scientific events about the topic noted above. This could be done via a regularly updated restricted website.
• All research units accept to meet at least once every two years, in order to make a report of the platform's actions and set directions for the next two years.
• All research units accept to publish, at least every quadrennial, a joint publication, which may consist in the proceedings of an international conference.
• All research units promote academic and research mobility as part of university exchanges in the field of "alert, alarm systems and risk mitigation in urban areas from a sustainable development's point of view".
  
  
  

Supervisor François MANCEBO Professor, chair of geography and urban planning Institut de Géographie Alpine, Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble 1 UMR Pacte Laboratoire Territoires 14 bis avenue Marie Reynoard, 38100 Grenoble, France, European Union Tel : +33 (0)6 12 53 74 46 francois.mancebo@ujf-grenoble.fr webpage http://iga.ujf-grenoble.fr/territoires/membres/chercheurs/Mancebo.htm Assistant Lauren ANDRES Assistant Researcher Institut d'Urbanisme de Grenoble, Université Pierre Mendes France Grenoble 2 UMR Pacte, Laboratoire Territoires 14 avenue Marie Reynoard, 38100 Grenoble, France, European Union laurenandres@yahoo.fr Tel : +33 (0)6 64 93 05 92