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Urbicide or Suicide? Shaping Environmental Risk in an Urban Growth Context: The Example of Quito City (Ecuador)

Abstract:

The present article uses the literal definition of urbicide, that is violence or destruction of a city to evaluate the dimension of trigger effects of natural hazards in the process. Some natural hazards are directly influenced by people and their interventions, above all in urban environments where the man-made changes appear to be broadly much more substantial and wider reaching on a local scale. In this regard, the city of Quito has been studied in detail here to attempt to comprehend the environmental risks faced by mega cities and taking advantage of the recently developed tool of the Multipurpose and Multihazard Exposure Model (MMEM-DMQ). This tool allows us to quantify the degree of exposure and vulnerability of a city to floods, the natural hazard most commonly affected by human interventions on the environment. Our conclusions evidence that man-made interventions at all levels of human society have created extremely complex high-risk situations that are difficult to solve. In the case of Quito, the environmental risk is such that “urbicide” falls short as a description, with the authors preferring to call it a “kamikaze city” on account of the enormous risks that have been taken with no possible short-term expectation of solution.