Devanathan Parthasarathy
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India
Keywords: informality, disaster governance, resilience, urban flooding, disaster mitigation
DOI: 10.5509/2015883551
Informal sector actors played a key role in Mumbai’s resilience to disastrous floods in 2005. Members of small-scale retail and service sector businesses, the city’s underclass, its waste workers and scrap dealers and sundry individual tradespersons such as electricians, plumbers, masons and sanitary workers were at the heart of recovery and rehabilitation in the weeks following the floods of July 2005. These floods not only affected significant parts of the city’s new Central Business District (CBD) and business sectors but also its poor and marginalized communities that lived in environmentally fragile and marginal locations. Ironically, these actors have also been at the receiving end of distorted urban planning initiatives, real estate growth, bourgeois environmentalism-inspired middle-class activism and ethnic chauvinist political forces which have pushed them to the city’s social, economic, and spatial margins. Hence, the aforementioned reasons have made the lives and livelihoods of these actors quite precarious and insecure. Going with recent sociological attempts to bridge the expanding field of disaster studies and classical sociological theorization by linking development theories to the study of disasters and their social implications, this paper argues for more imaginative disaster mitigation and management strategies that recognize the role of informal sector workers in post-disaster resilience. It is argued that this recognition should be accompanied by formal state sponsored institutional inclusion and integration of informal sector workers and actors in disaster governance. In Mumbai, informal economic actors were characterized by resourcefulness, access to key networks in enabling recovery, flexibility and innovativeness in design and planning, and the ability to offer low-cost options which could be rapidly deployed. These tend to contrast with the slowness and cumbersome procedures and responses that typify formal state and private responses to disasters. Given the feeble response mechanisms of state institutions in disaster management and mitigation in much of the developing world, and the established fact of citizen action being the first to respond to disaster situations, this paper suggests that paying attention to and involving informal sector actors in disaster governance can both augment the quality of disaster management and enhance the possibility of greater integration of the city’s marginalized and excluded groups into its mainstream social fabric.
关键词:非正式性,灾害治理,活力,城市洪水,减灾。 非正式部门的行动者对于孟买从2005年灾难性的洪水中的快速恢复起到了关键性的作用。在2005年7月洪水过后的几周里,小规模零售和服务业商家的成员、城市下等阶层、垃圾工人、废金属收购者以及各行各业的工匠如电工、水管工、泥瓦匠还有环卫工们对城市恢复生机起到了核心作用。洪水不仅仅严重影响到了城市新建的核心商业区和商业部门,而且也影响到了居住在环境脆弱和边缘性地段的贫困及边缘化的社区。富于讽刺意味的是,一直以来,在将他们逼迫到城市的社会、经济以及空间边缘的扭曲的城市规划提案、地产开发、受资产阶级环保主义影响的中产阶级政治行动以及族群沙文主义政治力量面前,这些行动者都处于接受的一方。因此,以上这些原因使得这些行动者的生活和生计变得不稳定和缺少保障。本论文顺应了社会学近期的研究趋势,即试图通过把发展理论和灾害研究及其社会影响联系起来,打通日益扩展的灾害研究领域和经典的社会学理论。本文提出,应该采取更富有想象力的减灾及灾害管理策略,要承认非正式部门工人在灾后恢复中的重大作用。本文还提出,这种认可应该通过国家的正式制度将非正式部门工人和行动者们容纳和整合到灾害治理中去。在孟买,非正式经济领域行动者们具有以下显著特征:资源丰富,拥有能够实现恢复、灵活性以及设计和规划中的创新性的关键性网络,并能提供可以快速实施的低成本方案。这些与国家和私人部门应对灾难的正式行动和程序中典型的迟缓和累赘特征形成鲜明对比。考虑到在很多发展中世界的灾害管理和减灾行动中,国家体制内的反应机制脆弱不堪,而公民行动实际上最早对灾害作出应对,本文建议,关注非正式部门并将他们包括到灾害治理中,既可以提高灾害管理的质量,也可以有更多机会将城市中被边缘化及受到排斥的人群整合到主流社会机体中来。 Translated from English by Li Guo
灾害治理的非正式性、活力及政治意义
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