Urban and Regional Disaster Management

With the growth of urban living around the globe, urban disasters as well are growing in both severity and frequency. Disasters come in all shapes and sizes and can be very detrimental to people in many ways. This has led to the implementation of disaster management practices in order to lessen the detrimental effects that disasters can cause. With the implementation of disaster management, comes the never ending effort to try and gain the upper hand on disasters. Disaster management in modern society can vary greatly in scale, focus, methodologies and applications from city to city or region to region. Disaster management is an ever-changing field with new techniques, technologies and practices being created every day to make it more effective. In-turn, the ever-changing field of disaster management coupled with the always advancing technologies throughout the globe urge the professionals of today to evolve in how they approach disaster management problems. As an editor, I have shed light on some of the work being performed by modern day professionals in the field of disaster management. More specifically, I shed light on policies, methodologies, technologies, pre-planning disaster analysis, post disaster analysis, techniques and trends in the fields of urban and regional disaster management. From pedestrian flow path modeling to government-sponsored natural disaster insurance pools, capacity development to early warning systems, there is a broad array of information compiled within this book pertaining to the urban and regional disaster management fields. I hope that this book will be found useful for teaching, learning and research alike.