VulneraCity–drivers and dynamics of urban vulnerability based on a global systematic literature review

Globally, urban disaster risk is being affected by changing patterns of natural hazards due to climate change and rapid urbanization. While we have a relatively good understanding of the hazard and exposure in cities, we know little about their vulnerability. In this study, we investigate the drivers and dynamics of urban vulnerability for six different natural hazards by conducting a systematic literature review on the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Out of an initial set of 3168 studies, we included 462 studies for in-depth analysis. We present VulneraCity, the urban vulnerability drivers database, in which we record the drivers and classify them based on topic and acquisition method. Overall, we list 1460 unique drivers of vulnerability in VulneraCity, of which 37.3 % are empirically acquired in the source studies. Other drivers are either modeled (7.9 %), theorized (22.9 %), adopted (27.0 %), or acquired with an unknown method (5.0 %). Furthermore, the relationships between drivers and impact are often assumed to be linear, but we identify six types of directional dynamics - one-directional, bidirectional, transferable, asynergies, conditional, and compound - which describe the complexities in these relationships to show that the linearity assumption is regularly violated. These results shed light on the necessary drivers that should be taken into account in urban vulnerability assessments. VulneraCity can facilitate discussions in local-scale vulnerability analyses, but could also provide input for larger-scale comparative studies of cities. We recommend further research into multi-hazard (instead of multiple hazards’) vulnerability and vulnerability dynamics as next steps towards more comprehensive urban disaster risk studies.