Ciudades sedientas: Agua y ambientes urbanos en America Latina

El riesgo es una construcción social y el peligro es real. Esto significa que las condiciones medioambientales donde las personas desarrollan su vida las llevan a que compartan visiones similares sobre los objetos que les rodean. Estas visiones compartidas se reflejarán en orientaciones culturales hacia la vida y, por tanto, hacia los peligros del entorno. Esta obra es pionera al explorar la intersección entre la dimensión social y la tecnológica para realizar el análisis de riesgos y el manejo de desastres en un contexto mexicano. Pérez Floriano y Rodríguez Esteves reúnen a un grupo multidisciplinario de científicos sociales —especializados en psicología social y organizacional, geografía, antropología, ciencias ambientales, economía, derecho y sociología— que nos brindan algunas de las tendencias más recientes en el análisis de riesgos y desastres en el México contemporáneo. Los autores presentan investigaciones que tienen como escenario la epidemia de gripe AH1N1, desastres asociados a fenómenos naturales, contaminación ambiental, accidentes industriales y riesgos por crimen y violencia.

Raging floods, massive storms and cataclysmic earthquakes: every year up to 340 million people are affected by these and other disasters, which cause loss of life and damage to personal property, agriculture, and infrastructure. So what can be done? The key to understanding the causes of disasters and mitigating their impacts is the concept of 'vulnerability'. Mapping Vulnerability analyses 'vulnerability' as a concept central to the way we understand disasters and their magnitude and impact. Written and edited by a distinguished group of disaster scholars and practitioners, this book is a counterbalance to those technocratic approaches that limit themselves to simply looking at disasters as natural phenomena. Through the notion of vulnerability, the authors stress the importance of social processes and human-environmental interactions as causal agents in the making of disasters. They critically examine what renders communities unsafe - a condition, they argue, that depends primarily on the relative position of advantage or disadvantage that a particular group occupies within a society's social order. The book also looks at vulnerability in terms of its relationship to development and its impact on policy and people's lives, through consideration of selected case studies drawn from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Mapping Vulnerability is essential reading for academics, students, policymakers and practitioners in disaster studies, geography, development studies, economics, environmental studies and sociology.

Approximately 80 per cent of the population of Latin America is concentrated in urban centres. Pressure on water resources and water management in cities therefore provide major challenges. Despite the importance of the issues, there has been little systematic coverage of the topic in book form. This work fills a gap in the literature by providing both thematic overviews and case study chapters. It reviews key aspects of why water matters in cities and presents case studies on topics such as groundwater management, green growth and water services, inequalities in water supply, the financing of water services and flood management. Detailed examples are described from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, and there is also a chapter comparing lessons which might be learnt from US cities. Contributing authors are drawn from both within and outside the region, including from the Inter-American Development Bank, OECD and World Bank to set the issues in a global context.