Incorporating evacuation potential into place vulnerability analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to illustrate a three-component operationalization of the Hazards-of-Place Model (HPM) by integrating urban infrastructure (using the capacity of road networks to facilitate evacuation as an example) to describe place vulnerability. This approach is informed by the HPM first articulated by Cutter (Vulnerability to environmental hazards. Prog Hum Geog. 20:529–39, 1996). The HPM is a conceptual framework through which place vulnerability is defined as a combination of social characteristics (expressed by selected socioeconomic demographics) and geophysical risk (expressed by probabilities of occurrence). Using a geographic information system (GIS), the study models the capacity of road networks to facilitate evacuation and used it as an example of urban infrastructure within which place vulnerability occurs. The output of the model was integrated with a geophysical risk layer and social vulnerability index layer as components for assessing the overall place vulnerability. The three-component approach to operationalizing the HPM provides a detailed and nuanced illustration of place-based vulnerability. As an applied tool, the three-component approach presents emergency planners with a new method of integrating diverse geographic data when illustrating spatial patterns of vulnerability to environmental hazards.