Social Inequality and Resilience in the City: Insights from Mumbai, India

Common to vulnerability and resilience research and policy intervention is the concern that differentiated capacities to respond to heat waves, floods and other hazards and stresses depend on differences in socioeconomic status (SES). Vulnerability and resilience spring from social inequality, differential access to resources, infrastructure and political power and from weak, ineffective or lacking social security, planning and early warning systems. In this context, information about how households vary by SES and the extent to which this relates to resilience variables of interest is fundamental to an understanding of capacity enhancement. However, the reliable characterization and measurement of the intersections and interactions between inequality and resilience has proven to be difficult, particularly in urban areas from low and middle income countries. In this presentation we use data from about 1000 surveys to examine social resilience to urban flooding as it relates to SES in the city of Mumbai, India. We ask in particular: what are the variations, by socioeconomic status, in the dimensions of urban populations' resilience?