November 17, 2025
SCARP Professor Stephanie Chang has recently published a new book describing many of the factors behind disaster risk.
Dr. Chang has a prolific history of research and planning regarding disaster management and risk management. She was awarded the 2001 Shah Family Innovation Prize by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), was EERI’s 2011 Distinguished Lecturer, and received the 2018 Distinguished Research Award from the Integrated Disaster Risk Management Society (IDRiM). She has served on the editorial boards of Earthquake Spectra, Environmental Hazards, and Natural Hazards.
Legacy in the Landscape:
How Urbanization Shapes Disaster Risk
With its focus on the city rather than the disaster event, Dr. Chang's book situates natural disasters in the context of urban growth and change. It offers an original, interdisciplinary perspective by connecting the technical and socioeconomic dimensions of disaster risk and highlighting the commonalities of hazards such as river flooding, coastal flooding, and earthquakes.
The book begins by proposing a novel Urban Risk Dynamics framework that emphasizes the roles of economy, landscape, and technology in influencing hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. This framework is then used to support the examination of six contrasting cities from around the world, offering generalized insights that apply to a wide range of urban risk contexts.
The book will be of significant interest to students and researchers working in urban planning, civil engineering, Earth sciences, and environmental science, and to policy makers and practitioners concerned with reducing future disaster risk in cities.
Dr. Chang's work:
- Uses non-technical language to explain key concepts from fields such as urban economics, geomorphology, and earthquake engineering, making it an accessible resource for readers from different disciplinary backgrounds
- Introduces an original Urban Risk Dynamics framework that highlights urbanization's role in influencing hazard risk and lays the foundation for a new approach to disaster mitigation
- Draws upon rich case study analysis of six contrasting cities from across the world, developing generalized insights that are relevant across all regions and hazard types
On this work, Dr. Chang describes:
I wrote this book to delve into what I see as a critical gap in the hazards field – the need to understand urbanization as a systemic driver of disaster risk. Much has been written about disasters in cities, but insights are scarce on how city-building itself influences disaster risk.
More information on Dr. Chang's book
More about Dr. Stephanie Chang
Professor Stephanie Chang is particularly interested in issues of urban risk dynamics, disaster recovery and resilience, infrastructure systems, climate change adaptation, and coastal cities.
Much of her work aims to bridge the gap between engineering, natural sciences, and social sciences in addressing the complex issues of natural disasters. Her research has ranged from empirical investigation of major urban disasters to computer modeling and analysis of risk reduction strategies.