Vulnerability across space: a focus on the underlying mechanisms

Vulnerability is widely recognized, both in scientific literature and institutional documents, as a key-component of risk, crucial for improving risk knowledge, assessment and management. In the last decades, vulnerability has been largely investigated according to different aims and disciplinary perspectives: nevertheless, the challenge for integrating current approaches has to be still faced and many gaps related to vulnerability understanding and measuring have still to be bridged. Despite some scholars have clearly outlined that “vulnerability rests in a multi- faceted coupled system with connections operating at different spatio-temporal scales” (Turner et al. 2003), till now vulnerability is often represented as a static and crystallized feature of elements/systems or, according to Roberts et al. (2009), “as a static factor” rather than a process, neglecting in such a way the significant changes affecting both its facets and the relationships among them over time and across space. Hence, a clear idea of the path to be followed for analyzing and measuring the time and spatial dependency of vulnerability (Birkmann, 2006) and for grasping its dynamic nature is still missing. For long, vulnerability has been associated, up to an absolute identification, to the concept of damage even though, according to a shared interpretation, it can be more precisely defined as “the characteristics and circumstances of a community, system or asset that make it susceptible to the damaging effects of a hazard” (UNISDR, 2009). The UNISDR glossary (2009) highlights that vulnerability concept includes numerous aspects - arising from physical, social, economic and environmental factors - and that it significantly varies over time, but does not emphasize the variability of vulnerability, and of its different aspects, across space despite the entity and the far-reaching dimensions of the consequences produced by such a variability, as largely shown by recent disasters. Even if different from each other, the concepts of vulnerability and damage are closely related and the recognition of damage patterns may represent one of the key- tool for in-depth analyzing some aspects of vulnerability not sufficiently investigated up to now. Accordingly, Cochrane (2004) states that “damages are displaced geographically and temporally”. Therefore, looking at the different phases following the impact of a hazardous event, might the analysis of the spatial distribution of damage help us to better understand factors and mechanisms able to induce a displacement of vulnerabilities across space? The present work aims at answering this question; in detail, grounding on some case studies, an overview of the main spatial mechanisms that can favor the displacement and the change of vulnerability across space and some hints devoted to an in-depth conceptualization of the spatial dynamics of vulnerabilities will be provided.