The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
The study of cities and the built environment asks how people, buildings, land, networks and institutions combine in dense places, and how that combination produces safety or harm. It draws on planning, architecture, civil and structural engineering, transport, geography, economics and the social sciences. On Cities and Built Environment, The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI) treats the field as risk science: what makes urban places exposed, what makes their people vulnerable and what helps them recover.
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NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Blue Marble (NASA) · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Natural Earth
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For field overview, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on night lights, population density and true-colour imagery with built-up and settlement extent from NASA GIBS, framed on India; 3 further NASA layers wait in the list.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date; indicators, not assessments of any place; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
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GeographyFor field overview, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on night lights, population density and true-colour imagery with built-up and settlement extent from NASA GIBS, framed on India; 3 further NASA layers wait in the list.
The Cities and Built Environment field covers urban development, buildings, mobility, infrastructure, housing and human-scale resilience. Experts in it study questions such as urban growth and land and housing and affordability, with methods such as structural and earthquake engineering as well as urban and transport engineering. Its counterparts at GRF and GRA look at the same systems through governance and finance.
Fig.How GCRI, GRF and GRA share one field while the authorities decide. Design, not a record.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Cities hold most of the world's population growth, economic output and public infrastructure. Decisions made in them last for generations: a road, a district or a building stock locks in exposure and energy use for decades. Rapid urban growth in many regions is happening faster than planning, servicing and building control can follow, so a large share of new urban space is built informally or without effective standards.
Hazards meet this growth. Heat, flooding, storms, earthquakes and landslides interact with urban form, and their effects depend on who lives where, in what housing, with which services.
How density, land use and expansion affect exposure and service costs. See urban growth and land.
How structures perform under heat, wind, water and ground shaking, and how codes are applied. See buildings and heat.
How transport, water, power and communications serve the city and fail together. See urban utilities.
How tenure, income, age, disability and social ties shape vulnerability. See informal settlements.
How planning authority, finance and enforcement shape what gets built. See municipal governance interface.
Urban systems draw on regional water, energy and food supplies and on national finance and law. A city's exposure is also an exposure for its insurers, lenders, utilities and public budgets. Dependencies and consequences maps these links in detail.
The same field is governed at The Global Risks Forum (GRF) through Disaster and Crisis Governance and examined for its financial dimension at The Global Risks Alliance (GRA) through Development Finance Nexus. The wider field gateway is cities and built environment.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Urban heat island | The tendency of cities to be warmer than their surroundings because built surfaces store heat and vegetation is scarce. |
| Informal settlement | A residential area whose inhabitants lack secure tenure, often without basic services or compliance with planning rules. |
| Green infrastructure | A planned network of natural and semi-natural areas that delivers services such as cooling and stormwater management. |
| Systemic risk | Risk arising from the interactions and dependencies within and between systems, where a shock can propagate and threaten the functioning of the whole. |
Work in the field relies on geospatial information systems, spatial statistics, structural and earthquake engineering, urban and transport engineering and social and behavioural science, among others. Each states its assumptions and uncertainty.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.