Urban Environment, Risks and Disasters: From Sustainable to Resilient Cities?

Since 2006 most of the world's population live in urban areas, according to UN-Habitat. There's a considerable part of these inhabitants living in bad conditions or in disaster-risk zones. These risks aren't always controlled by urban management, its norms and policies, especially in the developing world, where urban growth is hardly well conducted. That's the case of Brazil. In this way, cities become the perfect terrain for natural and technological disasters, leading to the non-respect of their inhabitants' fundamental rights, mostly the poor ones. Nevertheless, these rights may be granted by sustainable urban development, which does not exclude disaster risk reduction and must be founded on an adapted juridical framework, capable of considering other domains implied into sustainable development promotion and disaster risk reduction. Through a scientific synthesis, this article uses the deductive and exploratory research method, with a contribution to the prospective study of positive law, based on the analysis of references from articles and bibliographic studies.