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One of the phenomena happening worldwide, now and for the foreseeable future, is increasing urbanization. Cities are growing, and rural areas are declining. This is happening for a variety of reasons, mostly sociological and economic. The phenomenon is by itself neither good nor bad. There are advantages and disadvantages to urbanization. Ultimately, it will depend on what we make of it. Urbanization does provide specific challenges to the emergency and disaster management field, however.

First, of course, is that any disaster that happens to a city impacts more people than a disaster that happens to a farm. If a flood destroys a country road, then a few families can't get to work. If a flood submerges the New York subways, then tens of thousands of people can't get to work. Disasters in cities will be more focused, have more impact, and be more expensive to recover from.

Conversely, if a city chooses collective action to prepare for and mitigate potential disasters, then there will be more resources to utilize. The best example of collective action is insurance. If everyone buys car insurance, then the impact to everyone is minor but the impact to the individual that suffers a car accident can be minimized. One type of insurance that is in the experimental stage is flood insurance. It has a couple of serious problems, the primary one being that it is not sustainable without government subsistence.

Government capital investment in a system, such as our infrastructure, tends to be very effective. However, where ongoing government investment is required to support and maintain a system is required, then things start to break down and systems become far less resilient. Flood insurance is an example of a system with little resiliency. Another is farm subsidies. Sudden or long-term reduction in support will cause these systems to fail.