Urban sprawl and peri-urban risk: the wildfire frontier

Abstract

This paper focuses on one particular risk threatening residents of peri-urban fringes across the world’s Mediterranean biome, namely the risk of wildfires, termed bushfires in Australia. Communities across the Mediterranean biome (in south-east Australia, California, the Mediterranean basin and Chile) can experience destructive wildfires causing property damage and, in some cases, loss of life, but especially in peri-urban fringes. In such locales housing is often located close to areas of forest in both natural and semi-natural environments. In recent years impacts have been especially severe in Portugal, the south of France, Victoria (Australia) and California. For example, over the last thirty years, 353 people have died due to wildfires in southern Australia and all southern Australian states have experienced serious fires this century, most destructively in Victoria in 2009 and 2003. Yet, while the peri-urban fringes of many towns and cities across the Mediterranean biome are extremely vulnerable to wildfires, they are simultaneously highly attractive places to live and work. Hence, the fringes can represent a growing and profound ‘risk environment’ in which wildfires constitute a ‘manufactured risk’ in that they are related to a high level of human agency both in the production and mitigation of the risk.