Emergent emergency response: Speed, event suppression and the chronopolitics of resilience

Emergency responses are premised on the hope that even when events cannot be wholly predicted and prevented, that timely action in the present can be exercised to strip an emergent event of its disruptive potential. Yet, while the speed of emergency responses plays a critical role in underpinning UK resilience, it has been a relatively neglected subject in studies of resilience advanced through the paradigm of preparedness. This article aims to contribute to and extend work in the field of emergency governance by arguing that concerns surrounding the speed of response contribute to a distinct form of security enacted in contemporary emergency response strategies which I term ‘event suppression’. Drawing on policy analysis, Preparedness Exercise observations and practitioner interviews, this article investigates how speed operates as a core problematic orienting the design of UK emergency responses organized through the Integrated Emergency Management (IEM) framework. IEM promises to accelerate emergency response operations by utilizing advances in communications technologies to drive the bottom-up emergent self-organization of emergency responses. Event suppression ensures security not by preventing an event from happening, but by quickly closing down the ‘disruptive’ time of the emergency event and restoring the linear historical time of standard political processes

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio