WP4.1 research examines the governance and planning practices in Sierra Leone and how they promote or reduce urban risk.  It investigates within the context of the city the contemporary interaction between the structures of urban planning, including organizational forms and bureaucratic mandate, dominant development practices, plan-making procedures and individual stakeholder agency shape the (re)production of cycles of risk accumulation and reduction. 

WP4.3 research investigates how the governance of risk reduction currently works to enhance the capacity to act of those most vulnerable to be trapped in risk accumulation cycles, as well as of state and external agencies to disrupt these traps strategically, inclusively and collectively. The investigation is grounded in 15 selected informal settlements working with the lowest level of the devolved DRM structures and the collectives of the Federation of the Rural and Urban Poor (local network of the SDI) that are active across the settlements. WP4.3 includes the community led tool ReMapRisk which was developed by Urban ARK researchers based at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London (UCL). ReMaprRisk has been applied in two city contexts (Karonga, Malawi and Freetown, Sierra Leone) as a means of documenting cycles of urban risk accumulation or ‘risk traps’ to support grounded and informed action planning. 

ReMapRisk is used to map and analyse often under-recorded everyday risks, such as water and sanitation related diseases, and small-scale episodic disasters, such as fires and localised floods. The tool allows local communities to document and monitor how risk accumulation cycles or 'urban risk traps' materialise over time and where, feeding spatial and temporal details into an interactive online database.

A demonstration of ReMapRisk can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGrYRpBwoz8&feature=em-subs_digest