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The year that we have just left behind was marked by a steady drip of news following the isolated high-level depression event (DANA) that struck the Valencian Horta Sud area in October 2024. The catastrophic rains and flooding left more than 220 dead, damaged or destroyed thousands of homes, businesses and agricultural fields and devastated kilometres of road infrastructure and basic service facilities. Beyond the immediate impact, however, the DANA event also highlighted a deeper reality: the risk of flooding is not just a matter of rain, but also a reflection of how we have built and managed our local environment.
Geographers speak of risk landscapes (or riskscapes) to refer to the set of conditions and processes that cause certain areas to be more affected than others by extreme physical episodes such as floods. In a riskscape, physical hazards (such as the 771 l/m² of precipitation accumulated in 24 hours at the Turís weather station on 29 October 2024) are intertwined with social practices, urban planning policies and collective perceptions of the local area. In other words, risk is not only an extreme physical phenomenon, but also a result of the decisions we make as a society. The DANA event in Valencia demonstrated this clearly. The low-lying areas of the Horta Sud area and the peripheral neighbourhoods with less defence infrastructure were the hardest hit, whilst the city of Valencia and areas with better drainage systems suffered minor damage and recovered more quickly. This spatial and social inequality shows us how different riskscapes can coexist in the same area, depending on the interaction of factors such as economic level, access to services and the population’s ability to organise, along with the key role played by public institutions in risk management.
More than a year after the catastrophe, however, it seems that we are far from what should have been a collective turning point that could have integrated the lessons learned from the DANA event and situated life and people as the central pillars of spatial planning and emergency management. Few representatives of public institutions have questioned the structural causes that made the devastation worse, such as the lack of metropolitan spatial planning, policies for revitalising degraded urban centres and the decades-long containment of urban land consumption. The institutional response continues to focus on technical measures, whilst neighbourhood associations, academia and environmental organisations often share perspectives more rooted in the memory of past floods and knowledge of the local environment that receive little attention. This lack of dialogue opens a gap between the authorities and everyday experiences of risk since each actor involved (the government administration, the general public, farmers, private companies and so on) is exposed to a different riskscape, with its own priorities and perceptions.
The 2024 DANA event has reminded us once again that risk is part of the current Mediterranean landscape and that reducing it requires more than investments in technology: it also requires environmental and social justice, memory and participation. Recovering the Horta Sud area as a living drainage system and bringing people on board risk planning and management are essential to continue inhabiting a riskscape such as the Mediterranean coast, which understands collective security not only with walls, retention basins and channels, but also with social bonds and new ways of planning and imagining the local environment.
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