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Disasters continue to be most prevalent and severe for marginalised communities. To reach those furthest behind first, as the global community pledges in the 2030 Agenda, a critical assessment of equity in disaster risk governance is necessary. Yet, the understanding of factors that mediate the capacity of the governance processes to achieve equity ambitions is limited. This paper addresses this gap by proposing and testing a conceptual framework to assess equity in disaster risk governance.

The framework analyses the extent to which institutional relationships and data in risk governance support inclusion and diversity of voice and enable the equitable engagement of communities. The study applied the framework to key risk policies across governance levels in Brazil and Colombia.

The study finds that institutional awareness of cross-sectoral and -scalar coordination clearly exists. Yet, the engagement of actors further down the governance scale is framed reactively at all scales in both countries. The analysis of the risk data practices indicates that although data integration and sharing are key policy priorities, the policies frame the relations of disaster risk data actors as hierarchical, with data needs determined from the top down.

A key contribution of this framework is that its equity view results in a nuanced analysis, thus pointing to the differences between the two countries concerning the factors that mediate these challenges and providing specific entry points for strengthening equity in risk governance policies.

Seeks to analyse the complexity of current practices surrounding the management and governance of urban regeneration activities in the UK. In particular, aims to focus on the potential of initiatives decentralised to the sub‐local level that have been designed both to effectively manage public service provision and to improve citizen participation in local government management decision making.

Explores the early experiences of local authorities' attempts to introduce “area committees” in line with the complex “modernisation” agendas advanced by the “New Labour” government under an overarching project of “new localism”.

Highlights that new attempts at devolving power and responsibility to these sub‐local structures should be more flexible to local conditions rather than directed by national policy.

Argues for a “middle way” to be adopted in managing local government and governance changes in order to develop a more “pragmatic localism”.

Resilience is a topical concept in many academic disciplines world-wide and also among practitioners. In Europe, however, the current conceptualisations of urban resilience are highly specific to institutional contexts, national cultures and traditions and emergent risks faced in particular countries and their urban areas. The differences in how urban resilience is understood and applied are important, and yet such differences are only scarcely addressed in current resilience literature. This paper draws from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration security project HARMONISE – A Holistic Approach to Resilience and Systematic Actions to Make Large Scale Built Infrastructure Secure.

The project develops a comprehensive, multifaceted, yet mutually reinforcing concept for the enhanced security, resilience and sustainability of urban infrastructure and development. As part of the project, 61 experts were interviewed in six European countries (UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain and Finland) to establish a comprehensive understanding of the current role and position of resilience in urban-built infrastructure. These interviews elicit the current views of professionals from a number of contributory and competing disciplines.

Results indicate that there is no shared holistic understanding of urban resilience in Europe. The definitions of the concept vary across disciplines. The research identifies that there are a number of existing theoretical and practice gaps that require to be addressed.

This paper presents a number of research and practice “gaps” which are being addressed in the HARMONISE project and which require to be addressed by the wider academic and practice communities.

Aims to unpack the development and subsequent growth in the UK of so‐called new localism concepts and policies post‐1997.

Highlights both the political rhetoric and the practical applications of such policies. In this context, introduces the articles in this special issue which focus on various dimensions of new localism‐style policy, predominantly in the UK, but provide a series of arguments and illustrate a number of contradictions that are equally applicable in many Western countries.

Tension exists between centralising focus and constructing prescribed policy at national state level, and decentralising power and responsibility to a more inclusive group of stakeholders in order to develop increasingly nuanced and locally specific sets of regeneration priorities and outcomes.

The articles in this special issue illuminate a number of lessons for regeneration practitioners and managers, and for academics engaged in research and evaluation of public sector policy.

Today, the presence of unwanted activities threatening the safety of the field, which has negative effects on daily life and social psychology, is increasing day by day. There is no doubt that it is inevitable to avoid these threats, but it is possible to take some measures to reduce the destructive power of these threats. Nowadays, increasing terrorist attacks increase the importance of field safety design in urban areas. There is a loss of life in attacks around the world. The subject of this study is to investigate the design criteria related to the built environment and the measures to be taken in the case of bomb attacks in the built environment. In this study, a checklist will designed to measure the security design process around the building. The checklist titles are taken mainly from the “Safety design and Landscape Architecture” series of the Landscape Architecture Technical Information Series/LATIS publications by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and the Risk Management Series of the Federal Emergency Management Agency/FEMA (FEMA, 2003, 2007; LATIS, 2016) and others. The checklist created as a result of literature review will be tested in Istanbul Sultanahmet Square. As a result of the study, it was determined that improvements should be made in the areas of vehicular and pedestrian access, parking lots, lighting and trash receptacle designs around Sultanahmet Square.

The city of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, has become an urban laboratory where numerous nationally prescribed regeneration partnerships and strategies have been “tried‐out” over the last 30 years. This paper unpacks the different and often contradictory spatial scales that such responses have taken, be they area‐based or city‐wide, as well as how “ways of doing” regeneration have been subsequently recast by this range of new partnerships, structures and processes. These developments have subsequently transformed the linkages between both central government and localities, and between local authorities and citizens, especially with regard to issues of trust‐based relationships. This paper will exemplify these changes by highlighting how the Government's flagship community‐centred regeneration partnership collided with an ambitious and far‐reaching local authority‐led city‐wide regeneration strategy. This paper concludes by discussing and how this has implications for managing regeneration partnerships per se in the current urban policy context.

Explores comparisons between the English and Greek local government systems, in the hope of offering some fresh insights into the regeneration and management of local areas.

Discusses the issue of local political leadership at a time when changes in local political management arrangements are taking place in many European countries.

The English and Greek experiments with developing local self‐government provide some reassurance and some causes for concern but, above all, they demonstrate that in, unitary states, Ministers and Civil Servants at the centre find withdrawing from interference in local affairs a very hard exercise in self‐denial.

Illustrates the problems facing two centralised countries struggling with varying but limited success to cope with various public management issues raised by local devolution and decentralisation.

Seeks to draw together a number of separate but, arguably, inter‐related themes which are present for those involved in “sense making” within and across public and third sector agencies or organisations.

Uses a case study approach of one community‐based network in South London to explore the ways in which action learning can facilitate self‐reflection and open up the processes of partnership to a wider audience.

The particular challenge for any evaluator is to identify the ways in which definitions and meanings are shared or contested by participants. These can be “heard” through the different narratives which are constructed by those engaged in the evaluation process.

Attempts to identify what the critical questions were for those involved and provides a commentary on the experience.

Aims to present a critical discussion of two UK case studies through which a “third way” modernisation of regeneration policies has been identified as a world‐wide trend.

Provides case studies that represent attempts at creating “strategic superboards”: the first, local strategic partnerships (LSPs) is a national programme and the second, the regeneration zones (RZs), is peculiar to a specific region in the UK. Network management theory is used to analyse how regeneration partnerships, as networked organisations, are managed. The focus is on the institutional design rules used to achieve decentralisation, balance and joining‐up.

Although the findings show that the programmes' institutional design was potentially improved, the partnerships' achievements fell short of their objectives. It is concluded that a key factor in this failure is the continuing partial approach by central government in managing the networks. As a result these partnerships found it difficult to operate within the new institutional designs.

Highlights that there has been an absence of attention to management in network situations by UK academics that is not shared by our UK and European counterparts.