Taking responsibility for ‘shared responsibility’: urban planning for disaster risk reduction across different phases. Examining bushfire evacuation in Victoria, Australia

Urban planning has been increasingly recognized as a key mechanism for disaster risk reduction. Nevertheless, it has been difficult to translate this recognition into appropriate urban morphologies. Challenges still exist in working across the different phases involved in disaster management and in supporting the ongoing shift from top-down to shared responsibility risk reduction approaches. This paper examines these issues in the context of a bushfire emergency affecting three urban fringe communities in Bendigo, Victoria. The response activity of evacuation is studied with a computer agent-based model, demonstrating that: (1) complete evacuations take considerable time (30 min to 1 h); (2) urban form characteristics can have a noticeable impact on augmenting or decreasing this time and (3) it is possible for bushfires to overrun or surround settlements before this time. Existing ‘leave early’ policy is confirmed as appropriate, but further examination of the role of urban morphology during a bushfire disaster is required.