Hazards-of-Place Model of Vulnerability

The Hazards-of-Place model, introduced by Susan Cutter, Jerry Mitchell, and Michael Scott in a 2000 case study of Georgetown County, South Carolina, is a place-based, spatially explicit framework for assessing vulnerability to environmental hazards. Its central insight is that vulnerability is the product of two distinct components that come together at a location: biophysical vulnerability — the hazard exposure and physical conditions of a place — and social vulnerability — the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics that shape how populations there can prepare for, respond to, and recover from hazards. Implemented in a geographic information system, the model overlays hazard-risk layers (moderated by mitigation) with social-vulnerability layers to produce an integrated map of overall place vulnerability. By marrying the physical and the social in geographic space, it bridges the technocratic hazards tradition and the social-vulnerability tradition and became a foundation of modern vulnerability science.