How Do the Residents of a Peri-Urban Metropolitan Area Perceive and Adapt to Their Surrounding Landscape; A Socio-Spatial Study of the Bushfire Risk Representation in Greater Melbourne Urban Fringes ^†

When large urban agglomerations are located in wildfire prone regions, adapting to the demographic changes while limiting wildfire vulnerability of communities is a challenge for urban planners and policy-makers. The most at-risk communities are found on the urban fringes of the city, a peri-urban crown so-called the wildland-urban interface (WUI). People who live in WUI are therefore directly exposed to consequences of urban planning decisions and its natural risk management, or failure to do so. To keep them safe, they have to prepare their property and themselves to a possible fire by considering the surrounding landscape and its wildfire risk patterns. How do these communities adapt to the local wildfire risk context when they are part of a big city? On what grounds do they build their local wildfire risk knowledge?

To investigate these questions, we developed in 2021 a socio-spatial study on bushfire (the Australian’s wildfire) risk representation across three communities in residential areas at the edge of Melbourne’s urban development. We first studied the geography of the sites, especially the accessibility to city centre, the bushfire risk, urban planning documents and bushfire risk regulations. It led us to assume that some metropolitan contexts, such as turnover, new urban areas and city-oriented lifestyles, might disconnect residents from their neighbourhood’s bushfire risk. Then, through in-depth interviews with the residents, we identified the significant individual and community lifestyle characteristics and their bushfire risk representations using the landscape as an analytical experimental scenery. In January 2022, a survey will be distributed to the residents to analyse the connections between metropolitan influences, their wildfire risk representations and their ways of adaptation. For these study cases, descriptive attributes of the landscape are triggers that help metropolitan residents to materialise their vulnerability. Results are relevant for information on residents’ risk awareness and prevention actions.