Los desastres naturales y la geografía contemporánea

Abstract

Natural disasters and Contemporary geography. The contemporary geography began to integrate the disasters events in its epistemological reflections due to the geography of calamities. Its first formulations were published in 1920, by Raoul Montandon. Raoul Montandon's most important work was Matériaux pour l'Étude des Calamités. The other important epistemological reflection about natural disasters expounded in the U.S.A., by the followers of Gilbert F. White. In the sixties I. Burton, R. W. Kates and White himself, began to implant the so called geography of the risks. This geography will be called technocratic geography by the radical geography that applied the marxist analysis. The discipline recovered some of the initial presupositions of the geography of calamities, those that emphasized the social nature of natural disasters. Those patterns of research, combined with the work in other disciplines, have helped to create a framework of new sensitivities toward the disasters.