The complexity of current disasters creates a challenge for crisis communication. This paper aims at identifying gaps in communication in disaster management experienced in practice in order to facilitate learning from those situations. The research was conducted using a qualitative online open‐ended questionnaire. It shows that despite the developments in the discipline, communication as an integral part of decision making in disaster management needs to be further developed. The paper provides a practical‐oriented overview of the communication constraints in complex crisis situations, which has not been provided so far. This research is part of an international project developing performance indicators for a quality measurement system for crisis communication.

Tsunami intervention has been an extraordinary and unprecedented relief and recovery operation. This article underlines the complexities posed by shelter and housing intervention in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, revealing a pragmatic, reductionist approach to shelter and housing reconstruction in a contested and fragmented environment. Competition, housing anxiety and buffer zone implementation have resulted in compulsory villagisation inland, stirring feelings of discrimination and tension, and becoming major obstacles to equitable rebuilding of houses and livelihoods. A new tsunami geography has been imposed on an already vulnerable conflict-based geography, in which shelter has been conceived as a mono-dimensional artefact. An analysis of the process and outcomes of temporary and permanent post-tsunami housing programmes yields information about the extent to which shelter policies and programmes serve not only physical needs but 'higher order' objectives for a comprehensive and sustainable recovery plan.

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Currently, there appears to be an unhealthy disjunction between grand expectations and acknowledged reality in the face of urban transformations underway throughout the world. Drawing on the “right to the city” discourses, adopting a Lefebvrian approach to the production of space, and a critical regionalist approach to housing and the built environment, the article explores the conceptual analytical neologism of contested urbanism, where the struggle for bottom-up, inclusive development processes push against political hand market pressures towards becoming a world-class city. Dharavi, at the heart of Mumbai, India, is at the frontline of oppositional practices confronting neoliberal, futuristic Dubai-style mega-projects focused on capital accumulation, elite consumption, slum clearance, and deregulated real-estate speculation. Building upon a three-week academic studio exercise in situ, the confrontational power dynamics that shape people's access to housing and redevelopment are depicted here as exemplar of a wider struggle over social justice, where Dharavi emerges as an eminent yet paradoxical example of a universal expression of contested spatial form in the Global South.