Residents of informal settlements face a wide array of risks to their health, their livelihoods and incomes, and their homes or other assets. According to past disaster-risk reduction studies, the impacts of disasters is under-counted because so many events that could be considered as disasters are not classified as such and are not incorporated into disaster databases [14, 58]. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) distinguishes between ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ disasters [58]. Intensive disasters include events where at least 30 persons are killed and/or at least 600 houses are destroyed, while extensive disasters are those with impacts below these two thresholds. Global analyze show the importance of extensive disaster risk, both in terms of impacts (e.g. mortality, injuries, damage or destruction of homes, economic losses) and in terms of what drives it [16]. Widening assessments of disaster risk to include extensive risk greatly increases the range of risks and the scale of their impacts. These change even more if attention is given to what can be termed ‘everyday risks’ that are distinct from the above risks because they pose a constant threat to residents in their homes, neighbourhoods, and the wider city [3]. In sum, the full spectrum of risk in urban areas must encompass the risks of the largest disasters to small disaster risks (that are not usually considered as disasters) and everyday risks [54]. However, the boundary separating extensive disasters and everyday risks can be fuzzy: a flood killing one person may be included as an extensive disaster (if it is recorded) but the infection that kills a 3-year-old child is not. Extensive disasters usually arise from physical hazards, but while endemic infectious and parasitic diseases are considered everyday risks, epidemics are usually classified as disasters (see also [55]).