Thomas J. Campanella

Planning for Postdisaster Resiliency

The focus of this article is planning for resiliency in the aftermath of a catastrophe. First, the authors offer their conception of planning for resiliency as a goal for recovering communities, and the benefits of planning in efforts to create more resilient places. Next, they discuss major issues associated with planning for postdisaster recovery, including barriers posed by federal and state governments to planning for resiliency, the promise and risks of compact urban form models for guiding rebuilding, and the failure to involve citizens in planning for disasters. Finally, they discuss lessons from prior research that address these issues and policy recommendations that foster predisaster recovery planning for resilient communities.

Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning

During a recent departmental retreat here at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, planning faculty conducted a brainstorming session in which each professor—including me—was asked to list, anonymously on a bit of paper, some of the major issues and concerns facing the profession today. These lists were then collected and transcribed on the whiteboard. All the expected big themes were there—sustainability and global warming, equity and justice, peak oil, immigration, urban sprawl and public health, retro!tting suburbia, and so on. But also on the board appeared, like a sacrilegious graf!to, the words “Trivial Profession.”1 When we then voted to rank the listed items in order of importance, “Trivial Profession” was placed—lo and behold—close to the top. This surprised and alarmed a number of people in the room. Here were members of one of the !nest planning faculties in America, at one of the most respected programs in the world, suggesting that their chosen !eld was minor and irrelevant. Now, even the most parochial among us would probably agree that urban planning is not one of society’s bedrock professions, such as law or medicine or perhaps economics. It is indeed a minor !eld, and that’s !ne. Nathan Glazer, in his well-known essay “Schools of the Minor Professions,” labeled “minor” every profession outside law and medicine. Not even clerics or divines made his cut. Moreover, Glazer observed that attempts on the