New Urbanism and Disaster Resiliency?

          Attending the Annual Hazards Workshop, hosted by the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado has been a privilege I have enjoyed since coming on board with the CARRI team. The conference, unlike most, is not discipline specific, but rather brings together a group of researchers and practitioners who are interested in learning more about hazards, meaning disasters, and how we can deal with them.

            July 2010 was the 35^th time the group has met. It would be an interesting exercise to plot their themes/topics over those years, but I was most pleased to see that this year there was a concurrent session on Community Resilience and Recovery. I went to several of these sessions and each was extremely well attended. CARRI’s own Tom Wilbanks was a presenter at one that had standing room only.

            Though I will have more to share about what I learned at the conference, one was actually fortuitous that I learned at a panel that Dr. Philip Berke (UNC-Chapel Hill) moderated in a different track on environmental change and patterns of vulnerability. The panel focused on large-scale urban areas with that idea in mind.

            One of the panel participants, Dr. Peter Wenger of the National Science Foundation revealed that Dr. Berke was engaged in NSF-funded research on what we social scientists call the “new urbanism” and disaster resiliency. From the way the questions where handled, Dr. Berke’s research is in its early stages—but from my perspective, this is terrific news for our understanding of community resilience.

            The new urbanism folks address a pretty consistent theme. They don’t like urban sprawl. They don’t like single-use zoning. They think we can live and would choose to do so in denser communities where we can walk to the grocery store or work. I know more than most about this since I directed the Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Center for Urban Affairs and Mayor Riley is at the forefront of leaders in the new urbanism movement.

            How does this relate to community resilience? I don’t know the details of Dr. Berke’s work for NSF, but it is pretty easy for me to see. People who live closer to where they work—to the point of walking distance—are likely to find recovery from disaster easier.  Ditto for whether schools and places to shop and seek entertainment are as well.

            The new urbanism movement is all about core cities and multi-purpose nodes that, in the end, create not just easy access to employment or retail, but a sense of place as well. They like small parks, places where you can go and walk, talking to your kids or playing fetch with your dog.

            Berke’s is the kind of resilience research that should be pursued—it has the portent to be path-breaking in that it gets us through the multiple layers of community connections that we know entail resilience. It is encouraging to see the NSF funding such efforts. I look forward to the conclusions from this way of scientifically researching community resilience.