Disaster Recovery Management and Urban Development: Rebuilding Cities After a Disaster

Note, this course will be presented on Friday the 20th of January at 2:40pm in Taubman 275 at HKS.  GSD students are welcome to attend.  GSD enrollment in this course is limited to 4 students. Students in the Anticipatory Spatial Design Practices MDesS track will be given preference.
Presents disaster recovery theory and practice at the federal, state, city, and neighborhood/community levels. Focuses on the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as a recovery case study. The course can best be thought of as the detailed examination of the anatomy of a disaster – an end to end look at the rebuilding process of a post-disaster city. The course blends the case method of classroom teaching with field-based team projects working in disaster damaged communities. The lessons learned in the classroom from studying the rebuilding of New Orleans and other past recoveries will then be applied to current recoveries during the field-based team projects. New Orleans recovery cases are the backbone of the course, with cases from Aceh (Tsunami), the Haiti Earthquake, the Chile Earthquake, the Gulf Oil Spill, and speakers from New Zealand and Japan incorporated to broaden the discussion of recovery to how recovery varies by place, political system, economic system, type of disaster, and extent of damage. During the semester, students develop and complete real-world, field-based team projects that assist the residents of communities (the Clients) that are struggling to recover after a disaster. Students are assigned to teams, with each team working on one of the following projects: the Chile earthquake recovery, Haiti disaster recovery, earthquake recovery in Christchurch, New Zealand, Japan eathquake and tsunami recovery, or the recovery of the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans. Team field-based projects may also include working with the cities of San Francisco and of Los Angeles on planning in advance of a disaster to be better able to recover quickly after a disaster. The project teams will work on real-world, high impact recovery projects for these “clients” – projects designed to help these communities in their recoveries. Concepts covered in the course include: principles of disaster recovery management, the economics of disaster, risk management, loss estimation, hazard mitigation and land use planning, disaster recovery planning, short and long-term housing, repopulation dynamics, community development, U.S. federal and state recovery programs, and infrastructure and capital projects reconstruction and finance.