The circular relationship of public space, disaster and resilience

Roz Palmer, from WSP’s Cities team explains how disaster recovery can shape places, and why the answer is circular.

Australia | Thursday, 28 March 2024

Every destructive event is an opportunity to work with affected communities to rebuild places that will help them better recover next time, and this must include high-quality public places. We build community capital in public places during blue-sky periods, and that capital is vital to recovery. In a grinding cycle of disasters, our reactions after the event become how we’re preparing for the next. We can harness each disaster rebuild as an action toward an adapted future. We can Act-React-Act - and there are steps we can take immediately to start a more constructive cycle.

Act – create and protect public places

Throughout human history - and particularly in high-density areas - public space has been a vital extension of home. It is our fresh air, social hub, gym, travel route, source of peace and third place. It’s not home or work, but where we find our joy and our people. With more than 55% of the world's population living in cities and that proportion growing, the need for well-resourced third places will only grow. Though private venues can be our ‘third places’ too (like your local café), those places can exclude people who don't have the means to enjoy them, so public ones are essential. Public places, including community centres, parks and slow streets, are where we build community ties, especially during hard times.

The public infrastructure that we use every day is vital during disaster precisely because it’s vital to us during blue sky periods. The best public places are familiar. We know where they are and that we can find help there. Community halls become distribution centres, libraries become places to cool down, parks are emergency meeting points. We entrust our government to protect those public spaces, to build and maintain their physical infrastructure (the hardware) and to support the software – the programs, activities and services that bring these places alive. Ideally, they partner with community in managing them as an essential common resource.

When we create a successful, well-loved public place, neighbours know that's where they'll find each other when the normal means of communication and order are broken. The social ties formed in these public spaces build a community’s collective self-sufficiency and capacity for mutual aid. When a disaster shakes us, those ties are all we have, as government support often can't reach communities immediately.

React - leverage existing community ties during recovery

The community ties that inclusive public spaces nurture are the building blocks of the groups that organically form in crisis. They're an essential, critically effective tool in long-term recovery planning.

When individuals already know each other and have organised themselves to administer post-disaster aid, part of the work to access community knowledge for future planning is already done.

Leaders are identified
Their method for reaching consensus is in progress, if not already set
Knowledge of the area is centralised
Community trust is inherently present.

Image: A local community hall in Sydney being used as a food distribution centre during the COVID-19 pandemic

Fortunately, these mutual aid groups always arise when long-term recovery is necessary. Community members in the Northern Rivers initiated Helping Hands in 2017. The group re-activated as Resilient Lismore in 2022 to support flood-affected neighbours. Occupy Sandy organised volunteers to muck-and-gut houses after a catastrophic Superstorm hit the US in 2012 and food distribution groups sprung up globally when COVID locked us indoors. Neglecting to set formal protocol for incorporating these groups in official long-term recovery planning, i.e. as members of a community advisory board, is a wasted opportunity.

Act – formalise community advisory groups to envision rebuilding differently

Nurturing the formalisation of community groups, including resourcing permanent governance structures once the immediate need has passed, is one way to support long-term recovery even after emergency funding, media interest, volunteers and material aid recede. That upfront, formal relationship between government and non-government associations becomes ongoing, community-led resilience to the next disaster, and ensures climate adaptation planning is successfully embedded in rebuilding. These groups help fine-tune government responses over time, both in terms of ‘lessons learnt’ and through detailed local knowledge of risks and impacts as coming challenges surface.

A 'community advisory board' doesn't mean, as is often the assumption, that the community will be invited to dictate a list of impossible demands. In fact, the community can be the government’s best friend in overcoming the inevitable hurdles in realising 'implementation' goals. Good community engagement provides an honest translation of the existing environmental, monetary and political constraints, and encourages respectful deliberation over visionary but possible options. A successfully engaged community delivers feasible proposals that have majority buy-in, if not consensus.

Representation of disaster-affected communities in long-term planning will help us through the climate crisis. In the face of life-changing upheaval, why not create from the chaos the world we want generations after us to enjoy?

Roz Palmer Associate Principal, Cities, Infrastructure Advisory

Roz Palmer Associate Principal, Cities, Infrastructure Advisory

Participating in, or even directing, how we arrive at a better future state is also a psychological tool we can use to dig our way out of despair after disaster. Some individuals after a disaster will be desperate for clear action and distraction. Their engagement needs to be trauma-informed and sensitive to varying capacity across time and individual experience.

It's a tricky balance. Post-disaster communities rarely feel the government has done enough, and also that it is doing too much without community input. However, it's not too complicated: help locals organise themselves, resource their planning process and listen regularly for what other support they need. I've seen this work in Brooklyn when we organised to lift a whole block above future flooding, I've seen it in Athens working with asylum-seekers making a home together in a disused building. In the Northern Rivers I spoke to hundreds of people ready to define their future neighbourhoods while leading the Case Management team for the Resilient Homes Program.

So, what are the actions right now?

Resource community infrastructure and distinctive public places as essential infrastructure in every suburb
Establish community advisory boards on day one of recovery by contacting local organisations and mutual aid groups
Challenge status-quo built-form regulation that inhibits climate crisis mitigation and adaptation
After a disaster, build back neighbourhoods that are self-reliant when stressed (e.g., mixed-use and walkable).

Locals need to own the plan for how their neighbourhoods will mitigate and adapt to global warming, including where they will continue to build their collective capacity to face future disaster events. Crisis is change. Change can be good.

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