Out of a Cannon

Image from Shutterstock

I have never been terribly enthusiastic about New Year’s Eve resolutions. This is not because I lack resolve, but because the start of a new year has usually struck me as a rather arbitrary time to gain such resolve or to turn over a new leaf. If one is committed to certain goals and principles in life, then almost any day will do for fashioning new objectives in serving those goals, depending on circumstances. Why January 1? I suspect that it is mostly a reminder for many people that they have not spent enough time thinking about or pursuing their goals. They may need to develop the habit on an ongoing basis rather than pretending that the start of a new year will make things different. Will power and commitment matter. Do you really want to make things different? If so, then why not make the decision on February 4, or your birthday, or even the Fourth of July? Any day of the year will do, as long as the commitment is real. That commitment may arise out of a life-changing event, but it does not have to. New Year’s resolutions often fade into the ether of our dreams because those making them have not developed an adequate habit of connecting their dreams with a determination to make them happen.

All that said, on this particular trip around the sun, New Year’s Day seems for me a perfect day to launch some resolutions, even if many are focused on unfinished business. But I don’t just want to pick up the pace in 2024. I want to be metaphorically shot out of a cannon on New Year’s Eve. I want to start the new year with a passion.

I say this not because I changed how I feel generally about new-year resolutions. It’s because, for me personally, January 1 is a remarkably convenient opportunity for reclaiming lost energy. What happens a year from now may be different.

For one thing, although I don’t want to overemphasize this, as early as April, there were signs that I was facing a reckoning with regard to a medical problem that had been dogging me in one form or another for about a dozen years. Somewhere back then, my physician referred me to a urologist because of high PSA scores. PSA refers to prostate-specific antigens, antibodies that fight cancer or infections in the prostate gland. That led to a long series of periodic biopsies to monitor the possibility of cancer serious enough to merit surgical attention or radiation treatment, but doctors found only the slightest trace of an indolent cancer and never acted on it. Over time, it became harder to take it seriously, but such monitoring at least produced reassurance nothing disastrous was happening.

But that is not the whole story. In 2012, during a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles for the annual APA National Planning Conference, I became very ill. It felt like influenza, but by the time I left the plane, my only priority was to find a taxi for a quick trip to the hotel, where I promptly became seriously ill after checking in. Only a long-distance consultation with my primary physician, followed by a visit to a nearby urgent care center, confirmed that what I thought was the flu was actually prostatitis and required a major regimen of antibiotics for the next two weeks. I spent much of the conference in bed, sweating through a fever and visiting the bathroom frequently, occasionally struggling to attend events, only to succumb again. Fortunately, the antibiotics salvaged a post-conference road trip with my wife, Jean, to visit relatives in northern California and return to LAX along the gorgeous Pacific Coast Highway.

As for my urologist back in Chicago, when I later recounted these events, his eyes widened, and he said emphatically, “People have died from infections like that.” I did not, and I think I was otherwise far too healthy for that outcome, but it was unquestionably one of the worst experiences I have had with any sort of illness. Prostatitis is simply not fun. It is a bacterial infection, not cancer, but it can drive up PSA scores to drastic levels.

Prostate cancer drives them up much more slowly. It is a grinding menace, and because I have known people who died from it, I took it seriously all along. In the meantime, however, a less potent but serious problem developed called benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). Basically, it involves the enlargement of the prostate gland, a process that is typical as men grow older, but the big question is how big and how rapid the growth. By April, one of those periodic biopsies produced very uncomfortable impacts just as I was about to undertake a full week of online teaching for the Emergency Management Institute, for which I am a certified instructor for courses related to post-disaster recovery. The biopsy occurred on Friday. I was in miserable shape on Saturday, and I was already exhausted when I logged on with the class, another instructor, and our course supervisor at 7 a.m. on Monday. Although the course supervisor said he did not notice much difference in my delivery, it was a case of only making it look easy. When the day was over, Jean could see that I was thoroughly exhausted. It got a little better later in the week, but it was still a struggle.

My new urologist, Dr. William Lin, who had performed the biopsy (the original one retired in March), chose in a follow-up visit to refer me to a specialist who was highly trained in a new surgery called HoLEP (holmium laser enucleation of the prostate), for an evaluation of my suitability for this treatment of a prostate gland that was now about three times normal size. Other than aging, I have not found any indication that the medical profession knows precisely why this happens. It was just my bad luck, I suppose. Dr. Amy Krambeck did not have an opening until August 10, but at that appointment, she and her team made clear that I was well above the threshold for the surgery, and we scheduled it for September 29 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I also learned that she was regarded as quite possibly the best in the nation at this relatively new procedure, which basically uses laser treatment to hollow out the prostate gland, leaving the shell, thus drastically reducing bladder pressure, the main problem connected to BPH. I’ll let those interested follow the links to learn more. My focus here is still on New Year’s resolutions.

Why? Because the first thing I learned was that for at least a month afterwards, I was expected to adhere to some strict dietary limitations (mostly avoiding acidic foods and beverages) aimed at avoiding bladder irritation and allowing my internal organs to heal as well as possible. I was instructed to avoid most physical activity and not lift anything above ten pounds. The key was an intense focus on compliance, a self-discipline aimed at ensuring the best outcome.

Those who have been following the many blog video postings here in recent months will know that I spent much of my summer on trips designed to develop content for a documentary film about planning for community resilience in the face of natural disasters and climate change. By September, such travel became challenging, underscoring the real need for treatment. I had previously scheduled one more trip for early November in Texas—those blog videos are still coming—and deliberately asked Dr. Krambeck about the wisdom of its timing, which was tied to a Texas APA conference in Corpus Christi. She said I should be fine. I did get through it, but setbacks in the first week of November made me wonder as I worked with one of her assistants to determine their likely cause. They were ultimately blamed on inflammation, which could be addressed with Motrin or Ibuprofen. The trip took place, but not without its own challenges.

The reality is that recovery is often a bumpy road. Dr. Allison Shafron, who will see me on January 2 to assess my progress, texted a patient-portal welcome to “the roller coaster of recovery.” That struck me as curious because we use that same phrase in helping communities and local planners prepare for the long road to recovery after disasters. We even have a graphic slide in the EMI courses to illustrate the idea. By December, some other troubling personal matters were also seizing much of my attention, and I was feeling significant fatigue, sometimes as a result of a bit of sleep deprivation. I was also trying to rebuild strength and stamina by resuming a workout routine that I had suspended for nearly three months. I had to temper them initially to avoid overdoing it, but have gradually ramped up much of the exercise to pre-surgical levels. Some people might wonder if that might wear me out, and the answer is yes, but only temporarily. I have pursued fitness goals, on a noncompetitive basis mostly related to personal health, for years and know that the long-term benefits completely outweigh any short-term fatigue. That includes recovering from medical setbacks and injuries.

The reason for describing this at all is that it relates to my stated desire to be “shot out of a cannon” on New Year’s Eve. During much of 2023, I was decidedly passive about pursuing the sort of consulting work I have done in recent years because I was not confident about meeting the challenges involved while awaiting or recovering from the expected surgery. It did slow me down in ways that I am not used to. But I have also grown impatient to get on with normal life, to tackle new professional and volunteer challenges, and to achieve personal goals. These include raising money for and producing the HMDR documentary film, Planning to Turn the Tide; completing redesign of the disaster planning course I teach for the University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs; possible additional course instruction for EMI; and finally, outlining and moving forward on some long-planned book projects. That is to say nothing of reinvigorating this blog with new content, as well as planning at least one personal trip to relax and see the world.

On December 20, I became only 74 years old. I expect to be around for a while, and I don’t plan to occupy a couch. For the first time in years, January 1 seems like a perfect time to fashion some resolutions that I will pursue with joyful vigor. Happy New Year, everyone!

Jim Schwab

Lasting Lessons in Resilience

In the latter half of June 2008, it was hard to imagine Cedar Rapids as the city it had been just one month earlier. A massive flood along the Cedar River clobbered the city with a classic double whammy: About the time existing flood crests that had already swamped upstream Cedar Falls hit Cedar Rapids, a severe thunderstorm reached the city to compound the impact. The river, which runs through downtown in this city of 130,000 people, reached a flood level of 31.2 feet, besting the all-time previous record of 20 feet, reached in 1851 and 1929.

Downtown Cedar Rapids undergoing debris removal, late June 2008

Flood waters covered 14 percent of the city, more than 10 square miles. About 10 percent of the city’s population was evacuated from the deluge. Highway ramps became inaccessible, and at one point, a bus carrying prisoners from the county jail stayed just inches ahead of the rising waters to make its escape. City Hall, unfortunately situated on Mays Island in the middle of the river, was underwater, and governmental operations were moved to high ground elsewhere. In the end, nearly 1,300 flood-damaged homes were demolished, many making way for permanent open space as the city used federal hazard mitigation grants to acquire the properties with deed restrictions. Amazingly, as city officials have often said, there were no deaths due to the flood.

Relocated Czech & Slovak National Museum following June 2008 flood, Cedar Rapids

The avoidance of loss of life can be credited to the city and Linn County’s rapid response, which was not limited to emergency management. Within days, the Cedar Rapids City Council adopted a set of recovery goals that guided planning for long-term recovery for months and years afterwards. It shifted outside consulting contracts from riverfront planning to flood recovery. And it moved forward with a litany of creative approaches to business restoration, employment stabilization, and affordable housing development. Cedar Rapids became a living laboratory for community resilience.

For that reason, we made a special point during our Colorado to Iowa road tour for the film Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary project of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, to interview five essential city staff members on Tuesday, July 18, before closing out our trip by heading back to Chicago. These included City Manager Jeff Pomeranz and Community Development Director Jennifer Pratt.

Click here to hear two Cedar Rapids officials—Jennifer Pratt and Brenna Fall—discuss why they are supporting the HMDR film project.

These lessons have had lasting impacts in Cedar Rapids, which also suffered massive tree canopy devastation, as well as building damage, from an August 2020 derecho whose worst winds, exceeding 140 mph, swept through Linn County, including several suburbs. Taking climate change seriously, the city also last year adopted its own climate action plan. Cedar Rapids has quite probably done more to attack these problems in a forward-looking fashion than any other city in Iowa.

In coming weeks, this blog will feature new video clips from a four-day visit to the Florida APA conference in Jacksonville in early September. Meanwhile, plans are afoot for a November trip to Texas to capture additional content from the Texas APA conference in Corpus Christi, follow a mobile workshop exploring Hurricane Harvey recovery in Rockport, a Gulf Coast city where Harvey first made landfall in September 2017, and visit environmentally disadvantaged communities in the Houston area and record interviews with planners and activists there. Those posts will acknowledge the gracious support we are already receiving from several organizations and institutions in Texas.

To support the HMDR film-making effort, use either the donations link here or the QR code below. We will acknowledge all donors, whose help we greatly appreciate. Make this your film too as we move forward.

Jim Schwab

Tampa Bay and the Quest for Resilience

In my last blog post, I discussed the origins of a current active film effort, Planning to Turn the Tide, which I have been leading on behalf of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. This post, which includes the first of a series of blog videos recorded during our travels, discusses what we learned during our meetings and interviews around Tampa Bay, especially during an afternoon at the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council (TBRPC) in Pinellas Park, Florida, just north of St. Petersburg.

Click here to watch the summary video about the interviews at Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council.

One of our interviews featured Jerry Stickney, Director of the Sunshine Line, a Hillsborough County agency that provides transportation for disabled and disadvantaged people, including special services during natural disasters. That last point provided the bulk of our discussion because evacuating and sheltering these people during hurricanes, major storms, and other disasters is a major responsibility, but one that ensures some degree of social equity in the face of life-threatening circumstances. Hurricane Ian could easily have become the major hurricane that finally invaded the Tampa Bay region but instead turned east further south, striking the Fort Myers area.

Cara Serra, resiliency planner for TBRPC, discussed her role in facilitating the work of the Regional Resiliency Coalition, which consists of several working groups examining regional issues concerning shoreline management, infrastructure, stormwater management, and resilient building design and land use, among other concerns. They are currently developing a Regional Resiliency Action Plan.

In the quest for regional resilience, learning lessons from disasters elsewhere plays a major role, one that has not been neglected. Sarah Vitale, planning director for TBRPC, led the development of a new iteration of Project Phoenix, originally created in 2009, to help business leaders and others in the Tampa Bay region understand what the impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane might be if it took aim directly at Tampa Bay, something that last happened more than a century ago, when the population was barely one-tenth

Damage from Hurricane Michael, Bay County, FL. Photo by David Taylor

of what it is now. Her training workshop includes video clips of both a simulation of such a storm and real-life stories from Mexico Beach of economic recovery from Hurricane Michael, which struck the Florida Panhandle in October 2018.

Finally, we also spoke with Sean Sullivan, the executive director of TBRPC, whose engaging New England accent kept us captivated as he outlined his vision for a six-county region that is aware of its risks and prepared to handle the impacts of climate change. It is clear that he has a committed staff that is helping to implement that vision and develop the tools for effective change in that direction.

As promised in the video link above, here are links to the film trailer and the donations page to support Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary film for which all this work is being done:

Film Trailer

Donations Page (QR code below)

Supplemental note:

The impacts of climate change are affecting us all, often in unexpected ways. As I write this, my own sinuses are recovering from the onslaught of smoky air, full of particulate matter, spread south by the winds from thousands of acres of Canadian forests being scorched by massive wildfires. Winds from such fires in Quebec swept through much of the Northeast two weeks ago, including New York City. Yesterday, it was the Midwest’s turn to suffer, and Chicago was one huge grey fog that burned the eyes and made even healthy people catch their breath. The Chicago Tribune reported that we had the worst air quality of 95 major cities worldwide.

If we needed a vivid illustration that climate change and its impacts know no borders, this is certainly it. That is one more reason we at HMDR find urgency in our mission to develop this film and discuss how better planning at local, regional, national, and even international levels can help us turn the rising tide of losses from natural disasters.

Jim Schwab

Envisioning a More Resilient Future

One reason I have long loved being an urban planner is that, ultimately, planning is about imagining a better future. Or should be, anyway. Although I was in my early thirties before I returned to school for a pair of graduate degrees in Urban and Regional Planning and Journalism (a very unusual combination, I soon learned), I was intrigued with the creative process as early as high school. At the time, I applied it mostly to writing, but I learned in college that creativity was valuable for just about any endeavor. Much later, I was enthralled when I read University of Chicago psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s path-breaking 1990 book, Flow, a study of the creative process. By then, I was already in the throes of writing my own books and learning where my planning credentials could take me.

While most planners never write or publish books, we all are quite accustomed to producing plans, reports, and other documents for consumption by the public, public officials, and other decision makers. We learn how to present these materials and visualizations in public at meetings and hearings. Visual depictions, for example, of what a neighborhood not only is, but could become, are standard fare. Many of us learn to work with various kinds of visualization and design software that create renderings of future versions of boulevards and parks and other public spaces. What architects do for individual buildings, we try to do for entire neighborhoods and cities. In the process, we try to feed and amplify the public imagination for what could be, hoping to find options for improvement that will appeal to a public that may be looking for alternatives to an unsatisfactory or uninspiring status quo. Whole books and software programs, such as CommunityViz, have been devoted to sharing strategies with planners for accomplishing these visionary goals.

The written word and visualizations are two ways, often combined, for helping people see new possibilities or change the way they see the familiar. I have used them for decades, in evolving ways, to help people better understand my own planning specializations, hazard mitigation and disaster recovery. When a natural disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake has shaken a community’s assumptions about its own future, it can be time to think about rebuilding in a way that makes that community more resilient in the face of future events. I helped advance the idea of pre-disaster planning for post-disaster recovery, that is, thinking before a disaster even happens about what would expedite the recovery process and allow the community to emerge stronger and more prosperous than before. This has become known as finding the “silver lining” in the dark cloud of disaster recovery, building hope during a process that can take years or even decades in the most drastic situations.

Left to right, crew members Jim Schwab, David Taylor, and Kim Taylor Galway toast the film project at Royal Peacock, Sarasota, FL, June 18, 2023

Even when I left the American Planning Association (APA) at the end of May 2017, I largely envisioned a continuation of my hybrid journalistic and planning career in the form of books and teaching, for the most part, augmented by various consulting jobs. It was only after conversations with high school classmate David Taylor at the 50th reunion of our Brecksville, Ohio, Class of 1968 in June 2018 that another idea took shape. David, a Purple Heart Vietnam Veteran, had taken a very different path in life after recovering from war wounds, by becoming first a photographer, and later a videographer. After retiring from a marketing position with the U.S. Postal Service, he opened his own studio and has done film and photography work for veterans and environmental groups, as well as traditional assignments like weddings.

Dave had followed my career for decades, starting with the publication of my first book, Raising Less Corn and More Hell (University of Illinois Press), in 1988. As I grew into my role as a leader in hazards planning, he became fascinated with what planners do in that realm, regarding them as “unsung heroes” of the recovery process. Further conversations led to a visit to his home in Sarasota, Florida, in February 2019, which included a presentation at a Florida Atlantic University symposium in West Palm Beach, and eventually that fall into the idea of producing a video documentary about the role of planning in helping communities address threats from natural disasters and climate change. As chair-elect at the time of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division (HMDR), I took that idea to the executive committee, and they chose to sponsor the project.

Devastation from Hurricane Michael, October 2018. Photo by David Taylor

Thus began, for me, a new way of thinking about how to engage the public on these issues. I had no experience with film as a vehicle for this process, except as a viewer, but the idea captured my imagination. What can one do with film that would be different from the written word? As the script writer, how would I think about the narrative differently? Moving out of my comfort zone forced me to think even more creatively than usual, but I welcomed the experience because I sensed that it might give us a new way to capture people’s emotions and imagination around an idea whose time was overdue. The United States, and the world, were suffering ever more massive losses from natural disasters, in part as a result of climate change, and needed new ways to approach the problem. Maybe the kinetic visual impact of a film could help affect that, if crafted with the right forward-looking perspectives in mind.

It would not be easy, and I readily understood that. Moreover, the first question was how to pay for the project. Movies are inherently more expensive to produce than books, and involve at least as much work in most ways. But if we could pull this off . . . .

Fortunately, incoming chair-elect Stacy Wright was able to arrange a $5,000 donation from Atkins, a consulting firm, to start the ball rolling in the fall of 2019. I became chair of HMDR on January 1, 2020, but the COVID pandemic intervened within weeks and by March 2020, we had to shut the project down and wait for the best. It was the fall of 2021 before we were again able to move forward. We created a Video Project Advisory Committee to provide guidance on the project. It consists of leading voices in the hazards planning subfield. We also began to assemble teams of regional volunteers who could assist us with logistics and recommend leading planners for interviews and advice.

We chose to name the film Planning to Turn the Tide because of the metaphorical implications of seeking to reverse the growing tide of losses of life and property from natural and other disasters. Well aware of the impacts and trends of climate change, we know that the number and costs of America’s billion-dollar disasters has risen rapidly in recent decades. We also know that planning can make a difference.

Outdoor interview with Julie Dennis, owner of OVID Solutions (also a member of Video Project Advisory Committee) in Blountstown, Florida, July 2022. Holding camera is Kim Taylor Galway; to her left is videographer David Taylor.

In the meantime, we raised additional donations from other consulting firms* and won two small grants from the APA Divisions Council to help us get started. We announced our project in May 2022 at the APA National Planning Conference in San Diego and recorded interviews with leading hazards professionals at the Association of State Floodplain Managers annual conference two weeks later in Orlando. By mid-July, we had recorded 14 more interviews in the Florida Panhandle, mostly in Panama City, following the area’s recovery four years after Hurricane Michael struck as the first Category 5 storm to reach the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. In that visit, we had extensive support from both City Hall in Panama City and the Bay County Chamber of Commerce, which provided its board room for a recording studio for an entire day.

Local entrepreneur Allan Branch explains his restoration efforts at History Class Brewing in downtown Panama City, July 2022

By then, our main problem was that we needed an easy way for people interested in supporting the project to make donations. Fundraising can be hard work, but there is little reason these days to make it harder than it needs to be. APA worked with us over subsequent months to create a dedicated donations page where people could donate online. Because we were the first division in APA’s history to attempt a project like this, we were also the first to need such a mechanism, but by late March of this year, it was ready. The donations page, which you can also reach with the QR code below, channels donations directly to HMDR and tracks the donor information for us, so that we can recognize our supporters appropriately (unless they choose to be anonymous). You can help keep this project moving ahead by donating now, and I sincerely hope you choose to do so. You will be helping us sell the concept of resilient communities to America.

If you need more information on the project itself, visit our project information page. I will be adding new posts regularly as we continue our work, including short blog videos summarizing what we are doing along the way. Please stay in touch.

Jim Schwab

*Early Supporters:

Atkins

APA Divisions Council

Michael Baker International

JEO Consulting

Association of State Floodplain Managers (in-kind donation)

Jim Schwab Consulting LLC

OVID Solutions

Richard Roths, AICP

Clarion Associates

Punchard Consulting

 

Catch Up and Slow Down

I was lying half awake in bed at 4 a.m., unable to return completely to sleep after using the bathroom. My mind kept rolling over various competing obligations and necessities, and the thought hit me:

“You must catch up while slowing down.”

Frankly, that made about as much sense to me in the moment as it probably does to you upon reading it. One’s subconscious mind can shed strange light sometimes. The whole idea is as paradoxical as it is imperative. And yet, I mention it because I strongly suspect that many people can relate to it at some level.

We get caught in situations. Mine is partial explanation of why it has been weeks since I last posted on this blog, but that is a minor measure of the overall impact of a combined events and circumstances. As a professional urban planner, I can state flatly that life does not always follow our plans. It springs surprises and throws nasty curveballs.

Work piles up, even if much of it, in my case at the moment, is pro bono or volunteer work. The thought that I am sharing occurred last weekend, and I wrote the first four paragraphs above that morning. I got sidetracked until now, but there’s no better time to finish a blog post than now–I guess.

Let’s go back almost two months. On April Fool’s Day, aka April 1, I flew with my wife (Jean) and a teenage grandson (Alex) to Philadelphia to attend the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference. This was important to me on several levels, including my role as immediate past chair of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, which keeps me on the Executive Committee until the end of this year. Even then, I will still be involved, primarily in charge of a documentary film project, but I will save that topic for my next blog post. You can see the work piling up already. Being there allowed me to network with numerous people about numerous issues and projects and attend our division reception, where we announced a fundraising campaign to support the film project. Over breakfast, it gave one colleague from APA’s International Division an opportunity to recruit me for its Ukraine Rebuilding Action Group. But it was also a chance, during spring break for the Chicago Public Schools, to tour parts of a historic city with Alex and Jean.

A much earlier request to speak at a conference in Georgia set me up to fly back to Chicago on April 4 to stay overnight and fly the very next day to Atlanta. The occasion was the Larry Larson Speaker Series of the ASFPM Foundation at Lake Lanier, attached to the annual conference of the Georgia Association of Floodplain Management. Our distinguished panel was addressing issues of disaster resilience from federal, state, nonprofit, and local planning perspectives.

Little did I know my own resilience was to be tested. Wicked weather sweeping through the Midwest and South that week created havoc. By the time I arrived at O’Hare International Airport, having neglected to check for cell phone text messages, I learned that my flight to Atlanta was canceled and no others were available that day. I needed to be at Lake Lanier by that evening, so I conferred with the event organizers. I had to cancel my flight and hotel room and ended up speaking the next morning by video connection, missing out on personal interactions but delivering my comments anyway. Perhaps my own most notable remark was that I no longer wanted to hear any local official say after a natural disaster that “no one could have foreseen” the event. If the event happened, I said, it was always within the realm of possibility. “What you’re telling me,” I said, “is that you may not have spent much time thinking about it beforehand.” Terri L. Turner, a long-time colleague and recently retired development services administrator for the city of Augusta, Georgia, told me later that there was a ripple of laughter in the audience after I said that. Floodplain managers too often know the truth of such assertions.

Within two weeks, I discovered that my personal resilience was to be challenged in more significant ways. By mid-April, I experienced a sudden problem on the bottom of my left foot that appeared to be some sort of lesion or blister. Not sure, the best move seemed to be a consultation with my primary care physician to see what he thought. That happened on April 19, but he was also uncertain and referred me to a podiatrist. However, the very next morning, I reported to Northwestern Memorial Hospital for a previously scheduled prostate biopsy, which produced its own complications over the weekend. I might have just waited those out restfully if I had not been scheduled as co-instructor for a week-long online, all-day FEMA class that week, which was largely an exhausting experience. In mid-week, I left right after class adjourned for a follow-up appointment with the urologist to learn the results of the biopsy, which were reassuring but will involve some further measures this summer.

I finally managed to see the podiatrist the following Monday. He determined a need to biopsy the growth, a decidedly painful and messy experience even with a local anesthetic. I went home with a bandaged foot that I needed to protect for several days until it healed. A week later, however, I learned that the growth was benign; surgery would still be beneficial though not urgent.

Somewhere, in between all this, my printer died. I bought a new one from Best Buy but asked that the Geek Squad do me the favor of installing it. After all, I bought it the day of the foot biopsy. Our aging electric mower also died, and I brought our 19-year-old college student grandson to Home Depot to help buy a new one. I let him assemble it and mow the yard. I’m fine with mowing now, but for a few days, it was decidedly not a good idea.

By now, the second week of May had arrived, and a number of commitments beyond the FEMA class were amassing a backlog of work for which I needed a rapid rise in stamina, which I have mostly managed to generate. Nonetheless, I wish I had more energy and more hours in the day. That does not even speak to family obligations as summer arrives and school ends, and I dream of a vacation while arranging to see doctors in August. I’ll figure it all out, but as I said, life throws curveballs. The value of being 73 is that one has presumably learned something about how to handle matters more efficiently and wisely. I am applying that wisdom to regain control over those pending tasks and establish priorities. I am learning how to catch up and slow down at the same time.

My next post, coming very soon, will share the biggest project currently on my plate. I hope you will find it as fascinating and exciting as I do. Resilience matters.

Jim Schwab

 

P.S.: While editing this piece for publication, I learned that a Sunday feature article in the Chicago Tribune, in which I was quoted, has appeared online here. The article discusses the impact of climate change on urban heat and social disparities in the city. In addition, the two links below provide methodology for the article and searchable maps:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-viz-chicago-heat-disparities-climate-change-20230526-mzsazq6xa5b6rejv3rtvfefwoi-htmlstory.html

https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-how-we-reported-on-heat-disparities-in-chicago-20230525-hsdhhgzgwrc7tffcre6ftanphi-story.html

Thanks to reporter Sara Macaraeg for alerting me to the article’s release.

Community Planning and Pandemics Podcast

Periodically, I have linked blog readers directly to a new podcast in the Resilience Roundtable series, produced by the American Planning Association and hosted by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. Last fall, I became the moderator of this series, and the last, pre-pandemic podcast interviewed Florida planning consultant Julie Dennis about her experiences in recovery planning for Hurricanes Irma and Michael.

Earlier this month, however, we shifted gears, and I interviewed Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist and research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. Our topic was community planning and pandemics, and she shared numerous insights into the public health and community planning aspects of dealing with a pandemic like COVID-19. Most readers already know that I have written repeatedly about some aspects of the pandemic since March, but Monica in this interview sheds light on several other features of our current situation that I had not yet illuminated, in part because I lack her specific technical background.

Therefore, I am happy to provide this link to the new 40-minute podcast.

Jim Schwab

The Need for Resilient Infrastructure

This summer, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is at last rolling out its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, and its first Notice of Funding Opportunity will likely be issued in September. In July, FEMA is airing a series of five weekly webinars to introduce BRIC to communities and state officials around the nation. BRIC is the practical result of provisions in the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, passed by Congress in 2018, to create a secure funding stream for what was formerly the Pre-Disaster Mitigation program. I plan to discuss all that in coming weeks on this blog.

But the personal impact on me was to remind me to attend to an egregious oversight on my part that began earlier this year with the release by the American Planning Association (APA) of a new Planning Advisory Service Report, Planning for Resilient Infrastructure. I read it, attended to some other business in Texas and Nebraska in late February and early March, and along came the coronavirus, upending most of my existing personal and professional plans and refocusing my attention. But it is time for me to give this report the attention it deserves.

First, there is the question of why it deserves attention. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which funded the project led by the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), which partnered with APA, chose their joint proposal in funding the first round of projects under its Coastal Resilience Grants Program in 2016. As Jeffrey Payne, director of NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management, states in his preface, “Tomorrow isn’t what it used to be. Increasingly, coastal conditions include all the risks of the past, but risks that are amplified by a changing climate, rising seas, and more rapidly fluctuating Great Lakes.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I was involved with ASFPM executive director Chad Berginnis in co-authoring the proposal for this project in the summer of 2015. (After I left APA, ASFPM hired me back as a consultant in later stages of the effort to help refine and focus the PAS Report.) Our intent was both simple and bold. Local governments spend tens of billions of dollars annually on the construction and maintenance of various kinds of infrastructure. Much of that infrastructure, related to essential services including water, wastewater, and transportation, is subject to the impacts of climate change. While, as Payne goes on to state, this is true away from the coast as well, some of those impacts are particularly significant and noticeable in coastal states and communities. In short, a great deal of taxpayer money is at stake regarding the ability of that infrastructure to withstand future climate conditions and natural disasters. Planning for greatly increased resilience is a recipe for improved fiscal stability. This holds true even if, as planned by statute, a greater share of that funding for hazard mitigation projects comes from FEMA through BRIC. Taxpayers are taxpayers, whether the money used is federal, state, or local.

All that said, the serious work of completing the work fell to Joseph DeAngelis at APA, now the manager of the APA Hazards Planning Center, and Haley Briel, a research specialist for the Flood Science Center at ASFPM, along with Michael Lauer, a planning consultant with deep experience in growth management programs in southeastern coastal states.

Global average sea level rise from 1880 to the present, based on tide gauges and satellite measurements (US EPA). Reuse courtesy of APA.

Their collaborative report addresses the most significant issues of infrastructure resilience. Particularly in areas subject to coastal storms, these involve not just the impacts of major disasters but the everyday nuisance impacts of flooding because of high tides atop sea level rise that already are yielding closed streets and parks and flooded basements. Urban flooding has become a “thing” where the term never used to be heard. They include a small table with projections by the U.S. Global Change Research Program showing ranges of sea level rise between 0.5 and 1.2 feet by 2050, and 1 to 4 feet by 2100. Of course, these are rough ranges in part because various geological conditions, such as erosion or glacial rebound, cause different results from one region to another, although most of the East Coast faces serious problems over the coming century. A major part of the problem is that sea level rise amplifies the impact of high tides in storms, leading to increased flooding and erosion that is already evident in low-lying cities like Norfolk, Virginia, or Miami. The authors note that, “Over the last half-century alone, with just one to three inches of average sea level rise, daily high-tide flooding has become up to 10 times more frequent” in American coastal communities. Even in Midwestern communities, including those along the Great Lakes, problems result from climate-driven increases in high-precipitation storms that frequently overwhelm stormwater drainage systems built in an earlier era based on other, less challenging, assumptions.

Storm surge heights are cumulatively based on the mean sea level, the height of the tide, and the high volume of water pushed toward the shore by coastal storms (National Hurricane Center). Reuse courtesy of APA.

It is natural that a planning document is going to assert a role for planners in addressing these problems. The role the report asserts is entirely logical, starting with “assessing long-term infrastructure needs and understanding future risks to infrastructure assets.” Equally logical, however, is that the report builds upon prior APA literature to outline the need for coordinated action through the plan-making process to integrate climate risk into local plans as a means of “capturing the future conditions to which existing infrastructure and any planned infrastructure projects will be subjected.” Put simply, if the local planning process does not identify those risks and provide clear recommendations for creating resilient infrastructure, it is not likely to materialize in any coherent and consistent fashion. The third chapter outlines a step-by-step approach (see illustrations below) for developing an inventory of local infrastructure, identifying risks, and moving toward an effective plan for adaptation.

The process for conducting an infrastructure vulnerability assessment (Joseph DeAngelis). Reuse courtesy of APA for both diagrams.

 

 

 

 

 

A project or asset’s vulnerability to flood impacts is a product of its exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity (Joseph DeAngelis).

Later, the report provides some examples of what such consistent planning for resilient infrastructure may look like. Its case study of San Francisco’s approach to assessing sea-level-rise impacts outlines how the Sea Level Rise Committee of the city’s Capital Planning Committee (CPC), a body responsible for overseeing capital investments for infrastructure, recommended using the upper end of estimates from a National Research Council report for the West Coast. These were fed into a CPC guidance document for assessing vulnerability and supporting adaptation to sea level rise, a primary outcome of climate change. Without engaging the full details here, the bottom line is that the City and County of San Francisco was working from a single play book for climate adaptation of project life cycles for future infrastructure. Capital planning could thus proceed in a more standardized manner based on common assumptions. The report also uses an extensive example from Toledo, Ohio, the site of one of two pilot projects supported by the ASFPM/APA project. Toledo, sitting on the shores of Lake Erie, has suffered from stormwater flooding and is approaching the problem with a mixture of green infrastructure and analysis of social vulnerability in affected neighborhoods. The report elsewhere delves into questions and methods of documenting and addressing environmental justice and social and racial inequities in environmental protection through appropriate local capital planning projects.

Both cases highlight the value for local planners of establishing credible data sources, which often rest within federal agencies such as NOAA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But, as one chapter illustrates, these can include experienced national nonprofits as well, such as Climate Central. Unquestionably, however, the best single assemblage of data and tools is NOAA’s own Digital Coast website. Planners can access additional high-quality resources on climate through other NOAA programs such as the Regional Climate Centers, located at a series of universities across the nation, and the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments, where RISA staff work directly with climate scientists to communicate the science to the public and local officials.

Just as important as understanding where to find the proper data and tools, however, is a knowledge of best practices in local capital improvements planning, the development of effective standards, guidelines, and regulations for creating resilient infrastructure, and, finally, the best means for financing such long-term investments in infrastructure, especially with an eye to climate resilience. Each of these three topics is covered in separate chapters in the second half of the report.

View of part of the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy, February 2013.

Ultimately, the real challenge for local planners is overcoming a natural discomfort with the inherent uncertainties in planning for infrastructure that must withstand the impacts of climate change within a range of assumptions that, in part, depend on federal and even international action to mitigate rising global temperatures as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. Planners, and the communities they serve, must adjust to those uncertainties and the inherent complexities they embody. Planning, however, has always been a speculative enterprise riddled by uncertainties, yet cities have embraced assumptions about population growth, demographic change, and economic scenarios that have often been equally uncertain, for none of us has a crystal ball. What we do know, however, is the direction of existing and accelerating trends, and climate change is no myth. We are ultimately better off, and will better invest public resources, by anticipating climate change with the best projections available, so that our communities are not overwhelmed by future storms, sea level rise, and storm surge. We cannot say we did not see it coming. We can only hope to say we used a wise approach based on the best data available to avoid catastrophe for ourselves and future generations in the communities we serve.

Jim Schwab

 

Unequal Exposure

On April 29, I will be moderating “Demanding Equity: Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery,” a 45-minute session in a special three-day virtual conference of the American Planning Association, NPC20 @HOME. The online conference is an attempt to replace the experience of the canceled National Planning Conference, which would have taken place in Houston, April 25-28. For the first time in APA history, the annual event will not go forward as planned. Like numerous other conferences, it was untenable to assemble thousands of participants in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. But it is possible to provide a decent educational opportunity in its place by broadcasting and recording distance learning and letting participants ask questions remotely.

But why do I mention this one session, when APA is offering two dozen? Because it touches on some issues so central to the social and economic impacts of coronavirus, and speaks so directly to what planners and planning can do as we recover from this experience, that I wanted to highlight the subject in this post. It has been said often that the coronavirus does not discriminate. That may be true, but our society has done so and still does, often in ways people are reluctant to consider or admit. The result is that, as happens with most disasters, minorities and low-income people, those with fewer opportunities in life or greater exposure to danger, are disproportionately affected. And so it will be when the histories of this pandemic are written. The evidence is already stark enough for passionate discussion.

To give credit where it is due, the session was the brainchild of Adrian Freund, a veteran, semi-retired planner in Oregon. Before the NPC was canceled, however, Adrian was hospitalized (not because of coronavirus) and realized he would be unable to go to Houston. He reached out through a former president of APA, David Siegel, also of Oregon, to ask me to take over, and I agreed. We are on the same page on this issue. When APA decided to replace NPC with NPC20 @HOME, this was one of the sessions they felt must be included, and I reassembled the speakers to modify our plans for the new format.

All of them have a ton of wisdom to contribute on the subject. Shannon van Zandt is a professor of urban planning and department head at Texas A&M, and has authored numerous articles and led many projects on subjects related to equity in disaster recovery, particularly in the Texas context in which she works. Marccus Hendricks, an assistant professor of planning at the University of Maryland, is a Texas A&M graduate who has focused on infrastructure issues and environmental justice, writing his doctoral thesis on stormwater management in Houston. Chrishelle Palay is director at the HOME Coalition in Houston. Obviously, the panel has strong Texas roots, but there are few states where one can get better insights into the impacts of environmental inequities.

But it is the screaming headlines of the past week that have brought renewed attention to the issue in the context of coronavirus. In Chicago, we have learned that African Americans are dying from the virus at six times the rate of whites. Gary, a predominantly African American city, is the new coronavirus hot spot in Indiana. It is also where it gets personal for me. A 12-year-old granddaughter lives there and, as of yesterday (April 10), appears to have COVID-19 symptoms. Her mother called and was asked not to bring her to a hospital, but to isolate her at home. She will not be tested because, as everywhere else, this nation has not gotten its act together on testing. Will she even be included in the statistics, then, as a known case? Good question. I have no idea how Indiana is tallying such numbers. But she is in for a rough ride in the immediate future, and Gary and surrounding Lake County are certainly not fully prepared.

But what is happening in Chicago, as numerous commentators and public health officials have noted in the past week, is not only not unique, but to be expected. Detroit is emerging as a hotspot with major disparities in racial impact. State health data reveal that, while blacks make up 14 percent of Michigan’s population, they account for one-third of the cases and 40 percent of the deaths so far. In Louisiana, with one-third of the population, blacks account for 70 percent of the deaths. New Orleans has clearly emerged as a southern hot spot for coronavirus infections. Across the nation, one can find similar racial disparities.

Beneath those figures, however, are other disparities that weave in and out of racial and ethnic numbers. Age is perhaps the best-known factor, but so are many others. People in low-income service jobs, for instance, to the extent that they are still working, are more dependent on public transit and much less likely to be able to work from home like white-collar professionals. Public transit contributes greatly to mobility in urban centers, but does little for social distancing. It is still unclear just how transit will be affected for the long term, although it remains a vital link to jobs for many of the working poor. But coronavirus is clearly challenging the economic viability of many transit systems, one reason they were the target of assistance in the CARES Act.

It goes without saying that health care workers are significantly more exposed, but they are not just doctors. Their ranks include nurses, nursing assistants, and many others, some with much lower incomes, who nonetheless are risking their lives every day. Some of them work in nursing homes, which have not been the focus of any noticeable attention at the federal level. There are many ways to slice and dice the data to identify patterns of exposure, including those for access to health care, quite possibly the single most important factor driving disparities in this particular disaster. Lack of insurance coverage and inability to afford adequate health care leave many people untouched by the system and untested until it is too late. Poor or nonexistent health insurance coverage, especially for undocumented immigrants, accompanied by food deserts in many inner-city neighborhoods, endemic poverty in many rural areas and small towns, and exposure to job-related ailments, can produce numerous chronic conditions that make exposure to a new virus fatal or disastrous instead of merely survivable.

It remains remarkable, in view of these factors, that the Trump administration can maintain its drumbeat of opposition to the Affordable Care Act, including the recent refusal to allow newly jobless Americans to sign up for coverage. But this is one of many ways in which this nation, through both federal and state policy, continues to resist expanded, let alone universal, health care coverage to shore up health care deficiencies for the most vulnerable among us. There is both a meanness and short-sightedness that underlies much of this resistance. As I noted just two weeks ago, these health care vulnerabilities, with all the racial and socioeconomic inequities they embody, form the weak links in the chain of overall vulnerability for our communities when pandemic strikes.

And that brings me back to the point of the session I will moderate. One essential element of the planner’s skill set should be demographic analysis. The coronavirus pandemic highlights the critical value of addressing public health in comprehensive plans and other efforts to chart the future of cities, counties, and regions. Issues of national health care policy may be well beyond the reach of planners and their communities, but exposing the glaring disparities that have been made evident as the data on coronavirus cases grows is critical to knowing how resilient our communities are or how resilient we can make them. Access to health care is not merely a matter of insurance, as important as that is. It is also affected by the practices of local hospitals, the access to open spaces for densely populated areas, environmental regulations controlling industrial pollutants, public education around personal health, access to healthy food, the quality of our food distribution systems, and a myriad of other considerations that can be addressed to one degree or another through local or regional planning and through policy commitments to social equity.

That is precisely why, as the White House dithers, and federal management of the coronavirus crisis continues to fall short, dozens if not hundreds of mayors and governors and other local and state officials have stepped up to fill the gap. It is sad that there is not better national leadership in this crisis, but we are learning who our real leaders are. Enabling planners and other policy makers to support those officials with essential and meaningful data is an ongoing task, but if we are going to emerge from this disaster in a better place, identifying the inequities that weaken our communities and finding ways to build resilience across those weak links is going to be essential. There is no good alternative.

Jim Schwab

Facing Waterfront Hazards in Wilmington

Wilmington, a charming city of just over 100,000 on the far southern edge of the North Carolina coast, has taken some hits from coastal storms in recent years, most notably Hurricane Florence in 2018. Hurricane Dorian this year posed a minor threat but mostly left a trail of 14 identified tornadoes in its wake, a phenomenon familiar in the Southeast, though their association with hurricanes may be less well known elsewhere.

Wilmington Planning Director Glenn Harbeck, who I was told was one of the most knowledgeable people in town for the purpose, on October 8 took me on a boat tour of much of the city’s interior waterfront to let me see and photograph the area along Hewletts Creek, a stream feeding into the Atlantic Ocean behind the barrier island that includes the Masonboro Island Estuarine Reserve. Glenn and his wife have lived in Wilmington for 40 years, during which, he says, they have experienced a succession of hurricanes: Diana (1984), Bertha (1996), Fran (1996), Bonnie (1998), Floyd (1999), Matthew (2016), Florence (2018), and Dorian (2019).

Why it has taken me this long to write about it is another matter related entirely to my own obligations and distractions. At the time, however, I was in Wilmington as the invited keynote speaker for the annual conference of the North Carolina chapter of the American Planning Association. That event was at the city’s convention center, which sits along the Cape Fear River, which basically serves as the city’s western edge, with suburban or unincorporated New Hanover County on the other side. Along with the adjoining Embassy Suites, the complex boasts a boardwalk that allows people to walk to restaurants and other venues in more historic quarters of the city. I joined a party of a dozen at a nearby seafood restaurant, The George on the River, and got to see much of it. Some of the boardwalk appears to need work, but I was not clear on whether that was due to hurricane damage of work in progress. But I can give The George five stars. The food was wonderful and a credit to southern coastal cuisine. (I enjoyed crab-topped salmon with garlic mashed potatoes and spicy collards. I gladly recommend it.) Added appeal derived from the outdoor seating that made for a pleasant evening setting.

But all that followed the boat tour, which came in the late afternoon after a delayed arrival in Wilmington following a long layover in Atlanta on the way from Chicago. The weather had been uncertain, and Glenn was a bit concerned about concluding the trip before it turned rainy or inhospitable, although it never did. It was simply a bit chilly, but my photos have that overcast, gray-sky look as a result.

Compared to some prior tours I have taken of disaster sites, this one was relatively brief with modest expectations. Nonetheless, there are always learning opportunities, and I had never visited Wilmington before. Touring by boat allowed a different perspective than by land. Certain factors became readily apparent, with Glenn supplying ample explanation.

One, to be expected, was that, despite the clear dangers and mitigation challenges associated with a waterfront near the ocean in a region frequently affected by coastal storms and hurricanes, housing along Hewletts Creek remains attractive to its owners and has gained value as a result. These are people who love their boats and their access to the water, and the storms are simply part of the environment, much like a snowstorm in Chicago. Whether everyone takes all the appropriate precautions to protect those properties may be another matter, but most are at least aware of the challenges they face when hurricanes move toward North Carolina.

Because access to the water is a prized asset, most properties include piers, although shared piers are becoming more common, according to Glenn, presumably because of reduced costs and environmental impact. Those piers, however, have typically taken a beating in big storms, and Hurricane Florence contained some solid punches. One problem, he informed me, is that the buoyancy of the wood is the enemy of the piers’ survival because, as the storm surge rises and the piers rise with it, they are bent and twisted and collapse. In other words, the buoyancy of wood works against them. The photos provide ample evidence, but Glenn also told me that some had been repaired in recent months; if I had come three months earlier, the destruction would have been more evident. Past adaptation in some places was to rebuild the piers higher than before to move them above likely wave levels, but frequent storms and high storm surges have sometimes obviated the effectiveness of this approach. Instead, some pier owners are adapting with the use of Titan decking, which uses polypropylene plastic to stabilize the piers during future storms.

There were also, a year after Florence, remaining indications of the damages suffered to the boats themselves, which can easily be tossed about by winds and waves. We encountered one of those (below) toward the end of the tour.  

It should be noted that, although it is inside Wilmington, Hewletts Creek has a much more rural or suburban feel than the Cape Fear River waterfront, which is near the urban heart of the city and its downtown. The riverfront is not primarily residential but encompasses a variety of commercial uses, including hotels and a large marina. In contrast, the waterfront along Hewletts Creek consisted predominantly of private residential property.

I do not wish to leave the impression from this glimpse of Hewletts Creek that what happened there is the extent of the impact of Florence. Although I did not have time on this trip to get a thorough tour of the city, I did receive other information from Glenn and from Christine Hughes, a senior planner with the city for Comprehensive Planning, Design, and Community Engagement. From her, I learned that Wilmington’s working and low-income populations sustained a large hit on their affordable housing stock with the loss of approximately 1,200 apartment units. In September, the Wilmington City Council approved $27 million worth of bond issuances for the Wilmington Housing Authority. A big part of that involved the closure of Market North Apartments on Darlington Avenue, which will be rebuilt. That closure forced evacuation by more than 1,000 residents. Wilmington will be recovering from Florence for some time to come. The cost and numbers of people affected in this housing redevelopment underscore the solemn fact that often low-income and minority populations suffer the greatest impacts of natural disasters. Our communities are not whole unless and until we give them high priority in recovery planning.

It is also worth knowing that the quest for coastal resilience is not new to Wilmington, which has engaged with federal and state agencies for some time, as illustrated in a 2013 report on a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pilot project on community resilience. Glenn Harbeck has been in his current position for more than seven years after a long period of consulting and knows well the direction the city needs to take, but it is a long road. Residents can learn a great deal about the progress of infrastructure recovery projects from the city’s online map tracking such efforts, which include street and sidewalk repairs and stormwater management. Recovery is a complex process, as Wilmington knows well, and future storms, climate change, and sea level rise will all surely add to the challenges that lie ahead.

Jim Schwab

Aligning Planning and Public Health

Just nine days ago, on November 15, I stood in front of two successive audiences of long-term health care practitioners to present workshops at a conference in Wisconsin Dells discussing, of all things, “Fundamentals of Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery.” Where, some might ask, is the nexus between these two subjects?

Patients who survived evacuations from New York City area hospitals, six in the city itself and one just outside, during Hurricane Sandy would know. People with disabilities, the elderly, the ill are especially vulnerable during disasters, and moving them out of harm’s way is no picnic. They cannot just grab the keys to their cars and drive out of town ahead of the storm. Evacuating them is a major undertaking that must be well-planned.

And so, our fields of expertise converged. I discussed what I knew from urban planning, but I invited input from their experiences in handling such situations. Some had not yet experienced a disaster, but others had, and their numbers in the health care field are growing, as doctors and nurses find clinics and hospitals impacted by wildfires in California, and hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes elsewhere. Mine was not the only presentation related to such concerns. The keynote by Desiree Matel-Anderson, founder of the Field Innovation Team and a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) advisor, detailed personal interactions with disasters. Others focused on emergency management. The audience needed to know about new regulations and laws, such as those promulgated in 2016 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) or the Disaster Recovery Reform Act (DRRA), passed in October as a

Photo by Kristina Peterson

rider on the FAA Reauthorization Act. DRRA outlines new responsibilities for the FEMA administrator in providing training to local officials and utility providers in planning for emergencies for nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals, and for the Federal Highway Administration regarding evacuations for these facilities, prisons, and certain classes ofdisadvantaged persons. I told the nurses and administrators in my audience they needed to prepare for these new responsibilities. There seems to be a growing conviction in Congress and federal agencies that health care institutions need to be better prepared to protect their patients during disasters. In the light of events dating back to Hurricane Katrina, that does not seem unreasonable.

To some extent, I believe it is the growing engagement of the urban planning profession with natural hazards that is facilitating a re-engagement of the profession with public health practitioners. I say “re-engagement” because the two fields grew up together, at least in North America. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, industrializing, rapidly growing American cities were often festering incubators for diseases because of pollution, overcrowding, and fire and other hazards. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 laid the groundwork for major reforms related to building codes, helping to create the largely masonry-based architecture now predominant in the city. Activists like Jane Addams inveighed against oppressive health conditions for the working class. There was an urgent need for both better planning and public health measures that would prevent the spread of disease, and the two professions matured accordingly. At the same time, civil engineers took growing responsibility for developing the sanitary infrastructure cities needed, such as sewer treatment systems and effective drainage, a topic I addressed in a keynote in September 2015 in Boston for the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Coasts, Oceans, Ports and Rivers Institute (COPRI) annual conference. All three professions grew up in the same cradle, addressing urgent societal needs for health care, better urban design, and public sanitation.

Scene on the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy.

All of this is a long, but I think crucial, introduction to a book by Michael R. Greenberg and Dona Schneider, Urban Planning & Public Health: A Critical Partnership, published by APHA Press. I had planned to review it earlier, but recent events expanded the context for its importance. Greenberg, a long-time planning colleague and professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, previously authored Protecting Seniors Against Environmental Disasters (Routledge, 2014), a book inspired in part by his own experience with elderly parents during Hurricane Sandy. He is certainly familiar with the territory. Schneider, also at Rutgers, brings the perspective of a public health expert.

The book reads mostly like a textbook and thus may be of most valuable to instructors willing to acquaint students in both fields with their organic relationship to each other and why the partnership is important today. Admittedly, the problems are not the same. We no longer face the scourge of tuberculosis, and smokestacks no longer belch particulates as freely as they once did. The water is less polluted. But our society is creating other problems of a momentous nature, including climate change and the resulting increased severity of weather-related disasters. Under the Trump administration and various less environmentally friendly state administrations, there have been concerted efforts to retreat from previous initiatives aimed to clear the skies and foster environmental justice. It is thus imperative that we have trained, knowledgeable, and articulate professionals who can advocate for the public interest when powerful political forces push in other directions.

The book makes powerful arguments in this context for the salience of a collaborative assault on the threats posed to our communities by natural hazards, using the tools of both public health and planning to analyze the threats and identify meaningful solutions. Not everything needs to happen at a macro level, either; in fact, planners and public health officials often are at their best in examining trends at the neighborhood and community level to find very geographically specific solutions to localized but persistent problems.

The authors are methodical, laying a groundwork in the first three chapters for understanding the building blocks of the two professions and their integral relationships. One can easily detect the influence of Greenberg’s long and distinguished career on both a practical and theoretical level as he discusses the impacts of various approaches to zoning, such as the use of downzoning to protect open lands and natural resources and the use of special districts, as in Austin, Texas, to protect the environmentally sensitive Edwards Aquifer through measures such as integrated pest management practices, which reduce the use of toxic chemicals that can enter the water supply. And the connection to natural disasters? Even recent history has revealed the vulnerability of Texas to prolonged drought, making the protection of water supplies essential to public health and welfare.

Recognizing the modern context for their focus on this “critical partnership,” the authors have included significant material on the role of risk and hazard mitigation analysis in planning, with a whole chapter on “Keeping People Out of Harm’s Way.” As with much of the book, it leads students on a path through the critical minutiae of planning and public health analysis, including case studies at various levels of analysis—for example, a brief but close look at the Galveston City Hazard Mitigation Plan.

Other sections address critical current issues such as the availability of healthy foods in poor communities, and how that can be addressed through laws, community organizations, and better resources; how to redevelop safe community assets from former brownfield sites; and potentially evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of major regional development proposals. In short, this is not bedtime reading for most laypeople, but it is solid instructional material for aspiring young professionals and may be useful as well to community advocates who are willing to learn the nuts and bolts of using planning to achieve better public health results in their neighborhoods and communities. As such, it is a timely and needed addition to the literature.

Jim Schwab