Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Issue link: http://dysoncollege.uberflip.com/i/128987
As President Friedman asks, "Part of the matter is that preparation for rebuilding tends to be viewed as a security issue. But it's not a security issue, it's an issue of business continuity—and life continuity. And the scale is too small. Lots of players know how to build a building, but how do you rebuild a whole city? What's the right, easy way to finance the restoration? If a dirty bomb went off in lower Manhattan that contaminated everything, response would require an unprecedented level of cooperation. The bottom line is this: Rebuilding issues are indeed local but there is no conceptual architecture. Everything is invested from scratch every time. There are few templates, few tool boxes, and few sets of procedures. And that gap is global." If the containment vessel of the Indian Point nuclear power plant breached, and the radioactive plume spread 20 miles south to contaminate Manhattan, how could the city evacuate millions or recover after an evacuation? Even if the plume avoided Manhattan and contaminated Westchester County to the east, irradiating an area through to Interstate Highway 95, or Rockland County, to the west, contaminating the NYS Throughway (I-87), how could governments restore these suburban counties and the regional economic corridors for commerce? Even if security averts terrorist acts and technologies hold up, meteorologists predict that another major hurricane will hit Manhattan with an impact more devastating than those of the major storms of 1938, 1944, or 1954, because the city has developed more intensely. Conceptual Frameworks for Re-Development It is instructive, therefore, to explore briefly what society needs to study in order to begin to prepare for, adapt to, post-disaster conditions and to rebuild the infrastructure to restore socio-economic systems. Governments can learn from some of the preparations that companies are undertaking to do so. Universities can learn from the pioneering programs in education about sustainable development management practices. While related, the knowledge and skills associated with long-term and adaptive recovery from large disasters are different from the systems of emergency responders concerned with security and public safety. There are several dimensions to studying the conceptual architecture essential for redesign and rebuilding following a disaster. These are (a) planning and establishing new parameters for post-disaster adaptation, (b) establishing robust public participation and equitable procedures to accommodate competing interests, (c) allowing all interests to accept and become a part of the new design and phasing the rebuilding over a realistic time frame, and (d) accommodating the merger of the new systems with the older systems, and re-iteratively adjusting both integral resilience techniques into post-disaster redevelopment. Some of these dimensions pose entirely new challenges, as in creating the new adaptive planning regimes. Others are well understood but not yet applied to post-disaster adaptation and rebuilding, as in the public participation techniques and procedures. Because land use decision-making is the primary responsibility of state and local governments under the federal system of the U.S. Constitution, the responsibility to shape these four dimensions is a duty that state governors and legislatures need to address. New measures to merge state economic development planning into disaster redesign planning remain to be conceived and established. None of these state agency functions has been so coordinated as yet. A comparable reorganization was undertaken in 1978 for federal disaster relief, as when the Federal Emergency Management Administration was created by President Carter's Executive Order. The states all have economic development agencies, agencies for agricultural and markets, energy redevelopment 38