ABSTRACT
Community planning is failing many communities in times of crisis. When an extreme event occurs in a community, whether it is a natural process such as flooding or an accident such as a train derailment, it is the outcome of ongoing environmental interactions amplified by the planning decisions of that community. As Mileti successfully argues, disasters are therefore not random acts but the result of circumstances arising from the design of a community’s natural, social, and built environments. 1 “A cornerstone of community planning is that it aims to promote the public interest when coping with the various problems affecting the physical environment,” 2 and yet community planning is not integrated with emergency management’s efforts to deal with the most extreme of those problems. Rather, it may undermine community safety due to the potential for risk being generated from planning decisions, and a failure to recognize its potential to improve community resiliency.
