Who: Nikki Brand, Marcin Dąbrowski, Meng Meng
When: 14 September, 12:00 – 13:00
Where: BG West 270, BK, TU Delft
With this seminar, we would like to take stock of the impacts of the recent extreme weather events in Houston, Texas, ravaged by hurricane Harvey, and in the Pearl River Delta cities in South China, battered by typhoon Hato. These extraordinary weather events show how badly the cities affected are equipped to deal with extreme rainfall. They reignited a discussion on the role of planning in the resilience of cities to flooding, on the one hand, and the relations between urbanisation and climate change impacts, on the other hand. The debate in the media focuses on unregulated urban development and bad planning decisions as the culprits. To what extent the impacts of those events were made more serious because of the patterns of urban development and the related planning decisions (or lack thereof)? Have spatial planning systems in these cities failed? And how can they do better? These are the issues that we will informally discuss at the seminar in an attempt to make sense of the Harvey and Hato disasters through the prism of spatial planning and our research agendas. Join us!
