A history of planning through the broken lens of disaster

Abstract

Planning has a long and colourful history with the ‘art’ of planning evolving alongside the transition from a nomadic life to more permanent settlement. Long before Westminster, the Whitehouse or the Beehive, people have been coming together to give their aspirations for place some kind of form and content over ever-larger scales; we could call this the substance of planning. The substance of planning – transport, housing, sanitation, infrastructure – has been profoundly shaped by disasters, including war, plague, floods and fire; however, the connection between catastrophe and the evolution of planning is rarely acknowledged. This first task of this chapter is to illustrate this connection more fully by documenting some of the ways in which disasters of many different kinds have shaped the history of planning. The second and more difficult task is to highlight how several more recent events – including the Canterbury earthquakes – have exposed the importance of planning processes. A focus on the procedural aspects of planning opens up a more critical line of enquiry, and raises intriguing questions about who plans, for whom, why and how. This chapter therefore presents a brief history of planning substance and process, through the broken lens of disaster. I use this lens to explore an important question facing every city after disaster, that is, ‘How do we build back better?’.