Plan integration and plan quality: combining assessment tools to align local infrastructure priorities to reduce hazard vulnerability

ABSTRACT

Hazard vulnerability is a characteristic of disaster risks from natural hazards, worsening climate challenges, complex geopolitical governance dynamics, and local development conditions. Comprehensive planning documents often articulate a community’s infrastructure strategies, policies, and capital improvement investments, and are pivotal for sustainable development of cities. This article introduces a new approach for an evidence-based enhanced preparatory technique for comprehensive plans, called Plan I.Q. The framework brings together two recent planning evaluation tools, which use a combination of qualitative assessment and spatial analysis in GIS to develop high-quality integrated plans. The case study presents results from applying the framework during the development of a new comprehensive plan for the City of Rockport in Texas, which incurred heavy damages from Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Results show improvements to plan quality and plan integration across the community’s network of plans, increasing the quantity and quality of infrastructure policies to reduce hazard vulnerabilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable development
• hazards
• resilience
• infrastructure investments
• planning

Acknowledgement

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: this article is based on work supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (Grant #0031369). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Disclosure statement

The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) reviewed the anonymised abstract of the article, but had no role in the peer review process nor the final editorial decision.

Author contributions

Masterson conceived of the presented idea and developed the theory. Malecha, Katare, and Thapa performed the computations. Thapa, Masterson, and Malecha worked closely with the City of Rockport to test the analytical process. Masterson, Katare, and Thapa verified the analytical process. Berke encouraged Masterson to investigate and supervised the findings of this work. Berke conducted follow-up interviews with the city of Rockport to document additional outcomes. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the final manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

The Article Publishing Charge (APC) for this article is funded by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI).

Notes on contributors

Jaimie Masterson

Jaimie Hicks Masterson is director of Texas Target Communities at Texas A&M University, a high impact service-learning and engaged research program that works alongside low capacity communities to plan for resilience. She is author of Planning for Community Resilience: A Handbook for Reducing Vulnerabilities to Disasters and Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change. She is the engagement coordinator Institute for Sustainable Communities and the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard project funded by the Department of Homeland Security and a part of the Center for Coastal Resilience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Anjali Katare

Anjali Katare is a young professional with a Master in Urban Planning from Texas A&M University (USA) and Bachelor in Architecture from NIT Bhopal (India). Currently working as a Planner and Economic Analyst, she also engages as a researcher with Texas Target Communities at Texas A&M University. Anjali enjoys working on projects at all scales, from a small residential design to long-range planning for communities. She aims to address hazard vulnerability, climate impacts, and socio-economic challenges through data-led community-driven research. Over the years, she has worked on a range of projects across architecture, planning, real estate and public health fields. Anjali is also co-founding member of Vastukul, an ed-tech platform geared towards making design and planning education accessible and affordable in India.

Jeewasmi Thapa

Jeewasmi Thapa is the Senior Program Coordinator of Texas Target Communities, a high-impact service-learning and engaged research program at Texas A&M University(TAMU). She works alongside underserved communities to provide tailored planning support grounded in the local context and informed by interdisciplinary teams skilled at addressing land use planning, development management, and a host of civic, environmental, and economic challenges. As a certified planner, she designs inclusive community engagement processes and develops plans to fold and infuse data-driven strategies and best practices to address community-identified needs. She is also an engagement specialist for Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at TAMU.

Matthew Malecha

Dr. Matthew Malecha is an instructional assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University and a faculty fellow with the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. His research focuses on community resilience to natural hazards—especially the roles of plans, policies, and regulations, and their interactions with underlying social and spatial characteristics. Spatial plan evaluation and the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ (PIRS), which Malecha helped develop during his graduate studies, are central to this work. He also recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Community Resilience Program, where he explored community understanding and expectations of resilience, adaptation, and sustainability planning, investigating areas of overlap, barriers to action, and opportunities to improve effectiveness.

Siyu Yu

Siyu Yu is an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and a core faculty with the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. Her experience spans land use, plan integration, and resilience issues in the United States and the Netherlands, and Japan. Much of Dr. Yu’s current research focuses on the development, application, and extension of the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard TM (PIRS) evaluation methodology. The aim of this research is to better understand relationships among the network of land use and development plans and policies, and social and physical vulnerability to hazards and climate change. Her research has been published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Landscape and Urban Planning, Sustainable Cities and Society, and the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management.

Philip Berke

Philip R. Berke is a Research Professor, Department of City & Regional Planning; and Director of the Center Resilient Communities and Environment, Institute for the Environment of the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Berke’s research centers on community resilience to hazards and climate change with a focus on theory, methods and metrics of community planning and implementation. He has published over 100 peer reviewed articles and book chapters, and 10 books. He is the lead co-author of an internationally recognized book, Urban Land Use Planning (5th Edition), which focuses on integrating principles of sustainable communities into urban form, and co-author of a book, Natural Hazard Mitigation: Recasting Disaster Policy and Planning, which was selected as one of the “100 Essential Books in Planning” of the 20th century by the American Planning Association Centennial Great Books.