On Wednesday, panelists, professionals and students gathered at the Burns Auditorium in Kamphoefner Hall to discuss natural disaster relief and recovery after the events of Hurricane Matthew and other natural disasters.
Gavin Smith, a research professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of City and Regional Planning and director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence, noted the importance of hazard mitigation, appropriate design and information sharing as a preventative measure. Smith also talked about Hurricane Matthew’s impact on Kinston, North Carolina and how architecture can be used as a tool to bring people back to Kinston.
“Disasters often shine a light on a community,” Smith said. “Those that have been disenfranchised and marginalized — disasters often further marginalize them.”
Living with Floods: Eastern NC 2050 Opening Public Forum is a part of DesignWeek, a project that focuses on three communities in North Carolina that were impacted by Hurricane Matthew: Kinston, Greenville and Windsor. Panelists Gavin Smith, Chuck Flink, Kofi Boone and Maya Nguyen each gave individual presentations on their work, covering a range of topics from flood-resistant and resilient design to how cultural and socioeconomic factors affect disaster recovery. These presentations were followed by a Q&A session moderated by Dan Howe.
Flink, an executive in residence at NC State in the Department of Landscape Architect and a greenway planner, discussed his successful implementation of a greenway as a watershed in Grand Forks, North Dakota, after a flood devastated the city in 1997. Flink discussed the struggles of convincing a vulnerable population that land solely designed to hold water was valuable and worth investing in.
“People thought I was insane, and they thought the whole thing was insane,” Flink said. “But many years later, it’s the most beloved landscape in the community.”
The panel also covered the how social and cultural inequity affected the public’s response to natural disasters. Nguyen, an associate professor and researcher on housing policy, social and spatial inequality, urban growth phenomena and governance, discussed how immigrants from different cultures might be staying in their homes to protect their assets or because of a distrust of government.
“They didn’t really quite understand why people didn’t evacuate when there were mandatory evacuations,” Nguyen said. “A lot of the Asian population actually stayed in their homes and they flooded after Hurricane Katrina.”
Boone, an associate professor of landscape architecture, also talked about the relationship between disaster recovery and social inequity. He discussed Princeville, North Carolina, a town that refused to relocate and remained reluctant to receive help in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew, and the distrust that is prevalent in these communities.
“Design is not seen yet as an ally to social change,” Boone said. “The resources that we use, the political influence that we wield, the allies that we make in order to make large scale change happen are often not the same people that a lot of communities trust.”
The information shared in this panel was timely advice to participants of the DesignWeek program, who will be departing to Greenville, Windsor and Kinston Thursday morning. Participants of this program will develop a strategy to help an affected community in each of these locations and will present their results at the end of the six-day period. Participants as well as students interested in landscape architecture and environmental recovery were drawn to the event.
Emily Ulman, a sophomore studying environmental sciences, heard of the event through a landscape architecture class and noted that the panel helped her see the social ramifications of disaster recovery.
“I was just really interested in what they had to say, and there were a lot of different views that I hadn’t taken into account,” Ulman said.