Place-based Resilience Assessment and Planning

The 2019/2020 summer bushfires devasted lives, towns and landscapes across NSW and Victoria. As disasters, including fires and floods, are increasing, building disaster resilient communities through planning has become an important goal.

But research shows that while survivors often feel better prepared for the next disaster, they're often left out of the planning - and this can undermine their resilience.

This Study Unit introduces key concepts and directions of resilience thinking, alongside frameworks and methods, to help inform a resilience lens on place-based and community-led planning practice for architecture and design students.

The unit is connected to the Monash Sustainable Development Institute's transdisciplinary Fire to Flourish Program, which works with 4 fire affected communities to assist them in better understanding, assessing and building their resilience to future disasters.

Student will:

• Hear from a range of experts to learn about different resilience assessment and planning frameworks, their benefits and limitation, and different contexts for applicability.
• Learn how to conduct a resilience assessment, using:
  • social science data collection and analysis methods
  • a range of secondary data sources, such as wellbeing indexes and other socio-economic data sources
  • applied tool and co-design methodologies for place-based resilience planning.
• Prepare an holistic resilience assessment for a selected case study community drawing on established resilience planning methods.
• Generate an accessible resilience assessment report suitable for sharing with Fire to Flourish communities and other stakeholders.
• The unit provides foundational knowledge of resilience concepts methods to inform community-led and pace-based design.