€ 47,50
2009200 pages
hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-59726-561-4
Island Press
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Planning for Coastal Resilience
By Timothy Beatley
In Planning for Coastal Resilience, Beatley writes that coastal resilience must become the primary design and planning principle to guide all future development and all future infrastructure decisions. Resilience, the author explains, is a profoundly new way of viewing coastal infrastructure—an approach that values smaller, decentralized kinds of energy, water, and transport more suited to the serious physical conditions coastal communities will likely face. Implicit in the notion is an emphasis on taking steps to build adaptive capacity, to be ready ahead of a crisis or disaster. It is anticipatory, conscious, and intentional in its outlook.
After defining and explaining coastal resilience, Beatley focuses on what it means in practice. Resilience goes beyond reactive steps to prevent or handle a disaster. It takes a holistic approach to what makes a community resilient, including such factors as social capital and sense of place. Beatley provides case studies of five U.S. coastal communities, and “resilience profiles” of six North American communities, to suggest best practices and to propose guidelines for increasing resilience in threatened communities.
Though all of the examples are in the US, they make up a small percentage of the book. Planning for Coastal Resilience deals broadly with the challenges of planning in coastal areas and helps to define resilience as used by planners, and as such this book is suitable for readers all over the world.