Alumni News - February 2005

2005 APA alumni reception
March 21, 2005

Maya (main dining room), 303 2nd St. (Folsom St.)
San Francisco, CA

415-543-2928 (hotel contact)
7:00-9:00 pm

Cost will be $30-40 for beer/wine and hors d’ oeuvres.
Current students and recent grads (5 years) at reduced rate.

The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster
Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, Editors
Oxford University Press, Oxford

Inspired by the events of September 11 but about much more, The Resilient City:
How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster investigates urban disasters throughout
history and around the world, in an effort to determine how and why cities almost
inevitably recover and thrive in their wake.

According to editors Lawrence Vale (MIT professor and author of Architecture, Power,
and National Identity and Reclaiming Public Housing) and Thomas Campanella
(DCRP assistant professor and author of Republic of Shade and Cities from the Sky),
city resilience in the face of disasters from volcano eruptions, to starvation, biological warfare, and displacement
from urban renewal, is almost universal. Even totally devastated cities often survive as sites of tourism, education,
remembrance, or myth. Warsaw rebuilt itself after annihilation in World War II; Mexico City survived and
transformed itself after a 1985 earthquake; Washington, D.C. remained its nation’s capitol even after many of its
monuments were burned. What makes cities able to bounce back from catastrophe so forcefully and symbolically?
Who decides how they recover, and whom the recovery benefits most?

The Resilient City presents a cogent theory of urban resilience and recovery using evidence from 14 essays
representing various types of disasters. Each event varies in the scale of its destruction, the loss of life, and the
cause (natural (such as earthquakes), natural with human intervention (forest fires), human (terrorism), or
sociopolitical/economic (collapse of a local economy)). And each city responds to trouble differently, a complex
mix of politics, propaganda, and culture. Among the editors’ key conclusions are the ideas that cities’ narratives
of resilience are highly contested political necessities that ultimately have the power to spark national renewal
and symbolize a greater resilience – that of the human spirit.

Named to Planetizen's 2005 Top 10 Booklist: http://www.planetizen.com/books/plnz10.php

For forty years, Mike Stegman has been
opening doors to the American Dream.
Photo by Steve Exum,
©2005 Endeavors magazine.

Home Work
To Mike Stegman, America means "having a chance to own a
home and to build assets and pass on these assets to your
children so they can have a better life than you did."

by Cherry Crayton
endeavors

With his hands tucked in the front pockets of his black slacks,
Michael Stegman strolls up a street near a Chapel Hill public-
housing community. His brown eyes catch on a line of one-story
homes — their chipped paint, overgrown bushes, and neglected
lawns. Stegman pauses when he arrives at a tall, two-story house
that's just been built by EmPOWERment, Inc., a non-profit organization
in Chapel Hill that rents and sells homes to working-class families.
Without a droop in his ever-straight posture, he turns to face the beige
home framed by recently planted shrubs and seeded grass. Stegman,
chair and professor of public policy [Ed.: DCRP joint professor] at
UNC- Chapel Hill, stares at the house in silence for about a minute

before offering his thoughts in a voice of temperance that never wavers, even during hours of conversation.
"Three bedrooms. A modern kitchen. Central air conditioning. A front porch," he says. "This is terrific."
In the home, he says, he sees an America he craves to see repeated in neighborhood after neighborhood
across the nation. He sees opportunity.

Read the complete article on-line at endeavors.unc.edu

Call for papers!
Articles • Opinion Pieces • Case Studies • Book Reviews • Artwork

Carolina Planning, a DCRP student-run publication, is seeking articles for the Spring 2005 issue.
The next issue will focus on green buildings. Submissions due March 1st.

Submission Guidelines
Manuscripts should be up to 25 typed, double-spaced pages (approximately 7500 words). Please submit
one copy via email or on a CD, preferably in MS Word format. If you have photos, please submit them
separately and in .jpg format. Citations should follow the author-date system in the Chicago Manual of
Style, with endnotes used for explanatory text. Legal articles may use Bluebook format. Please include
the author’s name, address, telephone number, and email address, along with a 2-3 sentence biographical
sketch. Carolina Planning reserves the right to edit articles accepted for publication, subject to author’s
approval. Carolina Planning accepts submissions on a year-round basis.

Contact Information
Carolina Planning
Department of City and Regional Planning
Campus Box # 3140
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
(919) 962-4783
carolinaplanning@unc.edu

Subscription information is available at http://www.planning.unc.edu/pdf/2003.subscripform.pdf

Executive Director, Cleveland Public Art
Planner/ Senior Planner, Montgomery County Department of Park and Planning
Planning Director, City of Raleigh
Research Analyst, City of St. Louis
Team Leader-2004 Real Choice Systems Change Grant, Office of the Secretary at the NC Dept. of Health and Human Services
Transportation Planner I/II (Travel Demand Modeling), City of Durham, North Carolina
Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) – multiple positions
Senior Transportation Planning Engineer, Community Planner, Earth Tech
Research Associate II (R02), The Urban Institute

Full details and more jobs

Listserv modifications
Due to some of the problems we've experience with the listserv (viruses and incorrect postings), I have changed some
of the listserv settings to prevent listserv members from being able to post messages to the listserv. This was done with
the hope of minimizing extraneous email submissions.

We want the listserv to serve as a positive means for distributing information to DCRP alumni. One way to ensure this
is for all messages to be created or forwarded by the list moderator. If there is a message you would like to send to the
alumni, feel free to send it to me and I will post it on the listserv for everyone to see. Sorry to constrain this resource in
this way: we want to minimize the inconvenience and confusion extra email messages can cause.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

Best,
Udo
udo@unc.edu
919-942-4782