Campanella Media

(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

Leaf from an American
elm on the UNC campus.

loved to death
by Neil Caudle
endeavors

Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm.
By Thomas J. Campanella. Yale University Press, 272 pages, $35.

For generations, the American elm cast a spell over New England. In town after town, civic groups planted elms by the
thousands, and the trees grew tall and strong, shading streets and town centers under soaring canopies of green.

Old East Two views of the same elm tree in front of Old East Hall on the
Carolina campus. Top: early 1900s. Bottom: 2003.

Thomas Campanella, assistant professor of city and regional
planning, tells the story of how elms transplanted from swamps
during the Colonial period took root in public squares and spread
their branches over historical events.

When environmental idealism swept the region during the nineteenth
century, the elm claimed a leading role in urban planning and design.
Architecture "deferred" to the elms, which veiled and flattered buildings,
concealing their flaws. The region's reformers embraced the elm as
an emblem of well-being, a means for reversing the spiritual poverty of
urban life. Yankee ideals of rectitude and order found inspiration in the
uplifting influence of elms.

But the elm, a loner by nature, could not survive its own prosperity.
During the 1930s, a fungal agent imported in foreign logs hitched a
ride with the tiny elm leaf beetle, which rapidly spread disease from
tree to tree throughout New England. In the span of one generation,
Dutch elm disease stripped away the canopies and exposed Yankee
towns to the glare of the sun. Today, disease-resistant varieties of
the tree have made a modest comeback, but the days when elms
lined the streets are probably gone forever.

"The ubiquity of the elm was its downfall," Campanella writes. "The tree was loved to death."

(click on image to enlarge)

New East Elm
New East recently gained a new leafy neighbor, a sapling American
elm planted in front of the building's Cameron Street façade. The elm
is a specially selected "502" clone from the "American Liberty" series
developed in New Hampshire by the Elm Research Institute, and has
proven resistance to Dutch elm disease. The tree was donated to DCRP
by Bruce Carley, an elm expert in Acton, Massachusetts who has been
working to bring the much-missed tree back to America's streets and parks.

Carley maintains a comprehensive Web site on the tree, and was featured
in Tom Campanella's recent history of the elm, Republic of Shade (Yale, 2003).

DCRP Students Win Town of Hillsborough Design Competition

DCRP students dominated a recent urban design competition for the Churton Street corridor in nearby
Hillsborough, NC. As part of Assistant Professor Tom Campanella's "Theory and Principles of Urban
Design" class, five student teams submitted competition entries and presented their work to a jury of
community leaders. A variety of streetscape design components were proposed to enhance the identity
and image of Hillsborough and to improve traffic flow and pedestrian movement. The Hillsborough Tourism
Board, which sponsored the competition along with the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, now plans to
develop a Churton Street Corridor Improvement Plan based on the student schemes.

The winning plans were featured in the Durham Herald, and will be on exhibit at the Orange County
Library in Hillsborough. Hillsborough is among North Carolina's most historic towns, laid out in 1754 by
William Churton on land where the Great Indian Trading Path crossed the Eno River.

Campanella's Shade Shines
Boston Globe named Thomas Campanella book’s --Republic of Shade:
New England and the American Elm -- one of the "nine best nonfiction titles
of the year."

This was in a feature piece by Michael Kenney entitled "2003: A Road Map to
the Best," which covered both fiction and non-fiction. The article appeared in
the Sunday Globe book section on December 7th.

Boston Sunday Globe
2003: A road map to the best - nonfiction
By Michael Kenney, 12/7/2003
Thomas J. Campanella explored New England's main streets to chronicle, in ''Republic of Shade," the rise
and fall of the iconic American elm. The story is told with authority and charm. The elms, Campanella
writes, were ''a fragment of wild nature" that, planted along city streets, ''formed the most expansive urban
forest ever planted" -- and defined New Eng land well into the last century.

Michael Kenney regularly reviews for the Globe.