Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Disasters & Disaster Relief

After the vast destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans faces a rare chance to rebuild, with an unprecedented opportunity to plan what gets built. As the city's director of planning from 1992 until 2000, Kristina Ford is uniquely placed to use these opportunities as a springboard for an eye-opening discussion of the intransigent problems and promising possibilities facing city planners across the nation and beyond.

In The Trouble with City Planning, Ford argues that almost no part of our usual understanding of the phrase "city planning" is accurate: not our conception...

The world is full of wonderful products and services that occasionally disappoint and even harm us. "Unexpected Consequences: Why The Things We Trust Fail" explores the reasons these failures occur, examining them from technological, human, and organizational perspectives. Using more than 40 recent catastrophic events to illustrate its points, the book discusses structural and machine failure, but also the often-overlooked failure of people and of systems related to such things as information technology, healthcare, and security.

As the book demonstrates, faulty technology played a...

"The Wenchuan Earthquake of 2008: Anatomy of a Disaster" gives a detailed account of the damage, seismology and tectonics of the event and discusses earthquake prediction, seismic hazard and risk management, the creation and implementation of building codes, and new practices used in rescue, relief and reconstruction. It will be of significant interest to researchers and practitioners engaged in seismology, geophysics, engineering, the social sciences, and disaster management and recovery. It also offers a valuable new and unique Chinese perspective with many insights for future mitigation...

Combining the experiences of ordinary people with urban politics and history, "Saving San Francisco" challenges the long-lived myth that the 1906 disaster erased social differences as it leveled the city. Highlighting new evidence from San FranciscoOCOs relief camps, Andrea Rees Davies shows that as policy makers directed various forms of aid to groups and projects that enjoyed high social status before the disaster, the widespread need and dislocation created opportunities for some groups to challenge biased relief policy. Poor and working-class refugees organized successful protests,...

As Hurricane Katrina vividly revealed, disaster policy in the United States is broken and needs reform. What can we learn from past disasters--storms, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, and wildfires--about preparing for and responding to future catastrophes? How can these lessons be applied in a future threatened by climate change?

In this bold contribution to environmental law, Robert Verchick argues for a new perspective on disaster law that is based on the principles of environmental protection. His prescription boils down to three simple commands: Go Green, Be Fair, and...

On the day after Christmas in 1811, the state of Virginia lost its governor and almost one hundred citizens in a devastating nighttime fire that consumed a Richmond playhouse. During the second act of a melodramatic tale of bandits, ghosts, and murder, a small fire kindled behind the backdrop. Within minutes, it raced to the ceiling timbers and enveloped the audience in flames. The tragic Richmond Theater fire would inspire a national commemoration and become its generation's defining disaster.

A vibrant and bustling city, Richmond was synonymous with horse races, gambling, and...

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing eleven workers and creating the largest oil spill in the history of U.S. offshore drilling. But this wasn't the first time British Petroleum and its cost-cutting practices destroyed parts of the natural world. It also was not the first time that BP's negligence resulted in the loss of human life, ruined family businesses, or shattered dreams. From Alaska to Kansas to the Gulf, journalist Mike Magner has been tracking BP's reckless path for years, and in Poisoned Legacy he focuses, for the first time, on the...