2016 UIUC-NTU-NTU Plus Co-studio
Integrated Post-disaster Planning: Livelihood, Environment, Social Resilience

Leading instructors:
Robert Olshansky, Professor and Head of Urban and Regional Planning (UIUC)
Shu-Mei Huang, PhD, Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Building and Planning (NTU)

本課程為跨國合作規劃實習課程，台大建築與城鄉研究所與美國伊利諾大學都市計畫系合作（系主任Robert Olshansky老師及該學院學生），以屏東裡納禮為學習基地，在五月下旬至六月初進行移地教學（5/22-6/3）。

課程簡述：
Today people have come to learn that people have to live with disasters. Moreover, disaster is a long-term social-spatial process rather than a temporary event. What is ignored is that vulnerability of the place and people being affected by a particular disaster has had accumulated before the disastrous event. After the disaster, a number of issues would gradually surface in the course of recovery and it usually take more time than expected to get everything back on track. Public attention focuses on short-term relief while long-term post-disaster planning does not attract as much attention as necessary. Through the planning studio cooperated by the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University (NTU) and the Department of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign(UIUC), we are looking forward to building up a cross-border, interdisciplinary learning model to advance teaching and research about post-disaster planning.

The studio focuses on advancing towards an integrated post-disaster planning framework that links together issues of livelihood, environment, and social resilience. In particular, it pays attention to how place-based indigenous communities strive to maintain their cultural identity in relation to their inhabitance and collective use of the natural resource base in the context of post-disaster recovery. Relocation, in the name of modernization and safety, has occurred to the indigenous communities over the past century. In many cases, relocation is seen as a necessary measure to improve the people’s livelihood. Thus, how to cope with displacement becomes a lasting issue that challenges the indigenous victims of disasters. What is largely ignored is the issue of livelihood and social resilience that could not be satisfied by simply providing rehousing. The lack of linkage between the rehousing plan and their ancestral territories posed fundamental challenges to the indigenous communities. It is then another task to create conditions to enable the displaced communities to participate in placemaking in their new environment and to sustain a kind of meaningful linkage with their former settlements. Other than the issue of displacement, a few substantial issues to address are listed in the following:

• Finding new funding source in the face of a withdrawal of public investment
• Aging population and outmigration
• A lack of land to support community-based economic activities, such as farming
• Uncertain plans to reutilize the former settlements and the ancestral territories

Despite all the challenges listed, placemaking in displacement may turn crisis into critical opportunities for the impacted communities to recover the disappearing commons in coping with issues of ecological democracy, food autonomy, alternative economics, cross-culture communication, etc. creative practices can bring together people across ethnicities to reclaim their ownership to the new places. The studio attempts at having the students exploring alternative ways to cope with displacement through placemaking with the communities.