Buildings and Cities have issued a call for papers on the ‘Complexity of Disaster Reconstruction’.
Deadline for abstracts: 24 March 2025 (noon GMT)
How can the complexity and challenges of physical territorial reconstruction (after disasters) across diverse disciplines, stakeholders and governance be organised and synthesised?
Do current debates and practices on physical territorial reconstruction (i.e. urban and rural built environments after destruction by hazardous natural disasters, warfare, conflict or industrial accidents) reflect the scope required to address the whole range of complex issues? Does the inherent complexity of the task cause the fragmentation of scholarship and knowledge into an array of disciplines and issues that must be partial in order to remain governable? Is there a need for a theory capable of composing and giving operational coherence and strength to separate efforts? Is there value in rethinking how knowledge can be managed?
Aims and scope
The aim of this special issue is to probe the socio-technical, conceptual and organisational processes underlying physical reconstruction after disasters. The focus is on the integration of diverse knowledge domains in planning processes concerned with the reconstruction of damaged or destroyed urban and rural territories. Whilst recognizing the wealth of analyses and experiences focusing on distinct aspects of physical reconstruction, this special issue will explore the ability of different conceptual dimensions to be brought to inform one another, within a systemic view of the entire endeavour. By emphasizing disciplinary and methodological differences between contiguous efforts that might be better functionally connected, the special issue seeks to expose the complexity of physical rebuilding and social recovery processes whilst highlighting areas, gaps or links in need of scholarly or specialist attention.
This special issue has five strategic objectives:
1. to elucidate the epistemological and socio-technical complexity of reconstruction efforts
2. to explore the political dimensions of dealing with the same problem at different scales
3. to address the practical challenges of exploiting multi-disciplinarity within a landscape defined by advanced specialisation and knowledge fragmentation
4. to reflect on the transferability of lessons typically characterised by intrinsically idiosyncratic experiences
5. to discuss the role of theory in reconstruction studies and practice, as well as its relationship with data collation.
Potential topics
Potential topics cover a range of issues :
- Role of history in reconstruction studies
- Definition of the ‘heritage’ in reconstruction
- Future resilience
- Reconstruction and the evolution of social structures
- Opportunism in reconstruction
- Priority actions
- Decision-making geographies
- Understandings from case studies
- Constants of reconstruction
- Determinants of specificity
- Bounded rationality
- Effects of uncertainty
- Methods of comparative analysis
- Conceptual categories in reconstruction
- Trans-scalar challenges
- Timescales
- Reconstruction and computation
- Role of mitigation policies in reconstruction
- Planning autarchy
- Knowledge and technology barriers
Full details: https://www.buildingsandcities.org/calls-for-papers/complexity-disaster-reconstruction.html
