Projections 4: Responding to Disaster
Projections, the Journal of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, focuses on the most innovative and cutting edge research in planning. Each volume is devoted to a different topic of interest to planning scholars, students, and professionals. As a peer-reviewed publication, Projections welcomes original high quality submissions at the vanguard of planning theory and practice.
In a world of real and imagined danger in which we find ourselves, the process of trauma, recovery and remembrance has taken on new significance. While we do not address the events of September 11th 2001 directly, this volume of Projections certainly has its genesis in the struggle we have faced to rebuild, personally and professionally, in the months and years following that tragic morning. For me, the struggle to
cope with disaster recovery began earlier, following my visit to Sarajevo in 2000 where I was part of a group re-designing the government center after its 1992-95 siege. Five years after the war ended, the scars of conflict were immediately present: buildings toppled, areas land mined, growing squatter settlements and thousands of simple white sticks dotting the landscape, marking the resting place of the city's defenders.