Avoiding Atlantis: Protecting Urban Cultural Heritage from Disaster

Abstract

Mankind's incredible capacity to predict and track natural disasters far outstrips current policies in place to deal with them. There is an urgent need for practical legal tools and policies that are both effective and fiscally viable. Far too often, legal avenues available to communities recovering from a catastrophic event are clogged with the detritus of myopic planning and stale policies, providing inadequate mechanisms for efficiently expediting actions required to stabilize vulnerable cultural heritage resources. This article identifies three areas that comprise some common programmatic deficiencies encountered in disaster planning and recovery with respect to preserving urban historic resources, and outlines how urban policy makers might enact powerful, positive change: (1) Historic Resource Inventories; (2) Adaptation; (3) Streamlined Legal Review Processes.

Keywords: cultural heritage, disaster, preservation, urban, cities, policy, atlantis, catastrophe, heritage