A professor and three Ph.D. students in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University recently earned the Journal of the American Planning Association’s 2007 Best Article/Best Paper Award for an article they co-authored examining the financial impact of flooding in Florida.
The JAPA 2007 Best Paper award went to co-authors Samuel Brody, associate professor of urban planning, Sammy Zahran, a sociologist on the Colorado State University faculty, Praveen Maghelal, a 2007 graduate of Texas A&M’s Urban and Regional Science Ph.D. program, and two current students in the program, Himanshu Grover and Wesley E. Highfield.
Their paper, “The Rising Costs of Floods: Examining the Impact of Planning and Development Decisions on Property Damage in Florida,” was published in June 2007.
“The article will become a classic in the hazard mitigation literature”, JAPA editors wrote in their award announcement, because it provides rigorous scientific proof that natural hazard losses are largely the result of decisions about how human settlements are built, a view long held by planners.
“This shows that collaborative research efforts really do produce stellar products,” said Brody, about receiving the JAPA honor. “I could not have done this paper by myself. It was a synergistic effort that we’re real proud of and it’s nice to be recognized.”
In the paper, Brody and his associates tested a thesis stated by Dennis S. Mileti in his 1999 book “Disasters by Design.” Mileti said that disasters do not simply happen, but largely result from the design and construction of human communities. The thesis was tested with a quantitative model that isolated the effects of specific built environmental characteristics on flood damage.
The journal lauded the authors for demonstrating through research that “land use planning is often a better technique for mitigating floods than building expensive and disruptive dams and levees.” The journal also praised the authors finding, that “allowing a development to destroy a wetland imposes a real, measurable flood cost on the community.”
JAPA’s best paper is selected annually by the journal’s editorial advisory board. The award recognizes an article that makes a significant, original contribution on a topic of interest to the planning profession, has the potential to challenge and change the way the planning community conceives a problem and the scope of possible solutions, and other considerations.
Further details regarding the significance of the paper chosen for the 2007 honor were cited in the JAPA announcement reprinted below.
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The Rising Costs of Floods: Examining the Impact of Planning
and Development Decisions on Property Damage in Florida
by Samuel D. Brody, Sammy Zahran, Praveen Maghelal, Himanshu Grover, and Wesley E. Highfield
Citation: Samuel D. Brody, S. D., Zahran, S., Maghelal, P., Grover, H. & Highfield, W. E. (2007). Journal of the American Planning Association, 73(3), 330-345.
This article reports important research results, convincingly demonstrating that flood losses are a function of where and how we build urban settlements, not just an inevitable byproduct of population growth and increased building costs.” It shows that how we locate and design new development, especially how we handle the conversion of wetlands, is a key factor in determining the amount of flood damage that will result from a storm of a given size. The authors provide strong quantitative evidence that disasters are designed. Planners have long held that natural hazard losses are largely the result of decisions about how we build human settlements. This article provides rigorous scientific proof that this is the case, and will become a classic in the hazard mitigation literature.
This research combines several administrative datasets with state-of-the-art remote sensing techniques to thoroughly investigate this challenging problem. It demonstrates that land use planning is often a better technique for mitigating floods than building expensive and disruptive dams and levees. The article also emphasizes that, in addition to their well known environmental functions, wetlands are important in flood hazard mitigation. Allowing a development to destroy a wetland imposes a real, measurable flood cost on the community, and the article estimates this amount. This is valuable information for communities as they consider permitting wetland conversion. This article deserves the 2007 JAPA best paper award because it successfully links outstanding analysis to meaningful policy implications for planners.
