Planning and designing public open spaces as a strategy for disaster resilient cities : a review of literature

Abstract

Public open spaces are often used as a mode to make cities sustainable from all its three counts; economic, environmental and social. Most of contemporary urban planners, designers, and landscape architects use the public open spaces as a mode to increase the urban quality of life, improve aesthetic attractiveness, improve the environmental health, growth of economy, and to increase the walkability, liveability and vitality of a city which direct towards the sustainability. However, sustainable development should also encompass the enhancements of disaster resilience. Yet, the use of public open spaces as a strategy for disaster resilience, still remains largely unrehearsed when planning and designing sustainable cities. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to emphasize the need of planning and designing public open spaces with a focus on disaster resilience; as an agent of recovery, to provide essential life support, as a primary place to rescue and for shelters and potential for adaptive response. Further, this ongoing research study analyses the current literature and presents the significance of combination of disaster management strategies with urban planning and designing strategies in order to make cities resilience to disasters. Finally, the analysis suggests a framework to plan and design public open spaces for sustainable disaster resilience cities, proposing set of concepts; loose space concept, Urban Sponge Park, Network of Open Spaces, which can be potentially used when planning and designing public open spaces for disaster resilient cities.