Designing to Heal: Planning and Urban Design Response to Disaster and Conflict

survivors to help them facilitate changes on the ground and in people’s hearts and

minds. It seeks to foster the optimal circumstances to generate and sustain hope in

communities affected by disasters and ensure places are ‘hard wired’ to be

responsive to the process of recovery. This book does not claim to provide a

definitive way of guaranteeing that a community’s path to recovery will be made

smooth. Rather it seeks to provide a pair of spectacles through which disasters can

be looked at and plans generated with the survivors to help them create human

habitat – the optimal conditions for people to thrive.