Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency and magnitude of coastal storms around the globe, and the anticipated rise of sea levels will have enormous impact on fragile and vulnerable coastal regions. In the U.S., more than 50% of the population inhabits coastal areas. In Planning for Coastal Resilience, Tim Beatley argues that, in the face of such threats, all future coastal planning and management must reflect a commitment to the concept of resilience. In this timely book, he writes that coastal resilience must become the primary design and planning principle to guide all future development and all future infrastructure decisions.

Resilience, Beatley explains, is a profoundly new way of viewing coastal infrastructure—an approach that values smaller, decentralized kinds of energy, water, and transport more suited to the serious physical conditions coastal communities will likely face. Implicit in the notion is an emphasis on taking steps to build adaptive capacity, to be ready ahead of a crisis or disaster. It is anticipatory, conscious, and intentional in its outlook.

After defining and explaining coastal resilience, Beatley focuses on what it means in practice. Resilience goes beyond reactive steps to prevent or handle a disaster. It takes a holistic approach to what makes a community resilient, including such factors as social capital and sense of place. Beatley provides case studies of five U.S. coastal communities, and “resilience profiles” of six North American communities, to suggest best practices and to propose guidelines for increasing resilience in threatened communities.

“Sprawl” is one of the ugliest words in the American political lexicon. Virtually no one wants America’s rural landscapes, farmland, and natural areas to be lost to bland, placeless malls, freeways, and subdivisions. Yet few of America’s fast-growing rural areas have effective rules to limit or contain sprawl.

Oregon is one of the nation’s most celebrated exceptions. In the early 1970s Oregon established the nation’s first and only comprehensive statewide system of land-use planning and largely succeeded in confining residential and commercial growth to urban areas while preserving the state’s rural farmland, forests, and natural areas. Despite repeated political attacks, the state’s planning system remained essentially politically unscathed for three decades. In the early- and mid-2000s, however, the Oregon public appeared disenchanted, voting repeatedly in favor of statewide ballot initiatives that undermined the ability of the state to regulate growth. One of America’s most celebrated “success stories” in the war against sprawl appeared to crumble, inspiring property rights activists in numerous other western states to launch copycat ballot initiatives against land-use regulation.

This is the first book to tell the story of Oregon’s unique land-use planning system from its rise in the early 1970s to its near-death experience in the first decade of the 2000s. Using participant observation and extensive original interviews with key figures on both sides of the state’s land use wars past and present, this book examines the question of how and why a planning system that was once the nation’s most visible and successful example of a comprehensive regulatory approach to preventing runaway sprawl nearly collapsed.

Planning Paradise is tough love for Oregon planning. While admiring much of what the state’s planning system has accomplished, Walker and Hurley believe that scholars, professionals, activists, and citizens engaged in the battle against sprawl would be well advised to think long and deeply about the lessons that the recent struggles of one of America’s most celebrated planning systems may hold for the future of land-use planning in Oregon and beyond.

Given the realities of climate change and sea-level rise, coastal cities around the world are struggling with questions of resilience.  Resilience, at its core, is about desirable states of the urban social-ecological system and understanding how to sustain those states in an uncertain and tumultuous future. How do physical conditions, ecological processes, social objectives, human politics, and history shape the prospects for resilience?  Most books set out “the answer.”  This book sets out a process of grappling with holistic resilience from multiple perspectives, drawing on the insights and experiences of more than fifty scholars and practitioners working together to make Jamaica Bay in New York City an example for the world.

Prospects for Resilience establishes a framework for understanding resilience practice in urban watersheds. Using Jamaica Bay—the largest contiguous natural area in New York, home to millions of New Yorkers, and a hub of global air travel with John F. Kennedy International Airport—the authors demonstrate how various components of social-ecological systems interact, ranging from climatic factors to plant populations to human demographics. They also highlight essential tools for creating resilient watersheds, including monitoring and identifying system indicators; computer modeling; green infrastructure; and decision science methods. Finally, they look at the role and importance of a “boundary organization” like the new Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay in coordinating and facilitating resilience work, and consider significant research questions and prospects for the future of urban watersheds.

Prospects for Resilience sets forth an essential foundation of information and advice for researchers, urban planners, students and others who need to create more resilient cities that work with, not against, nature.