Scenario Planning for Post-Disaster Contexts

Planning after an unexpected contextual condition, or a natural disaster, requires content and process readjustments till the environmental, demographic, and physical contexts stabilize. Planning as an evidence-based discipline suffers from data fluidity after any unexpected contextual change making the comprehensive planning model unfit to the many uncertainties. The short-term objective for postdisaster is to save lives and restore basic community functions, it requires a segmented decision-making process that uses fragmented data, and not necessarily involving all the stakeholders because of the time limitations. The first response stage to uncertain contextual occurrences, especially in post disaster conditions, is at best incremental and short-term. To the contrary of that, long-term comprehensive plans require a unified decision-making process involving all the stakeholders based on better data availability after the initial fast thinking stage. This paper's enquiry is about the appropriate planning processes for post-disaster contexts, with the goal of exploring the planning concepts, processes, and data needs in uncertain planning conditions. Post-disaster planning visions will be explored so that they are not limited to recovery or bounce back to the old plans, but rather consider new future visions to accommodate the changing contextual conditions. The paper discusses scenario planning, incremental planning, muddling through and similar planning concepts for visionary futures. It discusses the creation of theoretical frameworks for innovative community engagement in urban planning. The paper concludes with recommendations on planning for uncertainties that consider the city as a nested system, where each system has its own objectives and processes for being resilient