Adaptation, Resilience & Hyperlocal Decision-Making in New England

Content

The Department of Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning's Zube Lecture Series gathers educators, researchers, and practitioners from around the world to give weekly talks on major topics in the fields of landscape architecture, planning, and sustainable community development. 

Vermont and other New England states are leaders in adopting state policy to reduce climate pollution while experiencing extreme heat, floods, drought, landslides, wildland fire, destructive winter storms, habitat-altering invasive species, and other hazards exacerbated by a warming climate. Each of these risks pose their own hazards, but flooding and fluvial erosion are threatening the livability and, in cases, continued existence of historic settlements around which civic, economic, and social life have revolved since the 1600s.  Each state is also experiencing a profound housing affordability and availability crisis.  The implications for land use planning and implementation, which in New England are done at a hyperlocal municipal level across several hundred units of government, are profound.  Is this governance structure that was born of colonization up to the task of planning and acting for the future?  Are disasters pointing to a functional, and existential, need for greater intermunicipal cooperation and regionalization? 

Zube Lectures are held every Thursday at 4:00 p.m. ET (unless otherwise noted) in the John W. Olver Design Building Lecture Hall (Room 170) at 551 North Pleasant St, Amherst, MA 01002. Lecture recordings are posted to UMass LARP - YouTube approximately 1 week following the event.

About the Speaker

Chris Campany is Executive Director of the Windham Regional Commission based in Brattleboro, Vermont, which serves 27 towns in Southeastern Vermont. Among the state's 11 regional planning commissions he is the lead on emergency management, mitigation, and disaster response and recovery, as well as conservation. He was previously Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Graduate Program Coordinator at Mississippi State University; Deputy Director of Planning and Zoning for Calvert County, Maryland; Deputy Commissioner of Planning for Orange County, New York; Federal Policy Coordinator for the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture; founder and Executive Director of the Baton Rouge Economic and Agricultural Development Alliance; and a Presidential Management Intern with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC.  Chris holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a Master of Public Policy and Administration from Mississippi State University, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from Louisiana State University.