Building Resilient Communities Through Conservation

Pandemics, climate change, natural disasters, inequity, the perils of urbanization: cities worldwide are working to build resilience against a steady stream of existential threats. Resilience planning may include protecting historic places, but it typically overlooks the role of heritage conservation in helping communities prepare for, and recover from, the hazards they face. How does telling a community’s full story make it more resilient? Who should be at the table to make sure resilience plans include places that define and unite neighborhoods? Recent graduate Kelsey Kaline Neighbors shares these and other insights from her master’s thesis, Mobilizing Heritage Conservation as a Tool for Urban Resilience.

Kelsey Kaline Neighbors is a Historic Preservation Specialist and Architectural Historian at IS Architecture in San Diego, California. With a background in community development and sustainability, she is interested in how heritage conservation can be deployed as a tool for fostering equitable, healthy, and resilient places for everyone. She has a degree in Sustainable Development from Vanderbilt University and both a Master of Heritage Conservation degree from the USC School of Architecture and a Master of Planning  degree from the USC Price School of Public Policy.

Our producer Willa Seidenberg interviewed Kelsey last year a few months after Kelsey finished her thesis. Not only is she a long-time professor of radio journalism for the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, but she is also earning her Master’s degree in Heritage Conservation.

Podcast Breakdown

• • • [02:43] What is urban resilience?
    • [10:16] Role of community and “traditional knowledge”
    • [13:44] Los Angeles’ resilience planning effort
    • [21:19] What can we do?

Want to know more about some of the ideas and places mentioned in this episode? Check out:

Thesis: Mobilizing Heritage Conservation as a Tool for Urban Resilience: Linkages and Recommendations by Kelsey Kaline Neighbors

Resilient Cities Network

(Los Angeles) Mayor’s Office of Resilience

Resilient Los Angeles report (pdf)

Resilient Cities Catalyst

World Bank: Resilient Cities

Heritage and Resilience:

ICCROM and Resilience

Climate Heritage Network

Episode Credits on About page