Natural (and Unnatural) Disasters w/ Tanvi Misra

This week we have a special episode on the incredible storm surging through Houston this weekend, Hurricane Harvey. With our guest, Tanvi Misra, author of the CityLab article The Vulnerable Communities in Harvey’s Path, Mapped, we discuss the issues that disadvantaged populations face not only in times of environmental crisis but every day in our cities.

As per Tanvi’s suggestions, we’re linking to an excellent thread on Twitter by Jia Tolentino that includes a list of local organizations she suggests supporting. Beyond that we can only ask ourselves, how do we consider compassion when planning our cities? Why does it take the worst case scenario to raise awareness of our citizens’ plights? What do we lose when we refuse to plan ahead, for hurricanes or others’ daily struggles? 

If you like these conversations and advocating for human-scale cities, you can donate to our efforts on our Patreon page at www.patreon.com/thirdwaveurbanism. Thank you to our supporters, and thank you all for listening, sharing, and doing what you do!

As always, you can keep up with our thoughts and send us your comments on Twitter or Instagram: 

Katrina can be found at @think_katrina

Kristen can be found at @blackurbanist

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Articles referenced in this episode:

Main article from CityLab: https://www.citylab.com/environment/2017/08/the-vulnerable-populations-in-harveys-path-mapped/538071/

ProPublica article on Houston’s preparedness: https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/harvey

The Urban Edge on zoning in Houston: https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-houston-really-does-have-zoning-sort-of/?sbe-widgetadd=true#.WaTUMZOGO1v

An excellent current summary of events from Vox: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/24/16198030/hurricane-harvey-2017-texas-gulf-corpus-christi-galveston-houston

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Intro and closing music is “Urban Life” by Gustavs Strazdin used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode