How smart cities are being reinvented after natural disasters
In this age of megastorms, visionary designers around the world are taking clever advantage of the chance to rethink what they rebuild. Here’s how the smartest places are finding surprising opportunities in the aftermath of devastation.
Three hours before dawn on February 6, 2023, a 29-year-old pastrymaker named Nuri Imren woke to the sound of his sister screaming. His family’s high-rise apartment in the Turkish city of Antakya was shaking violently—first from side to side, then up and down. A heavy wardrobe fell on his sister, pinning her under it and breaking her arm and shoulder. Imren, an amateur weight lifter, hurried into her room and raised the top of the wardrobe, resting it on his knees. A minute later, the shaking stopped and he was able to pull his sister free and usher her and their parents down 10 flights of stairs to the street. It was cold and dark outside, and a light rain was falling. All over the city, power was out. The darkness made it impossible to understand the devastation, but many of the eight- and nine-story apartment buildings around them had tipped, shifted, and collapsed. “We weren’t conscious of the cold, we were in too much shock,” Imren says. He found a truck parked alongside the road and helped his family climb up into it for shelter.
The Imrens were far luckier than many. When dawn broke, the scale of the disaster became apparent: A magnitude 7.8 earthquake had reduced much of Antakya to piles of rubble and twisted rebar. Though the city was in a known fault zone, shoddy engineering and poor construction quality had left many buildings vulnerable. Few people in the collapsed structures managed to escape. Within the space of 85 seconds, thousands died, including Imren’s girlfriend and his uncle, together with his family of eight. Imren’s apartment building, which survived the early morning quake and another that followed hours later, was so badly damaged that it was later blown up in a controlled demolition. For 50 days, he lived in his shop in the bazaar, the city’s traditional marketplace in the old quarter, before it too was demolished.
I meet Imren on a hot, sunny September afternoon two and a half years after the quakes, inside the temporary prefab structure that his shop will occupy until a permanent one can be built. It’s on the edge of the old quarter, just steps from the city’s central bridge over the Asi (Orontes) River. He’s at work making a künefe, a pizza-shaped confection comprised of finely chopped filo dough, cheese, and pistachios. Outside, a forest of tall cranes swirls over a vast and dusty construction site that stretches for hundreds of yards in every direction, as an army of workers races to complete a reenvisioned city center for Antakya’s displaced survivors.
The scale of the devastation that struck Antakya and the trauma it inflicted are almost incomprehensible. But so is the level of ambition that has been unleashed. The reconstruction is being carried out in an innovative way, guided by a vision that was formulated during a period of intense consultation with the city’s residents and with leading local and international architecture firms. The resulting master plan, overseen by the U.K. firm Foster + Partners, proposes a new version of the ancient city that not only incorporates the best of the previous version—the bazaars, the shops, the vibrant street life, and the intimacy of its residential neighborhoods—but also finds numerous ways to improve it.
Buildings will be lower—a maximum of three stories high in the historic core and five to six stories in the modern city center—in order to open sight lines to the river and mountains. Green space will be expanded, especially along the quake-vulnerable riverbanks, and walking and biking paths will be added. Apartments will be organized around courtyards, and sidewalks will be widened to encourage neighborhood interaction. Building foundations will rest atop thick slabs of concrete on piles that will serve as rafts in case future earthquakes cause the soil to liquefy. All in all, the rebuilt Antakya will be more resilient against earthquakes and more pleasant to live in.
Antakya isn’t the only place where this kind of optimistic vision is playing out. Around the world, a growing movement of architects and urban planners is promoting the idea that natural disasters like earthquakes, wildfires, and tsunamis, while tragic, can present an opportunity to rethink what the best version of a city might look like. And the urgency is greater than ever, at a moment when climate change is increasing both the frequency and severity of hurricanes and other weather calamities, which in turn intensifies the impact, both human and financial. At the same time, swelling populations in Africa and Asia mean that billions more people will be streaming into cities with aging infrastructure. For centuries, disasters like the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the 1906 Great Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco have shown that tragedy can reveal a city’s critical design flaws; today the potential vulnerabilities are considerably more complex than our ancestors could have imagined. But if done properly, rebuilding in the aftermath of a catastrophe can result in a human environment that is safer, more equitable, and more environmentally friendly.
“When you’re left with a blank canvas, you can reimagine things,” says Jeremy Alain Siegel, an associate at the international architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), which consulted on the Antakya project. “You can turn a crisis into an opportunity.”
To be clear, none of this is easy. A vibrant city is a living thing, the product of millions of daily spontaneous personal interactions between neighbors, between family and friends, between merchants and customers, between civil servants and citizens. “What is a city but the people?” says Cem Yılmaz, an Istanbul-based urban planner whose firm, KEYM, mapped the layout in the central district of Antakya. “It’s not the buildings; they are nothing. The people are the memory. All of the people you loved or talked to, all the food that you eat. Everything there has a meaning to you.”
Sale Extended - Save up to $20!
Yılmaz’s team researched property records to map who lived where, so that residents could be given homes close to their original location and people who were neighbors might become neighbors again. “We want to nurture that human relation, so that the chain of connection won’t be broken,” he says.
In his shop, Imren serves me a slice of the freshly made künefe and offers me a coffee in the local style, in an hourglass-shaped glass with no handle. Then he walks with me a hundred yards—dodging piles of debris, bags of cement, and the clanking treads of a backhoe—to show me where his shop was before the quake. Beyond a swath of welded rebar stands a dusty plane tree that spreads its branches over an ancient-looking roofed well and a newly rebuilt mosque. “I grew up under that tree,” Imren says. His grandfather sold clothing in the bazaar there, and later his father sold shoes. Imren was raised, he says, by all the shopkeepers and their friends and family members. According to Antakya’s master plan, the bazaar will be rebuilt, but Imren hasn’t yet received confirmation that his old space will be reallotted to him. “The only thing I hope for out of life is that shop,” he says. “That is everything, to open that shop. It’s where I belong.”
It seems obvious that any successful attempt to rethink a city is going to have to address the needs, desires, and customs of its people, but architects and urban planners are often trained to think more about buildings and infrastructure than the people who will inhabit and use them. The pitfalls of overlooking the human dimension can be seen along the eastern coast of Honshu, the main island of Japan, which was devastated by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake—the fourth largest ever recorded—on March 11, 2011, commonly known as the Great East Japan Earthquake. Even worse damage was caused by the ensuing tsunami, which sent a 130-foot-high surge of seawater onto the coast, sweeping away whole neighborhoods and claiming some 20,000 lives.
In the aftermath, the government-led reconstruction effort prioritized fortifying this area of Honshu against future tsunamis. In an effort that ranks as one of the most expensive civil engineering projects in modern history, $12 billion was spent building a vast system of seawalls that stand up to 50 feet high and stretch along 270 miles of coastline. In cities like Rikuzentakata, where 1,700 people died and 80 percent of the buildings were destroyed, massive amounts of earth were shifted to raise the rebuilt city by 33 feet. “From the government’s perspective, the overall effort was quite successful, as they completed most of the construction of new structures within their 10-year plan,” says Anawat Suppasri, a tsunami researcher at Tohoku University who was living in the affected area when the disaster struck.
The tsunami wasn’t the only problem the region faced. As a rural part of a country in long-term demographic decline, northern Honshu—historically referred to as the Tohoku region—had been losing young people to urban centers for years. Officials hoped that the attention brought to the area by the disaster would spur tourism, and poured millions of dollars into facilities like the Takatamatsubara Tsunami Reconstruction Memorial Park, which includes a museum devoted to the tragedy and to subsequent recovery efforts. In the interest of broadening the economic base, the government also invested in other industries, including a multibillion-dollar initiative called the Fukushima Innovation Coast Framework that has helped fund solar power installations, wind farms, hydrogen energy research, and agriculture.
But the Japanese government didn’t fully engage the public in the rebuilding process, says Italian geographer Annaclaudia Martini of the University of Bologna, who has studied the rebuilding since 2014. One village council member told her that the consultation meetings were all scheduled for times when young people were in school and fishermen were working. As a result, locals never fully bought into the plans. Fishermen, for instance, hated the seawall that isolated them from their livelihood. “Local participation tended to be more sort of a box-ticking than really involving the people,” Martini says. Worse, little effort was made to keep communities intact after the rebuilding. As the government completed new housing units, it distributed them by lottery in the interest of fairness. “That does not take into consideration that people were living in neighborhoods, that they had friends, that they lived close to certain people,” Martini says.
Many residents were over 60 and wound up living in different districts than their former neighbors. “It destroyed social ties,” she says.
The recovery from this major disaster has widely been seen as a missed opportunity. The place had been restored, but not in a way that encouraged people to return. It doesn’t have to be that way. With a little creativity, and a lot of public engagement, delightful things can happen.
On a sultry afternoon in late summer, I find myself strolling through John V. Lindsay East River Park, on the banks of New York City’s East River in lower Manhattan. It’s a place I once knew well. A few decades ago, I lived on the Brooklyn side of the river, and played tennis here often. But today the park looks different. What had previously been a flat, utilitarian waterfront space with ball courts and bike paths is now a green, undulating carpet. The old trees are gone, replaced by saplings that stretch up from newly sown grass. Chunky, rough-hewn cuboid boulders form an amphitheater around a basketball court.
At one level, this is just what it seems to be, a new park for the enjoyment of the city’s residents. But it’s also a great deal more: Hidden amid the curving landscape are stout defenses against natural disasters, a response to one of the city’s darkest chapters.
Hurricane Sandy made landfall on October 29, 2012. Having churned through the Caribbean as a Category 3 hurricane, it had weakened as it moved northward over cooler waters, but even after being downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, its 80-mph winds pushed a 13-foot storm surge into lower Manhattan, flooding subway stations and knocking out power substations. The blocks just inland from the park are occupied by towers that are home to more than 3,500 public housing units; they had been built on a floodplain, and when the storm hit, the area was flooded in waist-deep water. Forty-four people died in the storm, and more than eight million lost power. The damage to New York City was estimated at $19 billion.
In response, the Obama administration tried a new approach. The Department of Housing and Urban Development held a competition in 2014 called Rebuild by Design, which solicited proposals for not just rebuilding after the crisis but also for creating future resilience by anticipating catastrophes and building with a holistic understanding of the needs of the community. The front-runner of the competition was wunderkind Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, whose firm, BIG, had just opened an office in the city. Their proposal, called the BIG U, imagined girding the most vulnerable 10 miles of shorefront in an interlocking system of seawalls, berms, and movable barriers designed to hold off high storm surges, and which could be extended upward in the future as the effects of climate change intensify.
Today I’m on a walk with Jeremy Alain Siegel, who led the team behind BIG’s proposal. Tall and lanky, with a boyish energy that belies his salt-and-pepper hair and three-day beard, he’s accompanied by a bouncy miniature Australian shepherd named Ziggy that he’s taking care of for a friend.
The ambitions of the BIG U—later referred to as the Dryline, in a punning nod to Manhattan’s popular High Line park—didn’t stop at holding back the water. BIG wanted to make the storied waterfront better: hipper, more beautiful, more useful to the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods. It envisaged broad pedestrian bridges, planted with grass and shrubs, to provide access, and a reverse aquarium consisting of underwater windows that would allow parkgoers to peer into the river itself.
In retrospect, BIG’s lack of experience in New York City politics turned out to have one important advantage: they wound up putting forth a lot of cool ideas that more experienced operators pooh-poohed as impossible. “We had a certain naivete that helped us worry less and dream more,” Siegel says.
BIG won the proposal to develop the overall scheme, and then won the contract to design several of the plan’s components, including a 2.25-mile-long stretch along the East River called the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project, which features John V. Lindsay East River Park (aka East River Park).
With $760 million of funding in place, BIG began a period of discussion with stakeholders—not just local residents but also city agencies like the Parks Department. “This work is collaborative in nature,” Siegel says. “In the design field, we’re used to being the genius with the pen that does the sketch, but this work really requires collaboration and compromise and listening. You have to be open to relinquishing control a little bit.”
It’s famously hard to get anything built in New York City. The mayor’s office demanded major changes that nearly doubled the project’s cost, and neighborhood residents protested not being consulted about the revised plan. But eventually the wrinkles were ironed out, and construction began in 2020. The first section of the ESCR project opened in 2023, followed in 2025 by the first sections of East River Park, whose remaining sections are slated to open in 2027. The whole Dryline is expected to be finished sometime in the 2030s.
Few of the most creative elements from the original BIG U proposal made the transition to physical reality. Neither the reverse aquarium nor the wide overpasses were ultimately deemed practicable. But other innovative features were included, like 77-foot-long floodgates that slide out sideways when needed, and the overall spirit of playfulness endured.
As we approach the top of the berm, Ziggy pauses to relieve himself on a newly planted shrub. Overhead a subway rumbles across the Williamsburg Bridge. A couple of teenage bicyclists come rolling over the new swooping pedestrian tied-arch bridge, fabricated in Italy and installed in a single night, that connects the park to the city. Two men are arranging charcoal in one of the grills set amid an archipelago of cheerful green umbrellas. Beyond, sunlight sparkles on the blue river. For a moment, you can almost forget that it’s really all flood-control infrastructure.
Antakya and the Dryline represent some of the most ambitious reconstruction projects in the world, and their proponents would like them to serve as models for how planners can dream big even in the face of urgent need. But there are a lot more places in the world that are smaller and that will never command large-scale resources for redevelopment, and yet they’re still managing to implement impressive visions of the future. “There are some little guys out there that are doing some unbelievable stuff, all around the world,” says Kona Gray, president of the American Society of Landscape Architects, which held a series of conferences in 2025 about disaster recovery around the United States.
Take the mountain town of Paradise, home to 26,500 people before it bore the brunt of the Camp megafire that swept across 240 square miles of Northern California in 2018. Built along the top of a wooded ridge, Paradise was essentially wiped off the map. Eighty-five percent of its structures were destroyed, and 85 people died.
In the aftermath, the town enlisted Pittsburgh-based architecture firm Urban Design Associates to collaborate on a recovery plan that would both help prevent catastrophe from recurring and result in a place that was more economically resilient and enjoyable to live in. Barry Long, the firm’s principal, first visited Paradise less than a month after the fire, when the town was still sealed off. “We had to go through security to get in,” Long recalls. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen. The majority of buildings had been burned to the ground. There were burned-out vehicles lining the streets. Everything was black, except it looked like there were pumpkins all over town. These were large propane canisters that the paint had burned off of, and then when the rains had come they’d rusted, so they were bright orange.”
The rebuilding process was run by the town’s government, which didn’t have a lot of resources at its disposal. Unlike in Antakya, where the national government funded a citywide reconstruction, the rebuilding of Paradise was largely left to the individual lot owners, many of whom had to wait for insurance payments to come through. All the town could do was write codes and ordinances to guide change, and lobby for state and federal money to fund improvement projects.
“We had a very large community engagement process,” Long says. “The overriding message that we heard was, ‘Please don’t redesign our town. We just want a better version of what we had before.’”
To make the town more fire resilient, the plan called for expanding the street grid to provide for better escape routes; burying electricity infrastructure that can cause wildfires; requiring fire-resistant materials in rebuilt homes; and removing dangerously flammable trees and debris from around all structures. It also envisioned an overall improvement in equity and quality of life by creating a walkable downtown, adding green space, and building a network of bike and pedestrian trails.
The plan has been only partially implemented. The town is still struggling to find funding for a new sewer system, and is back to less than half its pre-fire population, which is holding back its ambitions for the revitalized downtown. But the healing is under way: For several years it has been the fastest growing community in California. “They’re building back, and there’s a lot of community pride,” Long says.
Around the world, many other small communities are responding to natural disasters, or trying to prepare for them, by thinking creatively. In 2022, after heavy flooding in eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia destroyed hundreds of homes and killed 45 people, officials in Kentucky allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to create eight communities, totaling 500 homes, on high ground. Half of those communities will take advantage of a local feature that had long been considered an eyesore and a nuisance: the flattened hilltops left behind by the strip-mining of coal. Planners envision the sites to consist of small clusters of houses, like those being built in the Skyview Estates subdivision in the town of Hazard, where proximity will foster a sense of community. And many of the houses will be energy efficient and solar powered, making them affordable and environmentally friendly.
In some places where rebuilding seems improbable, there’s also the question of how to honor what was lost. One remarkable memorial has arisen in Italy, where a series of destructive earthquakes tore through Sicily’s Belice Valley in January 1968, killing hundreds and leveling the relatively isolated village of Gibellina. Officials decided to rebuild on a site a few miles away that had better access to the road network. But the original village wasn’t simply abandoned; artist Alberto Burri began a decades-long project to turn the site into a vast concrete artwork that follows the former street grid to entomb the ruins. When it was finally finished in 2015, the project ensured no one would ever build there again.
Today, however, more places are fortifying themselves for the next seemingly imminent threat. In Iceland, after an active volcanic area threatened the small fishing town of Grindavík in 2023, officials built several miles of dikes to try to divert lava, but magma flowed below the surface and dangerous cracks opened in the earth. Although the town’s residents had already evacuated, lava destroyed three homes and a heavy-equipment operator fell into a crack and died. Recently, after conducting the most intensive geological study ever carried out in Iceland, officials have begun devising plans to reinhabit the town. The reconstruction plan calls for dozens of homes to be destroyed and for new building to be banned in high-risk areas. Still, Grindavík residents will be on their toes for a long time: Geologists say the eruptions could continue for centuries.
Unlike in eastern Honshu, Japan, the coastal Chilean city of Constitución has also proved that it’s possible to rebuild in an inviting way against multiple potential disasters. After much of it was leveled by the one-two punch of an earthquake and tsunami in 2010, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena worked with the local communities to incorporate nature and individualism into the rebuilding and resilience effort. Instead of using concrete retaining walls to divert future floodwaters, the city planted a forest in a newly created riverfront park to reduce their speed and absorb their wave energy. To make new housing more affordable, displaced residents were given half-built houses that they could complete themselves using their own material and ideas. Today many of them stand as completed homes.
Andy Fox, a professor of landscape architecture at North Carolina State University, thinks that smaller communities that build back better after a natural disaster could be more generally useful models for future recovery efforts than big, expensive projects like the Dryline. “If these ideas work in really small communities that have limited resources, then you can scale them up into places that have lots more resources. They can be bigger and better,” he says.
In Antakya, Imren balances carefully as he walks back toward his shop along a narrow ridge of dirt separating two newly dug foundations. Passing a row of unfinished storefronts, he points to one after another. “The owner of this shop died,” he says. “The owner of that shop died. And that one over there too. And not just the owner, but their whole families. Children, parents, grandparents. Everyone.”
This is a city where almost everyone has been profoundly traumatized. Everyone has lost loved ones, and everyone knows people whose loss has been so soul breaking that they wonder if they can go on. I talked to one Turkish architect who told me that after pouring himself into the rebuilding project for a year, he now avoids coming to Antakya, because the experience of hearing people’s stories has become too painful for him.
In his shop, Imren swipes through photos of his friends and relatives who are gone. He pauses on one, a fellow weight lifter who was a coach, mentor, and dear friend. After the earthquake, Imren spent weeks looking for him. He finally located his body within the ruins of a gym 52 days after the quake.
How is it possible for a place to come back better after that kind of loss? For his part, Yılmaz feels that the void that has been created is all the more reason to build a better version of Antakya, to make sure that pain on such a scale is never felt here again. And this isn’t the only place in the world that needs this kind of vision. There is so much damage that needs to be repaired. Not just from natural disasters, but from human-made ones as well. So many places need to be made safe and good. “So many things are doable,” he says. “So many things are changeable.”
What Yılmaz and his colleagues are doing in Antakya is an experiment, and they hope that if it’s a success it can be replicated by others. The idea is to heal, and create a place where people can be secure and lead their best lives, together, as a community. “This can be a model,” he says, “for any city in the world that needs it.”
Yılmaz anticipates that the first shops in the rebuilt area will begin opening in February, with residents moving into their new homes soon after. Even with all the pain, he feels optimistic. “When this is finished, I think it will be a happy place for people. A place that connects human to human.”
