Social Equity, Land Use Planning, and Flood Mitigation
Authors: Roy Malini , Berke Philip 
Published: October 2022

Every flood event reveals hidden disparities within cities—disparities in capacities to anticipate, respond to, and recover from disasters. Studies examining drivers of disparity have found that highly socially vulnerable (e.g., poor, minority) neighborhoods sustain more damage, have access to fewer recovery resources, and experience slower recovery. Climate change and unregulated growth are likely to exacerbate these disparities. Scholars argue that disparities along the lines of race and income are partly due to inadequate planning. Planning for flood mitigation has lacked a deep understanding of values and has therefore overlooked needs and exacerbated physical vulnerability in socially vulnerable neighborhoods.

Increasing local and international attention to the socioeconomic drivers of disaster impacts elicits the question: How can land use planning foster more equitable hazard mitigation practices that meet the needs identified by marginalized communities? Equitable hazard mitigation is advanced through three dimensions. First, contextual equity involves preparing an information base that asks who is vulnerable to flooding, who has (not) been engaged in planning decisions that affect vulnerability to flooding, and why. Recognizing contextual inequities in plans is the first step to making visible historic discrimination and addressing drivers of persisting political disenfranchisement. Second, procedural equity involves organizing a participation process that critically considers whom participation processes should target, how stakeholders should be inclusively engaged, and how multiple values should inform policy priorities. Dedicated planning-participation processes can repair past legacies of power information imbalances and co-produce planning goals. A process where vulnerable, marginalized citizens have as much information and as much say in policy decisions as others adds nuance to planners’ understanding of needs, and enables the incorporation of overlooked values into distribution of land use policies. Third, distributional equity involves designing planning policies so that flood mitigation services and infrastructure are directed to neighborhoods and households most in need. Moreover, distributional equity considerations need to be integrated across the local government plans (e.g., transportation plan, housing plan, and hazard mitigation plan) that affect growth in hazardous areas.

Social equity outcomes further rely on the degree of knowledge transfer between the three dimensions. The effectiveness of distributional equity is critically dependent on contextual and procedural equity and affects how plan outcomes align with the needs and values of disadvantaged and vulnerable communities. Likewise, the scope of contextual equity is shaped by historical distributional and procedural equity or lack thereof. To advance equitable outcomes, more research is required on the implementation and effectiveness of different land use planning approaches. Future inquiries should examine social equity through a multihazard lens; empirically analyze the causal relationships among the contextual, procedural, and distributional equity; and explore the effectiveness of different planning tools and governance structures in fostering socially equitable hazard mitigation.