The Review 4: Emergency: Planning and Adaptation

The ReView 4: Emergency examines the evolving relationship between planning and adaptation in an age defined by overlapping environmental, social, technological, and political crises. Bringing together contributions from faculty at the Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment alongside exemplary student work, the volume investigates how built environment fields can respond to uncertainty not merely through resistance or mitigation, but through creativity, resilience, and transformative thinking. Organized around six thematic chapters—Emergency; Uncertainty as a Driver of Innovation; Planning: Systems Thinking in Education and Practice; Spontaneous Order in Deliberate Planning; Adaptation: Stability and Change; and Mitigation or Adaptation? Adaptation or Reaction?—the publication explores topics ranging from public space and community preparedness to living biomaterials, architectural elasticity, climate justice, urban governance, and the future of professional education. Situated within the ecological realities of the Gulf South yet addressing challenges of global significance, The ReView 4 contributes to contemporary architectural discourse by proposing that emergency should not only be understood as a threat demanding urgent reaction, but also as an opportunity to rethink permanence, embrace uncertainty, and imagine more equitable and adaptive futures.