Community resilience and urban planning in tsunami-prone settlements in Chile

Urban planning can serve to minimise the effects of a tsunami and enhance community resilience. This study explores to what extent urban planning has addressed tsunami resilience in four villages on Chile's South Pacific coast, each of which was struck by tsunamis in 1960, 2010, and 2015. Through a detailed policy review and semi-structured interviews with residents, this paper analyses whether tsunami mitigation policies were incorporated into regional and local planning tools. It finds that although the government proposed relocation to tsunami-safe areas after the tsunami of 1960, urban development continued mainly in tsunami inundation zones-in the context of weak local planning frameworks and in the absence of community participation. In only one of the four case studies did participatory planning bring about the relocation of an entire village to a safe location. This paper concludes that incorporating participatory risk zone planning into urban planning enhances tsunami resilience.