Integrating universities with the built environment practice and the communities in disaster management education

Abstract

Built environment (BE) practitioners have a key role to play in developing societal resilience to disasters. In doing so, various interactions are needed between BE disciplines and other stakeholders engaged with the disaster management process. Therefore universities conducting courses on disaster management need to consider the needs of these stakeholders in their programme design and delivery. This requires building partnerships between universities, BE practice and other stakeholders engaged in disaster management who are referred to as ‘community’ in this research. Previous research has highlighted the lack of integration between practice, community and university (PCU) in contributing to the societal resilience to disasters and therefore it is very important to strengthen the integration between PCU. Development of such partnerships is a complex task and it is important to identify how PCU integration can take place and how the effectiveness of such integration can be measured. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to present the initial PCU framework developed as part of an EU funded project, aimed at developing a professional doctorate for disaster resilience in the built environment. The methodology adopted for this research comprises of a literature review and brainstorming. The paper presents several mechanisms to integrate universities with the BE practice and communities in developing meaningful partnerships in the proposed professional doctorate, some of which include, collaborative programme design, delivery, research and supervision