The ReView: Emergency

Planning and Adaptation
Patricia Fraile Garrido

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. 

With Contributions of
Iñaki Alday, Richard Campanella, Rubén García Rubio, Cristóbal Molina Baeza, Sonsoles Vela Navarro, John Renne, Cordula Roser Gray, Patricia Fraile Garrido, Emilie Taylor Welty, Patti Dunn, Daniela Rivero Bryant, Andrew Liles, Assia Crawford, Rebecca Choi, Jesse M. Keenan, Tyler Antrup, and featuring selected academic work produced by students from the Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment during the 2024–2025 academic year. 

Quote from the book
“In a world shaped by emergency, planning means preparing the ground for the unexpected, and adaptation means designing with uncertainty as an ally.”