Thomas Campanella

An urban historian and professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, after teaching at the University of North Carolina, Campanella trained at MIT and has devoted his career to the history of the American landscape and city, with Republic of Shade (2003), on the American elm, as his first book. The Resilient City (2005), edited with Lawrence Vale, gathered the cases of Chicago, San Francisco, Warsaw, Hiroshima or Beirut to ask how modern cities recover from catastrophe.

His 2006 article on urban resilience and the recovery of New Orleans, written with the city still flooded after Katrina, formulated his most cited thesis: almost no major city has disappeared after a disaster because its residents return, and so a city's resilience is that of its families, parishes and associations, not of its levees. Organised neighbourhoods such as Broadmoor came back; the poorest and least organised did not.

The Concrete Dragon (2008) told the story of China's urban revolution, the largest in history, and Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (2019) is a total history of his native borough. Critics warn that entrusting resilience to citizens may let the state off the hook; he replies that social resilience demands, precisely, public policies that guarantee the return of those who cannot organise.