Core Principles For Planning Public Open Spaces to Enhance Coastal Cities’ Resilience to Tsunamis

Public open spaces in cities are considered as an asset for making cities sustainable from all its’ three counts; economic, social and environmental. Yet, the importance of public open spaces for disaster resilience is less recognised and still remains under-rehearsed in urban planning context. Within this context, this research explores the potentials of public open spaces as a mean to enhance the coastal cities’ resilience to Tsunamis through planning and designing interventions. Further, this research is focused down to the Sri Lankan context, as Sri Lanka is one of the Tsunami prone countries fronting many challenges such as land scarcity due to the rapid urbanization, challenges to the natural and built environment due to the unplanned urban development. This paper is based on the part of the findings of a doctoral study. The doctoral study adopted the grounded theory method as the research strategy. Accordingly, data collection involved 72 unstructured interviews covering wide variety of participants related to the field of study in the context of Sri Lanka; Tsunami affected communities, disaster resilience experts, urban planners, sociologists and coastal planners, etc. The coding procedure of grounded theory is used to analyse the transcripts, notes, maps and documents related to the interviews conducted. The analysis reveals that there is a significant potential to use public open spaces to enhance the coastal cities’ resilience to Tsunamis as an emergency evacuation directing point, as a primary place for emergency rescue, as an agent for temporary sheltering, as a facilitator for Tsunami disaster mitigation and as a mediator to provide Tsunami awareness. Finally, the findings propose five core principles which can be used to plan and design public open spaces as a strategy to enhance the coastal cities’ resilience to Tsunamis.