Chapter 24 - Model for Integrated Urban Disaster Risk Management at the Local Level: Bottom-Up Initiatives of Academics

Abstract

This chapter outlines the activities of academia designed to enhance knowledge and develop professional capacities in an environment faced with a clear crisis of the state's planning system in postsocialist transition. The Department of Urbanism at Belgrade University's Faculty of Architecture developed the country's first master's study program fully intended to educate a specialized cadre of urban planners, entitled Integrated Urbanism, and so consciously steered Serbia's professional public toward dialogue on the future of the profession and professional action. Work on student assignments allowed the construction of a collaborative learning platform that covered a broad range of stakeholders: students, teachers, experts from the professional context, specialists from local communities, and international experts. Student assignments were rooted in actual problems faced by the specific local community, which made it possible to jointly consider and understand new topics from the European and global context and develop new professional responses. The model for integrated urban disaster risk management discussed in detail in this paper constitutes one of the outcomes of this collaborative learning effort that is based on the example of the Obrenovac municipality, which suffered major damage in the disastrous floods that occurred in spring 2014.