China Planning Network (CPN)
China Week 2008 City Resilience Roundtable
Commissioner's Remarks
Dear Friends of China Planning Network, Ladies and Gentlemen:
Good morning!
Welcome to the CPN China Week 2008 and the City Resilience Roundtable.
Today's Roundtable includes 14 presentations in four sessions. I will
ask the moderator of each session to introduce the speakers and topics
of their corresponding sessions.
Here I would take this time to introduce you the process in which this
Roundtable is shaping up, and the main themes that we want to
emphasize.
The day after Mar 12th, when the catastrophic earthquake in China
happened, I called my mom and dad “Are you OK?” “We are fine. Nothing
happened in Shandong. But half of China was shaken! And everyone is
doing something.”
The second day, Guo Ming and I have a long conversation.”What can we
do? What can CPN do? What can the world academic community do?”
Today's CPN roundtable and tomorrow's fieldtrip to Sichuan are our answer to this question.
It took us four days to complete the research and the conceptual design
of the roundtable and we sent out the invitation. On the second day, I
received responses from all over the world: MIT President
Hockfield, MIT Chancellor Clay, Former Under Secretary General of
the United Nations for Humanitarian Affairs Mr. Egland, Director
of UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, Mr. Briceno,
Prof. Vale, Prof. Sanyal, Prof. Olshansky...One week later, 14
top scholars and professionals on post-disasters recovery accepted our
invitation to fly to China for today's Roundtable. This is with a
notice of less than two months . As a Chinese, I am touched.
I had a chat with MIT Chancellor Clay about this story. He responded
“For this CPN initiative, no one can say no to you.” Yes, I would
agree. No one can say no to the deepest care of life that all human
beings share.
There are three themes that we want to emphasize in this CPN Roundtable:
1. The long term nature of the rebuilding and restoration, therefore
the role of planning. 10 years on after 99 Taiwan Earthquake, the
recovery from this earthquake is still under going. We don't want to
see that all our energies and enthusiasm are consumed in the first
month and one year later, nobody cares about it any longer. Not only we
need the short-term, emergent and campaign-like response, but also long
term, systematic and sustained efforts, which could be more difficult
but important.
2. We want to encourage positive thinking during the course the
recovery. The disaster is a tragedy but what opportunities that
disasters may bring about that would not otherwise have been available?
Many speakers will elaborate on this with the various aspects,
economic, technological, political, and cultural and historical. Here I
just want to give one of them in its most materialistic form and in a
stylized fashion: everybody in the world knows about Sichuan now. The
exposure of the name Sichuan to the whole world is worth a billion
dollar. And we want to make sure the people in the impacted region is
the beneficiary of the billion dollar.
3. We also want to promote critical thinking on what disasters helps to
expose: the problems and complexities that would otherwise have not
been noticed. Disasters are a drastic way to demonstrate how a society
functions and in moments of the extreme occasion, humans behave in
their authentic way. The reason I mention this is that it relates
another understanding that the China Planning Network wants to
emphasize: The more critiques a person, an organization, or even a
country can tolerate, the faster it can learn and grow. And China is
strong and confident enough to take them in positive way.
Thank you!
Now, I will invite the three keynote speakers to the stage: Prof. Larry
Vale from MIT, Mr. Salvano Briceno from UN, and Prof. Robert Olshansky
from UIUC. I will ask Prof. Steven French from Georgia Tech to
introduce the speakers and moderate this session.
Jinhua Zhao
Executive Commissioner
China Planning Network
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