Centering Those Who Matter Most: A Participatory Planning Framework for Designing and Sustaining Hyperlocal Resilience Hubs in Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene
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premjee-isbah22-mcp-dusp-2026-thesis.pdf
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Author(s)
Premjee, Isbah
Advisor(s)
Arcaya, Mariana
Date Issued
May 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Disasters are not natural. They are produced at the intersection of physical hazard and socially constructed vulnerability shaped by histories of racial capitalism, geographic disinvestment, and political exclusion, which ultimately determine whose lives are valued and whose losses are normalized. Hurricane Helene's devastation of Western North Carolina in September 2024 made this devastatingly clear when communities already living at the margins of formal systems bore the greatest losses and found themselves reaching, holding, and carrying each other during and after the storm when these systems failed. Drawing from these acts of collective action and mobilization, this thesis finds that the primary infrastructure of disaster recovery is social, relational, and care-based. Building on disaster resilience scholarship, feminist theories of care, participatory planning theory, and asset-based community development, this research situates resilience hubs–community-serving facilities augmented to support residents, distribute resources, and coordinate communications before, during, and after climate-driven disruptions–as spatial expressions of collective care. This thesis argues that the knowledge necessary to design and sustain these hubs is already held by the communities that have experienced disasters. Planners, policymakers, and organizations working on resilience-building must begin with listening, following the lead of frontline communities, and creating the conditions for situated, place-based knowledge to shape the design and function of resilience hubs.
The primary contribution of this thesis is a Participatory Planning Toolkit for MountainTrue, a Western North Carolina organization, that proposes a six-phase framework: Root, Dream, Align, Co-Design, Activate, and Tend. The toolkit is designed to support MountainTrue in co-creating and sustaining hyperlocal resilience hubs alongside frontline communities to function in normalcy and during moments of crisis. This six-phase framework begins from the first interaction with communities and culminates in how to tend to both the resilience hub and relations forged with communities through this participatory process. The toolkit was built through a multi-tiered methodology, including community input, in-depth conversations with practitioners, iterative feedback from MountainTrue, and a comparative analysis of six existing resilience hub frameworks. This thesis insists that the kind of knowledge resilience planning requires is situated, embodied, and relational, and can only be generated by those who have lived through the storm, carried their communities after it, and know what it will take to survive the next one.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
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