Disasters like Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are inevitable when we construct cities in harm's way, says Aaron Betsky, who believes we have designed ourselves into a Catch-22 of create and protect.

It could have been worse. That is the best you can say about the twin natural catastrophes that hit Texas and Florida recently. The question remains: in how far did design and planning both put more people in harm's way and helped prevent a higher toll of death and destruction"
The answer is both: the design profession's focus on minimising harm that its own decisions, large and small, threaten to bring on, was on full display.
This is most obvious at the biggest scale. Most of Florida is ? or was ? swamp and mangrove forests, with barrier islands helping to mitigate the sea's furry. By turning it into the home of tens of millions of people and building their homes and business on those swamps and barriers, we are inviting a disaster that the removal of nature's defences only makes worse. The same is true in Texas, where the bayous have been channeled, the porous prairies have been turned into asphalt, and one of the world's largest and dirtiest industrial ports has been put directly in harm's way.
What prevented the results from being worse than they could have been, especially in Florida, was improvements in both information services and building codes. Even trailer parks are now better able to withstand hurricanes, and millions of people got themselves out of harm's way in ...