Rob Olshansky

Robert Olshansky is professor emeritus of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught for 28 years. He has studied recovery planning and management after numerous major disasters around the world, including ones in the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Haiti. Along with Laurie Johnson, he co-authored Opportunity in Chaos: Rebuilding after the 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe Earthquakes (available online), Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans (APA Press, 2010), and After Great Disasters: An In-depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery (Lincoln Institute, 2017). In 2014 he co-edited a special issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association on Planning for Disaster Recovery.

Now located in the San Francisco Bay area, Olshansky's current research focuses on the process of community relocation in response to natural hazards, and he is researching scores of such cases in North America and Asia, including current work Puerto Rico and Indonesia. In 2021, with the UC Berkeley Center for Community Innovation and Next 10, he co-authored a research and policy report, Rebuilding for a Resilient Recovery: Planning in California's Wildland Urban Interface.