The Consideration of Emergency Management Issues in Spatial Planning Practices

Spatial planning can play an important role in increasing the possibilities for emergency response. Nevertheless, little research has been done that explicitly looks at the way emergency management issues are addressed in predisaster spatial planning. We explore the consideration of emergency management issues in the context of a Netherlands case study. In the Netherlands regional fire departments provide local planning authorities with recommendations regarding the consideration of emergency management issues. We found that only some of these recomendations were implemented in the land allocation plan itself and that risks were often reduced but seldom eliminated. Nevertheless, possibilities for emergency response in general were increased. Moreover, the communicative character of the safety advice process and the resulting collaboration between planners and emergency responders fit in well with the more general communicative and collaborative approaches to planning. For these reasons these experiences can also be relevant for the integration of spatial planning and emergency management in other countries.