2026 Dale Prize: Rethinking Recovery: Planning for Resilient and Adaptive Climate Disaster Management

The Dale Prize recognizes planning excellence, creates dialogue between scholars and practitioners, and enriches the education of planning students. The Dale Prize is awarded in pairs: a $5,000 award to a scholar and a $5,000 award to a practitioner. Awardees spend two days meeting with students in classes and participate in a colloquium and other events.

The 2026 theme is Rethinking Recovery: Planning for Resilient and Adaptive Climate Disaster Management

The 2026 Dale Prize Colloquium is open to the public and will be offered by Zoom. We invite all to the Dale Prize Colloquium, 6:00 p.m.-7:30 p.m. (PST) on Tuesday, March 3rd. The Zoom Webinar login link will be announced in January 2026.

As natural disasters (and some not so natural)—wildfires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, and extreme heat—become more frequent, urban planners find themselves faced with immediate disaster management responsibilities and the need to create long-term recovery and resilience plans. Recovery and resiliency have evolved from separate concepts to being envisioned as a continuous, frequently recurring process with measurable impacts on the physical, economic, social, political, and environmental dimensions of our communities. Hence, as urban planners, we must focus on recovery efforts in our impacted communities that address housing, migration, displacement, the economy, and community vulnerability.

The 2026 Dale Prize invites planning and planning-related scholars and community-based practitioners to consider the changing role of planning in helping communities recover from disasters and build more resiliently. This includes scholars and practitioners who are working on risk management, rebuilding infrastructure, addressing disaster-induced displacement, and equity planning in impacted communities through stages of recovery across myriad sectors.

The focus on disaster management this year underscores the need to revisit the integration of disaster recovery into planning practices, institutional policy procedures, and collaborative governance strategies across public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Managing disasters, adapting to new climate realities, and developing resilient cities will require wide-ranging hazard mitigation solutions. Comprehensive policy approaches include promoting inclusive community participation processes, rehabilitating infrastructure, and building resilient communities.

We seek scholars and practitioners who have worked on planning process development and implementation for disaster recovery across different sectors. We are drawn to applicants who have previous experience working with local, state, and federal governmental agencies to coordinate disaster responses and improve proactive disaster management strategies. Moreover, we are interested in scholars and practitioners whose work examines the influence of infrastructure, land use and housing decisions, and political processes on the rate and nature of recovery, as well as on emerging technologies, data approaches, or strategic frameworks for improving adaptive management practice within post-disaster environments. Lastly, we encourage applicants whose disaster management research and practice has focused on addressing community vulnerability, resiliency, and rebuilding, especially for residents disproportionately impacted by disasters and other historical forms of planned and unplanned harm. 

As the rate of disasters increases and recovery efforts continue to lag, urban planners must deal with complex interdependencies among built environments, environmental hazards, organizational processes, and community-based strategies to address climate vulnerabilities and environmental injustices. The 2026 Dale Prize challenges both scholars and practitioners to generate innovative thinking and applied solutions to envision disaster recovery as an opportunity to intentionally design equitable approaches. These approaches should address how we can adapt to long-term future conditions by building resilient communities that are safer and more just.