Giving community members center stage after disasters: Santina Contreras

USC Trojan Family Magazine is featuring Trojans who have made a significant difference in sustainability at the University of Southern California.

When Southern California battled historic wildfires this January, urban planner and researcher Santina Contreras wasn’t just thinking of the brick-and-mortar reconstruction that would be necessary to rebuild her hometown of L.A. She immediately thought of the communities and the voices that would be essential for a truly equitable recovery. With thousands of families displaced and the loss of important community entities such as schools, churches and other important meeting places, she wondered what community considerations would be overlooked in the rush to rebuild.

Contreras, an assistant professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy in the Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis department, has spent more than 15 years working with communities across the globe surrounding disasters. As a result, she knows what’s at stake when rebuild efforts fail to give community members an active role in the recovery process.

“I feel as though it is my responsibility to shine a light on how disasters are affecting the most vulnerable members of our community,” Contreras says. “That feels like the most important and rewarding aspect of the work I do.”

An eye-opening experience

As an L.A. native, Contreras developed an early interest in earthquakes, focusing on how people living in inadequate conditions are affected by natural hazards.

After receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in structural engineering from the University of California, San Diego, Contreras earned a Master of Science degree in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

It was an international disaster that would influence the trajectory of her career. After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Contreras crossed the globe to work with a nonprofit organization on housing reconstruction efforts in West Sumatra, Indonesia.

As an engineer, she first approached communities struggling to rebuild from a technical standpoint, advising on how to incorporate earthquake-resistant techniques into construction efforts.

Her on-the-ground experience “opened up new questions for me surrounding the roles that communities play in being able to build resiliently,” Contreras says. “I saw how various social dynamics were affecting people’s ability and willingness to adopt the techniques we were teaching, including what they could afford and what made sense in terms of their local customs.”

After working with several other organizations in the private and nonprofit sectors on the design and implementation of resilience-building projects, Contreras became more deeply aware of the importance of prioritizing interdisciplinary and inclusive approaches when planning for hazards and disaster risks.

She earned her doctorate in planning, policy and design from the University of California, Irvine, and wrote her dissertation on the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Instead of studying the physical aspects of rebuilding, Contreras examined the role community engagement played in the recovery and rebuilding practices of nonprofit organizations.

While Contreras has since expanded her focus beyond earthquakes to include other kinds of disasters and environmental planning spaces, the themes of community and equity continue to echo across her work.

Elevating community voices

Contreras says her favorite projects provide opportunities for community members to have their voices heard. In late 2023, Contreras began her role as principal investigator of a project within the USC Urban Trees Initiative, in partnership with Public Exchange at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The project began after a South L.A.-based community coalition asked Contreras to help them capture residents’ priorities on urban trees after seeing past nonprofit and government-led efforts fail to fully incorporate their needs and interests in local tree planning activities. The qualitative study Contreras and her colleagues conducted led to a report that provided community members with the data to advocate for their interests.

“The most fulfilling part of the trees project has been seeing the real-world applications of our research, seeing our data applied in ways that community members can actually use,” says Contreras, adding that along with producing a publicly available technical report and research brief (in English and Spanish), community members used study data to make short video reels to support their advocacy efforts. “Our study aims to amplify the voices of community members, so that their interests can be better integrated into the decision-making process.”

That same year, Contreras began working with a multidisciplinary team of colleagues assembled by Public Exchange on the California Solar Canal Initiative, a consortium of research universities testing a plan to blanket California’s network of 4,000 miles of canals with solar panels. The strategy, which officially launched in March, aims to transform the canals into a powerful source of clean energy and water conservation, while reducing air pollution.

As the lead investigator at USC on the project’s community resilience and environmental justice team, Contreras will be working with community stakeholders to examine the project from an environmental justice perspective, including considering how communities could be positively or negatively affected by the expansion.

Coming home with a new perspective

Before joining USC in 2021, Contreras was an assistant professor of city and regional planning and an affiliated faculty member of the Sustainability Institute and the Center for Latin American Studies at The Ohio State University. Prior to that, she did postdoctoral work at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Contreras has published numerous papers and reports on assessing equity, justice and engagement approaches surrounding natural hazards, environmental planning and other resilience-building efforts. Her research has been published in top journals — including the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Urban Affairs and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction — and covered in major media outlets such as NPR, the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times.

Returning to her hometown presents Contreras with the unique opportunity to reconnect with the communities she knows best and apply her interdisciplinary approach to Southern California’s interconnecting environmental and equity issues.

“I was really excited to come to USC Price,” Contreras says. “After being at a few different types of institutions, I’ve learned that there’s a big policy piece to my work. By being a part of USC Price, I’ve been able to tap more deeply into the bigger implications of my work in terms of how it affects communities at a policy level.”