This study examines people's response actions in the first 30 min after shaking stopped following earthquakes in Christchurch and Wellington, New Zealand, and Hitachi, Japan. Data collected from 257 respondents in Christchurch, 332 respondents in Hitachi, and 204 respondents in Wellington revealed notable similarities in some response actions immediately after the shaking stopped. In all four events, people were most likely to contact family members and seek additional information about the situation. However, there were notable differences among events in the frequency of resuming previous activities. Actions taken in the first 30 mins were weakly related to: demographic variables, earthquake experience, contextual variables, and actions taken during the shaking, but were significantly related to perceived shaking intensity, risk perception and affective responses to the shaking, and damage/infrastructure disruption. These results have important implications for future research and practice because they identify promising avenues for emergency managers to communicate seismic risks and appropriate responses to risk area populations.

The COVID-19 crisis upended the status quo of our everyday life. The rising discourse in the midst of this pandemic is ‘human guilt’ (e.g., ‘we are the virus!’), reviving the dark side of neo-Malthusian environmentalist ideology. While the pandemic should be considered a wake-up call for us to drastically rethink our relationship with nature, planning discipline cannot resign itself from its power and responsibility to make a difference in human and nonhuman lives. So, here I ask: How can we carefully reposition ‘human intervention’ in the aftermath of this ‘human guilt’, without nullifying the hopeful spirit and our belief in the power of planning? Inspired by Tronto/ Lawson’s geographies of care and Dewey-an pragmatism, this essay calls for the rise of ‘planning of care’. Planning of care not only recognises humans’ interdependency on one another, but also acknowledges cities’ on-going, dialectic relationship with their natural surroundings.

This article responds to the call for planning theorists to develop a posthumanist approach to planning, especially in the context of the Anthropocene or planetary environmental degradation. In the wake of often unexpected and brutal feedback from nature – frequent flooding, heat waves, tornadoes or cyclones – the positioning or conceptualisation of ‘the environment’ in planning has changed; rather than being discounted as an inanimate background that merely hosts human affairs, it is now considered an active agent that influences how we design and plan for a city. The posthumanist framing of the planning agenda is closely related to the previous ‘material turn’ in planning, which initially introduced ‘distributive agency’, where human agency or our willingness to act is activated only via our relation with non-human surroundings. ‘More-than-human’ approaches to planning, inspired by the new ecology movement that debunks the idea of human exceptionalism, attempt to extend that logic even further by proclaiming how we can critically reframe planning to develop more inclusive and ethical relationships with non-human species. As a continuation of this dialogue, I provide the philosophical background behind the recent rise of posthumanist or ‘new materialist’ ecopolitics and argue why and how they can offer important insights for planning theory and practice. I lay out specifically how planners would execute this ‘posthumanist normativity’ in their everyday planning practices, focusing on three lessons that could be directly applicable: (1) understanding environment politics as a mundane politics of representation – which eventually allows us to consider non-human species as social minorities, (2) learning to ‘stay with the trouble’ – recognising the webs of our material dependency on non-human critters that encourage us to cultivate ‘response-ability’ and (3) activating political mobilisation based on empirical experiences – thinking of immediate physical experiences and sensory values as major sources of environmental activism.

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Standing electric scooters (e-scooters)' rapid infiltration as a mobility option has left cities in the limbo of having to deal with regulation and planning for their sudden interruption. As the first city in Australia to allow e-scooter sharing, Brisbane is at the forefront of regulating their use in public space. We reflect on how e-scooter governance can be considered a continually (re) negotiated site of state-market interface, drawing insights from Lindblom's science of muddling through, Dewey's socially organised intelligence, and Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard's discussion on contesting market domination/ modes of social regulation.