Vanessa L. Deane
Assistant Clinical Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service; Director of Urban Planning Program
Dr. Vanessa L. Deane is Assistant Clinical Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service and Director of the Urban Planning program at NYU Wagner. Dr. Deane's research and practice centers on the political economy of disasters, primarily in small island developing states. For about a decade, she undertook an in-depth analysis of Haiti's institutional development over the past 30 years in order to evaluate the country's post-earthquake capacity for improved local governance and public service delivery.
In light of the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Deane received a Quick Response Grant from the Natural Hazards Center, with the support of the National Science Foundation, to evaluate the role of crisis leadership on pandemic outcomes in Barbados. Additionally, in the face of rising instances of natural hazards - coupled with the long-term economic challenges resulting from the pandemic - her work explores how Caribbean nations might better position themselves to maintain the wellbeing of their citizens, economies and their physical landscapes in order to mitigate current and imminent disaster threats.
Dr. Deane received the 2020 "Professor of the Year" award in just her first year as a full-time faculty member. Other accolades include the 2018 “Impact Award – Young Women Rising” by the American Women for International Understanding as well as being inducted into the Haitian Roundtable’s 1804 List as one of the “Top 5 to Watch” among Haitian-Americans in 2015. Dr. Deane was also named one of “40 Urban Leaders Under 40” by Next City in 2014.
She obtained her Ph.D. in Public and Urban Policy from The New School and her Master of Urban Planning from New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University with her Bachelor of Arts in African and African American Studies and in American Studies, with double minors in Education Studies and in Social Justice and Social Policy. Dr. Deane is also the Chief Executive Officer of Pinchina, an international urban planning and public policy firm she founded in 2010.
The consequences of disastrous events are escalating across the world, for example, in terms of lives lost, injuries, adverse social conditions, economic costs and environmental destruction. Furthermore, the rapidity of action required when an emergency arises poses unique challenges to traditional planning and the provision of public services. This course introduces students to the discipline of disaster risk management, particularly regarding natural disasters, in order to better understand planning and public service approaches necessary to prepare for, respond to, recover from and mitigate future disaster impacts. The course also includes assessments of social and individual behaviors that serve as a foundation for understanding how people act in disasters, how behavioral changes may save lives and property, and how risks are or should be communicated at every stage.
Couples with CAP-GP.3227.
As part of the core curriculum of the NYU Wagner Masters program, Capstone teams spend an academic year addressing challenges and identifying opportunities for a client organization or conducting research on a pressing social question. Wagner's Capstone program provides students with a centerpiece of their graduate experience whereby they are able to experience first-hand turning the theory of their studies into practice under the guidance of an experienced faculty member. Projects require students to get up-to-speed quickly on a specific content or issue area; enhance key process skills including project management and teamwork; and develop competency in gathering, analyzing, and reporting out on data. Capstone requires students to interweave their learning in all these areas, and to do so in real time, in an unpredictable, complex, real-world environment.
Management and Leadership is designed to empower you with the skills you will need to make change in the world; whether you care about bike lanes, criminal justice, prenatal care, community development, urban planning, social investment or something else. Whatever your passion, you can only have an impact by leading and managing organizational processes. Organizations are the way work gets coordinated and accomplished so knowing how they work -- and how to work within them – are perhaps the most powerful set of tools you can have.
In this course, you will enhance the technical, interpersonal, conceptual, and political skills needed to run effective and efficient organizations embedded in diverse communities, policy arenas, sectors, and industries. In class, we will engage in a collective analysis of specific problems that leaders and managers face—first, diagnosing them and then, identifying solutions—to explore how organizations can meet and exceed their performance objectives. As part of that process, you’ll encounter a variety of practical and essential topics and tools – from goals, structure, strategy and teams to diversity and inclusion, motivation, and negotiation.
This course examines historic and contemporary patterns of racial and ethnic stratification often found at the center of disputes concerning urban development, the allocation of city resources and unequal distributions of power. Also embedded throughout the course are ongoing analyses of the ways in which structural inequalities often function in class and gender-specific ways. Using New York City as a laboratory, an interdisciplinary approach is implored - within and outside of the classroom - to make explicit the impacts of this complex legacy of racial formation on planning processes, decisions and outcomes for historically disenfranchised people and communities. The racialized experiences of select immigrant populations, which includes patterns of incorporation into American society as well as enduring transnational links to countries of origin, are also explored within this context.
The consequences of disastrous events are escalating across the world, for example, in terms of lives lost, injuries, adverse social conditions, economic costs and environmental destruction. Furthermore, the rapidity of action required when an emergency arises poses unique challenges to traditional planning and the provision of public services. This course introduces students to the discipline of disaster risk management, particularly regarding natural disasters, in order to better understand planning and public service approaches necessary to prepare for, respond to, recover from and mitigate future disaster impacts. The course also includes assessments of social and individual behaviors that serve as a foundation for understanding how people act in disasters, how behavioral changes may save lives and property, and how risks are or should be communicated at every stage.
The last three decades have witnessed a global proliferation of public sector restructuring, decentralization, and democratization in developing countries. Traditional development planning has adapted (unevenly) to these trends as they have unfolded. This course presents an overview of the evolution of the theory and practice of planning in developing countries with a particular focus on subnational governments. A central theme is that there are certain universal norms and processes in development planning, but the structure and performance of a planning system depend heavily on the economic, political, institutional and cultural context of a particular country. The course outlines and assesses planning models and systems, reviews approaches used by developing countries and international development agencies to support decentralization and local planning, and introduces a range of practices and tools used by local planners in developing countries. The overall focus is on how local planning systems, techniques and processes can be strategically designed and implemented to work effectively in different contexts. Detailed case studies and exercises based on them are an integral part of the course.
Management and Leadership is designed to empower you with the skills you will need to make change in the world; whether you care about bike lanes, criminal justice, prenatal care, community development, urban planning, social investment or something else. Whatever your passion, you can only have an impact by leading and managing organizational processes. Organizations are the way work gets coordinated and accomplished so knowing how they work -- and how to work within them – are perhaps the most powerful set of tools you can have.
In this course, you will enhance the technical, interpersonal, conceptual, and political skills needed to run effective and efficient organizations embedded in diverse communities, policy arenas, sectors, and industries. In class, we will engage in a collective analysis of specific problems that leaders and managers face—first, diagnosing them and then, identifying solutions—to explore how organizations can meet and exceed their performance objectives. As part of that process, you’ll encounter a variety of practical and essential topics and tools – from goals, structure, strategy and teams to diversity and inclusion, motivation, and negotiation.
2020 - 2021
“Barbados, COVID-19, and Crisis Leadership: A Small Island Perspective”
Studies and reports have emerged highlighting the outsized performance of women-led countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, though Barbados, under the historic leadership of Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, has been conspicuously absent from these discourses. To thereby insert a small island perspective into a broader discussion of disaster leadership, this study examines the extent to which the Prime Minister’s decision-making reflected commonly accepted attributes of crisis leadership found in the literature on emergency management. Specifically, a qualitative analysis of the Prime Minister’s press briefings from March through July 2020 evaluates the extent to which demonstrations of these leadership attributes may have contributed to the containment of this crisis during the first four months of the pandemic. The paper briefly concludes with a reflection on whether the study’s findings have implications for leaders of small island developing states, beyond just this pandemic instance, in the face of inauspicious threats pertaining to climate-related disasters and disruptions throughout the Caribbean region.