Elyse Zavar
Biographic Data
| ID | 1687334 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elyse Zavar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elyse |
| FAMILY NAME | Zavar |
| SIGNATURE | ZAVAR E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Texas |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5017-8411 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Crime on Postbuyout Open Space
In the aftermath of environmental disasters, communities across the globe are implementing household relocation programs as hazard mitigation strategies. In the United States, these programs are known as buyouts, which relocate people and structures out of high-risk areas, managing the acquired land as open space. Typically, buyout open spaces are managed as vacant lots, which more generally are associated with increased crime and blight. Using a…
Contextualizing future climate-forced community relocations on islands
Through a study of Ra Province (northeast Viti Levu Island, Fiji) involving both archival research and community engagement, we highlighted a long history of Indigenous population mobility. Many coastal settlements have mostly undocumented histories of relocating inland due to shoreline retreat and land loss over recent decades. Studies of Navutulevu and Vunitogoloa use oral histories and nineteenth-century accounts to show this. More recent auto…
The Influence of Power on Post-Buyout Land Management Practices
U.S. government agencies execute home relocation programs, known as buyouts, in flood-prone areas to reduce hazard exposure. By converting the buyout properties into open space, these governmental agencies assume ownership and management responsibilities. As with all landscapes, the post-buyout landscape reflects power dynamics and institutional forces that shape how the land is managed, perceived, and used. For acquired properties, historic hous…
Between skepticism and solutions
Biophilia as climate justice for post-buyout land management
From Hazard Mitigation to Climate Adaptation
With the onset of climate change resulting in more frequent hazard events and coastal inundation, communities are considering buyouts as a tool for climate adaptation. Despite a growing body of research, there has never been a systematic review of the literature on buyout programs, although our ability to implement buyouts successfully relies on a thorough understanding of buyout policy, design, implementation, and impacts. In this systematic lit…
Understanding the role of wrongdoing in technological disasters
Chasing utopia
Home buyouts
Purpose Home buyout programs are typically funded by the federal government and implemented by local agencies. How these agencies design and implement buyouts has considerable impacts on participating households and communities, making understanding the internal processes of implementing agencies a critical component of buyout research. This study addresses this issue by exploring the early design and implementation phases of a buyout program in …
Chain tourism in post-disaster recovery
Post-disaster research relating to tourism tends to focus on broad economic measures that can miss local-scale actors and contemporaneous impressions by tourists and tourism-based business owners in places undergoing recovery from a disaster. Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm, swept across coastal Texas in August 2017. Many of the communities affected by Harvey have economies largely based on family recreation. Interviews in Rockport–Fulton, T…
Disaster drills as experiential learning opportunities for geographic education
Student participation in municipal disaster drills can enhance geographic skill sets as well as build community resilience to local hazards. In these drills, students often assume the role of victims to help test local emergency response services. Teaching in an interdisciplinary department, we incorporate these field-based learning opportunities into undergraduate courses that draw heavily on geographic concepts yet reside outside of traditional…
Post-disaster communalism
Disasters disrupt the functions and meanings of urban spaces, often prompting changes in their ownership, management, and use. This study examines two such disaster events: riverine flooding in Lexington, Kentucky, and Hurricane Katrina in coastal Mississippi. After each event, we observe the emergence of quasi-public spaces during long-term recovery, where residents generally perceive an increase in the ‘publicness’ of formerly exclusive spaces.…
Patterns of disaster commemoration in long‐term recovery
The postdisaster landscape is replete with memorials that help communities collectively remember destructive events and recover psychologically. Although commemoration is intrinsic to all stages of recovery, little research from the disaster‐science field engages memorial texts across disasters. Meanwhile, a rich body of work on memorials and their functions exists in the cultural geographic tradition. Drawing from this literature, the current st…
An analysis of floodplain buyout memorials
Land use change on U.S. floodplain buyout sites, 1990-2000
Purpose – The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides guidelines for the management of open space created through property acquisition (buyouts); however, land use decisions are primarily left to local governments manifesting in a variety of uses. The purpose of this paper is to provide a land use assessment of buyout sites, to describe the changes in those uses that have occurred during a ten-year period from 1990 to 2000, and to offer an a…
The role of magnetic agents in shaping post-disaster land use
Residential perspectives
This mixed‐methods case study identifies how floodplain property acquisition—a buyout—impacts an urban environment at the neighborhood scale while considering the role of individual residents in formal and informal land‐use decision making. In floodplain buyouts, the reopening of urban space is enabled by federal structural drivers, primarily Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but it is repurposed as a cultural landscape constructed and …
Disaster reconstruction and business geography following the 2007 Greensburg, Kansas Tornado
In May 2007, a tornado (classified as EF-5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale) touched down in the small Midwestern town of Greensburg, Kansas. Eleven people lost their lives, 95 per cent of the urbanized landscape was destroyed and hundreds of residents were left temporarily homeless. The town's decision to rebuild as a ‘green city’, and the many implications of that approach, has been well documented in the popular media. However, geographic change, …
Residential perspectives
This mixed‐methods case study identifies how floodplain property acquisition—a buyout—impacts an urban environment at the neighborhood scale while considering the role of individual residents in formal and informal land‐use decision making. In floodplain buyouts, the reopening of urban space is enabled by federal structural drivers, primarily Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but it is repurposed as a cultural landscape constructed and …
Patterns of disaster commemoration in long‐term recovery
The postdisaster landscape is replete with memorials that help communities collectively remember destructive events and recover psychologically. Although commemoration is intrinsic to all stages of recovery, little research from the disaster‐science field engages memorial texts across disasters. Meanwhile, a rich body of work on memorials and their functions exists in the cultural geographic tradition. Drawing from this literature, the current st…
An analysis of floodplain buyout memorials
Disaster reconstruction and business geography following the 2007 Greensburg, Kansas Tornado
In May 2007, a tornado (classified as EF-5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale) touched down in the small Midwestern town of Greensburg, Kansas. Eleven people lost their lives, 95 per cent of the urbanized landscape was destroyed and hundreds of residents were left temporarily homeless. The town's decision to rebuild as a ‘green city’, and the many implications of that approach, has been well documented in the popular media. However, geographic change, …
Understanding the role of wrongdoing in technological disasters
The role of magnetic agents in shaping post-disaster land use
Disaster reconstruction and business geography following the 2007 Greensburg, Kansas Tornado
In May 2007, a tornado (classified as EF-5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale) touched down in the small Midwestern town of Greensburg, Kansas. Eleven people lost their lives, 95 per cent of the urbanized landscape was destroyed and hundreds of residents were left temporarily homeless. The town's decision to rebuild as a ‘green city’, and the many implications of that approach, has been well documented in the popular media. However, geographic change, …
Residential perspectives
This mixed‐methods case study identifies how floodplain property acquisition—a buyout—impacts an urban environment at the neighborhood scale while considering the role of individual residents in formal and informal land‐use decision making. In floodplain buyouts, the reopening of urban space is enabled by federal structural drivers, primarily Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but it is repurposed as a cultural landscape constructed and …
Land use change on U.S. floodplain buyout sites, 1990-2000
Purpose – The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides guidelines for the management of open space created through property acquisition (buyouts); however, land use decisions are primarily left to local governments manifesting in a variety of uses. The purpose of this paper is to provide a land use assessment of buyout sites, to describe the changes in those uses that have occurred during a ten-year period from 1990 to 2000, and to offer an a…
The role of magnetic agents in shaping post-disaster land use
An analysis of floodplain buyout memorials
Post-disaster communalism
Disasters disrupt the functions and meanings of urban spaces, often prompting changes in their ownership, management, and use. This study examines two such disaster events: riverine flooding in Lexington, Kentucky, and Hurricane Katrina in coastal Mississippi. After each event, we observe the emergence of quasi-public spaces during long-term recovery, where residents generally perceive an increase in the ‘publicness’ of formerly exclusive spaces.…
Patterns of disaster commemoration in long‐term recovery
The postdisaster landscape is replete with memorials that help communities collectively remember destructive events and recover psychologically. Although commemoration is intrinsic to all stages of recovery, little research from the disaster‐science field engages memorial texts across disasters. Meanwhile, a rich body of work on memorials and their functions exists in the cultural geographic tradition. Drawing from this literature, the current st…
Chasing utopia
Home buyouts
Purpose Home buyout programs are typically funded by the federal government and implemented by local agencies. How these agencies design and implement buyouts has considerable impacts on participating households and communities, making understanding the internal processes of implementing agencies a critical component of buyout research. This study addresses this issue by exploring the early design and implementation phases of a buyout program in …
Chain tourism in post-disaster recovery
Post-disaster research relating to tourism tends to focus on broad economic measures that can miss local-scale actors and contemporaneous impressions by tourists and tourism-based business owners in places undergoing recovery from a disaster. Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm, swept across coastal Texas in August 2017. Many of the communities affected by Harvey have economies largely based on family recreation. Interviews in Rockport–Fulton, T…
Disaster drills as experiential learning opportunities for geographic education
Student participation in municipal disaster drills can enhance geographic skill sets as well as build community resilience to local hazards. In these drills, students often assume the role of victims to help test local emergency response services. Teaching in an interdisciplinary department, we incorporate these field-based learning opportunities into undergraduate courses that draw heavily on geographic concepts yet reside outside of traditional…
Understanding the role of wrongdoing in technological disasters
From Hazard Mitigation to Climate Adaptation
With the onset of climate change resulting in more frequent hazard events and coastal inundation, communities are considering buyouts as a tool for climate adaptation. Despite a growing body of research, there has never been a systematic review of the literature on buyout programs, although our ability to implement buyouts successfully relies on a thorough understanding of buyout policy, design, implementation, and impacts. In this systematic lit…
Biophilia as climate justice for post-buyout land management
The Influence of Power on Post-Buyout Land Management Practices
U.S. government agencies execute home relocation programs, known as buyouts, in flood-prone areas to reduce hazard exposure. By converting the buyout properties into open space, these governmental agencies assume ownership and management responsibilities. As with all landscapes, the post-buyout landscape reflects power dynamics and institutional forces that shape how the land is managed, perceived, and used. For acquired properties, historic hous…
Between skepticism and solutions
Crime on Postbuyout Open Space
In the aftermath of environmental disasters, communities across the globe are implementing household relocation programs as hazard mitigation strategies. In the United States, these programs are known as buyouts, which relocate people and structures out of high-risk areas, managing the acquired land as open space. Typically, buyout open spaces are managed as vacant lots, which more generally are associated with increased crime and blight. Using a…
Contextualizing future climate-forced community relocations on islands
Through a study of Ra Province (northeast Viti Levu Island, Fiji) involving both archival research and community engagement, we highlighted a long history of Indigenous population mobility. Many coastal settlements have mostly undocumented histories of relocating inland due to shoreline retreat and land loss over recent decades. Studies of Navutulevu and Vunitogoloa use oral histories and nineteenth-century accounts to show this. More recent auto…
Disaster Management and Resilience (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Geography (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Cartography (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works)