Santina Contreras

Biography

Santina Contreras is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on interrogating community engagement practices surrounding hazards and disasters. Specifically, this involves examining the implementation, equitability, and underlying power dynamics associated with community engagement activities in hazard, disaster, and environmental planning spaces. In her work, she takes an interdisciplinary approach toward understanding relationships between local communities and external stakeholders (organizations, planners, engineers, etc.) to highlight the ways in which inequitable engagement approaches undertaken by these entities can lead to the overburdening and extraction of local communities.

Contreras has extensive experience working in the private and nonprofit sectors on the design and implementation of resilience-building and international development-focused projects. She has published numerous papers and reports focused on assessing equity, justice, and engagement approaches surrounding natural hazard events, environmental planning projects, and broader resilience-building efforts. Her research has been published in top planning, environmental hazards, and public affairs journals, including the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Urban Affairs, Environmental Hazards, and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. Her research has been covered by major media outlets such as the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, LAist, and Planetizen.

Before joining the faculty at USC, Contreras worked as an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, where she was also affiliated faculty of the Sustainability Institute and the Center for Latin American Studies. Prior to that, she held positions as a Researcher-in-Residence at the Natural Hazards Center and a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Environmental Design Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Contreras holds a Bachelor of Science in Structural Engineering from the University of California, San Diego, and a Master of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Planning, Policy, and Design from the University of California, Irvine.

Selected Publications

• Contreras, S., Witkowski, K., Pérodin, J., Remington, C., Headley, A., & Ganapati, E. (2024). First Responder Ladder of Community Engagement: Understanding Community Facing Activities During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Urban Affairs, 1-23.
  https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2024.2410277  
• Contreras, S., & Niles, S. Building Resilience through Informal Networks and Community Knowledge Sharing: Post-disaster Health Service Delivery after Hurricane Maria. Environmental Hazards, 21(5), 433-452. https://doi.org/10.1080/17477891.2022.2049191
• Contreras, S. Using Arnstein’s Ladder as an Evaluative Framework for the Assessment of Participatory Work in Post-disaster Haiti. Journal of the American Planning Association, 85(3), 219-235. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2019.1618728