Our planning frameworks don’t yet reflect the realities we now face
Justin Auciello (MCRP ’05) | July 10, 2025 | Opinion, Energy & Environment
When systems fail — when the power is out, cell towers are down, and trust in institutions is frayed — what holds a community together?
It isn’t zoning. It’s signal.
Verified, actionable, emotionally calibrated information — the kind that keeps people oriented, connected and calm — is often the most critical form of infrastructure during collapse. Yet it’s rarely planned for.
As we move toward peak hurricane season, it’s worth remembering that in 2021 New Jersey made meaningful progress by amending the Municipal Land Use Law to require a sustainability element in municipal master plans. In 2023, the state took another step when Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law a bill requiring municipal hazard mitigation plans to include climate-change threat assessments and resilience strategies. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection also released its first statewide Climate Change Resilience Strategy in 2021 to guide long-term adaptation planning.
That’s real progress. But in an age of climate shocks, disinformation and infrastructure fragility, it’s not enough. We need to go further. We need to explicitly recognize information as infrastructure and begin building civic signal systems into how we plan, govern and respond.
That means embedding systems designed to function when formal ones fail. It means planning not just for continuity of utilities, but for continuity of trust.
As a licensed professional planner with two decades of experience shaping master plans across New Jersey, and as someone who has operated inside infrastructure collapse, I’ve seen what happens when we don’t.
Before Hurricane Irene in 2011, I founded Jersey Shore Hurricane News, a two-way civic signal system built on Facebook that became a trusted real-time source during Irene, Superstorm Sandy, and the years that followed. It served as a substitute for emergency dispatch in coordination with the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management when 911 lines were overwhelmed during Sandy, countered misinformation, and helped neighbors connect and support each other. It saved lives.
What I’ve learned is simple: When institutions falter, signal is what remains.
I hold a master’s degree in city and regional planning from the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. I understand how our planning frameworks work, and I believe they don’t yet reflect the realities we now face.
So, what would it look like to treat signal as infrastructure?
It starts by mapping local information ecosystems and identifying where access gaps exist. It requires designing peer-to-peer communication systems that operate across multiple platforms, embedding feedback loops to surface misinformation and verify facts in real time, and ensuring those systems reach the most vulnerable — including the disconnected, the linguistically diverse and the overlooked.
In some communities, that might mean equipping barbershops or bodegas with printed updates. In others, it could involve WhatsApp groups moderated by multilingual community leaders. What matters is that the signal reaches people — clearly, reliably and respectfully.
We also need to preplan infrastructure substitutions using tools like mesh networks, community radio and portable satellite internet. We should institutionalize public information workflows not just for disaster response, but as part of everyday governance. Signal isn’t just a lifeline during collapse, it’s connective tissue during calm. Quiet-time signal strengthens community awareness, builds trust in public systems, and ensures residents stay informed, engaged, and resilient long before a crisis ever hits. And we must equip residents with the media literacy and crisis readiness to navigate chaos, so that when the noise spikes, they know how to find clarity and truth.
These aren’t fringe ideas. They are an evolution of what planners already do, applied to the systems that govern trust, coordination and attention. We already build continuity into our roads, energy and water systems. Why not do the same for information?
In fact, municipalities across the country are beginning to treat communication continuity as a resilience priority. The New Jersey Legislature can lead by amending the Municipal Land Use Law again, this time to require a civic signal and information infrastructure section in municipal master plans. This section should focus on real-time communication, redundancy, access equity and institutional transparency.
That would mean codifying public signal protocols across departments, developing civic signal maps and fallback workflows, and identifying trusted neighborhood “signal hubs,” such as libraries, houses of worship or community centers that can anchor reliable information flow. It also means integrating signal planning into emergency operations and capital improvement strategies, making communication resilience a visible and permanent part of local planning.
Because planning for climate resilience without planning for information resilience is like building a flood wall and forgetting the evacuation map.
What happened on July 4 in Texas should be a warning to everyone. When the National Weather Service forecasts a high risk of flooding — and then it happens — without deliberate, local action, something has to change. The forecasts were solid. The science worked. The signal was there.
Weather balloon data over Texas showed a saturated atmosphere and slow-moving winds days in advance. That led to a flood watch on July 3, a flash flood warning at 1 a.m., and a flash flood emergency by 4:30 a.m. Radar, models, balloons and meteorologists all did their job.
The failure wasn’t technical. It was human.
No sirens. No door-to-door outreach. No evacuation orders. And as The Texas Tribune reported, the danger came during a holiday weekend, with RV parks and cabins filled with people unfamiliar with local flood risks.
This wasn’t a forecasting failure. It was a failure to act.
When the models flash red, you don’t wait. You move. You warn. You get people out. That’s the difference between signal and silence.
Civic signal isn’t just about data or forecasts. It’s about getting the warning to land, in time, in context. It’s about making sure alerts lead to action. The last mile matters. Without it, warnings don’t save lives.
New Jersey has the tools. It has the talent. What we need now is the will across institutions and communities to widen the lens and make information infrastructure a formal pillar of sustainability, safety and continuity.
Let’s embed civic signal into our plans, our budgets and our collective sense of readiness.
The next storm, outage or institutional failure isn’t a question of if, it’s when. And when it happens, civic signal is the thread that holds us together.
Let’s plan like we know that.