Sarah Bassett

Sarah M. Bassett is a Professor of Practice in the School of Public Affairs, Emergency Management & Homeland Security program at Arizona State University and co-Director of the Resilient Visions (RV) CoLab. Grounded in a transdisciplinary planning practice, her work focuses on the social and spatial dimensions of natural hazards. She combines place-based practices, spatial computing, and policy advocacy to advance extreme weather preparedness, connect community action to state and federal policy, and develop simulation tools for risk communication and decision-making. Recent work spans federal heat policy, state preparedness planning including the nation's first statewide Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan and trainings with FEMA and the Department of the Interior, and NSF- and UN-funded simulation research on navigating risk and uncertainty. Bassett was elected to the national board of the American Planning Association's Technology Division in 2022.

Prior to ASU, Bassett held senior leadership roles at some of the largest planning firms in New York City and the U.S. Southeast, where she established new offices, built and expanded practice areas in risk, resilience, and environmental planning, and served in regional leadership roles partnering with states, cities, and communities. That practice spans climate adaptation, disaster recovery, green and nature-based infrastructure, multi-modal infrastructure, and long-range planning, with work recognized and published by the American Planning Association, the Federal Highway Administration, and the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. As co-founder and Director of Urbanism at Peoples Culture, a New York City collective she co-built, Bassett uses narrative and spatial computing to surface the human dimensions of risk and unmet community need, translating those conditions into co-created work that drives policy change. That work is archived at the Smithsonian Institution, featured in the New York Times and MIT's Co-Creation Studio, and has directly shaped policy in North Carolina and New York.