Dr C. Vitale (Corinne)

Corinne Vitale is an Assistant Professor at the chair of Spatial Planning of the Nijmegen School of Management (NSM), Radboud University. Her research focuses on the themes of spatial planning, flood risk management, water governance, river basin management, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and upstream-downstream power dynamics. The consideration of power distribution helps in unravelling the complexity of upstream-downstream interactions, which are not purely determined by the relative positions of actors within a river basin.

During the past years, she has been exploring how spatial planning choices may contribute enhancing urban flood resilience. Flood risk management is increasingly being considered not only a technical issue focusing on hazard reduction via hard control infrastructure, but also a matter of societal transformation, governance approaches, and spatial development choices. From a theoretical point of view, Corinne adopts a discursive-institutional perspective to gain a better understanding of how the interplay among contextual factors, attributes of the community of actors involved in flood risk policies, and institutional settings may help in unravelling the complexities of implementing spatial strategies in flood risk management.

Corinne is a lecturer and course coordinator in bachelor, pre-master, and master programs in Geography, Planning, and Environment (GPE). She also supervises master's students for the completion of their thesis.