How can academia, and specific programs training professionals from the built environment, prepare them to face and work in post-disaster contexts? Firstly, we must take into consideration that families and local builders do the vast majority of reconstruction after a natural disaster. Therefore, it is this capacity that needs to be developed to achieve safer buildings. Architecture and urbanism must aim to promote the uniqueness of a place and, by doing this, keep its culture alive. With this perspective, our drivers to create resilience and adapt to disaster are to work with the causes, history, and cultures in which we intervene. The local culture will facilitate work, or on the contrary, will inhibit it if our work is counter-cultural. When a sense of place is reinforced in the efforts to reduce disaster risk and in recovery, the possibility for autonomy will emerge, despite the implementation of top-down technical concepts. Secondly, we must establish a relationship that is not of dominance or imposition. In other words, the first and utmost requirement is that local communities in affected regions be seen as active collaborators rather than ‘helpless aid relief beneficiaries.’ Hence, our work must create opportunities for capacity building so that local professionals can assume complex processes as a priority to be addressed before disasters occur. Finally, we must accept that our field is changing substantially, as the disaster field is merging with other areas such as climate change adaptation as well as increasing displacement and migration; which constitutes a working field, which is more and more complex and requires working on different scales of the built and natural environment; much more resources, as well as expertise.