Abstract: The risks of disasters pose many ongoing challenges for settlements in Australia. The emergence of threats stemming from climate change are combining with ongoing population growth, alongside the development and application of new techniques and treatments that address risk reduction. Urban planning and design operates at the interface between emerging threats and human responses that are manifest in physical modification of settlements and the populations living in and using them. In keeping with this challenge, the development of new scientific understandings and design responses offers the possibility that new approaches can be developed that are suitable utilization by the urban planning and design disciplines. However, the application of new methods and understandings has often proven to be uneven and sporadic, at the expense of improvements to the resilience of Australian cities. In response, this paper examines the value of mainstreaming as a way of delivering resilience improvements in the practices of urban planning and design. This paper reports the findings of investigations into successful cases of mainstreaming in Australian disaster risk reduction.