While resilience is a term with a long history, it has gotten a specific meaning of late. And while cities have often been shaped by risk and disaster (such as diseases, war, floods, water scarcity, earthquakes and fires), the notion of resilience is distinct from mitigation and adaptation.
This panel will discuss the term resilience from a historical perspective, and explore it within the context of the contemporary (capitalist) city, in which risks are accepted and control is given up. It will look at the link between the social and the physical embedded in the idea of resilience, and ask the question what this social component means for the production and understanding of risks and stresses, and also for how we address risks.
36. Some Basic Observations in the Context of Disaster Resilience
• Extreme Natural Events are part of the Earth’s Processes
• These natural events have not turned into (Un-)Natural Disasters
until Civilizations got into Nature’s harm’s way:
Dissociation of Modern Societies from ‘Living with Nature’
• The building of Cities and Infrastructure, often in grotesque
denial of these natural processes and their potential Hazards, can
turn disasters into catastrophes.
• With Technological Development (Industrialization, Energy,
Transportation Agro-Industry, largely based on Fossil Fuels) we
now have Climate Change as an important man-made amplifier of
natural hazards that increasingly expose our unprepared societal
and physically built assets to exponentially rising risks. Example:
Sea Level Rise.
• While much of the Vulnerability of Human Societies comes from
Socio-Economic Pressures (Including Population Explosion), the
increasing Risks from Extreme ‘Natural’ Events amplifies and
accelerates the Risks, Impacts and Social Vulnerabilities.
38. The Future History: The Design of Solutions.
What are the Needed Elements:
• Understand and Quantify the Hazards of ‘Natural”
Processes (Earth Science, Climate Science, ….)
• Understand the Vulnerabilities (“Fragilities”) of our Social
and Built Assets to these Hazards (Tasks for the social,
economics, geo-science, and engineering disciplines).
• Quantify and Map the Risks that exist now, and how they
are likely to evolve in time and space, with and without
intervention.
• Then let the education and information age loose on the
political, economic, social, psychological interplay, and
see whether we make rational, informed decisions, or run
-- like lemmings -- over the cliff in sheer denial of the
obvious.
40. Some Warnings for Urban Planners and Designers (and all of us):
• Protection (by engineered solutions) of coastal habitats
from the Rising Seas is likely to be unsuccessful in the
long run. In fact it may cause sooner or later great human
loss and instabilities.
• Adaptation by ‘Living with the Water’ (technological
solutions to a limited extent), but more likely by well
planned and socially well managed Retreat to Higher
Ground (or to regions with sufficient water supply in
drought-stricken portions of the Earth) is more likely to be
successful and sustainable.
• This requires setting aside the intellectual, financial, and
social resources commensurate with this huge task.
• This is a matter of Inter-generational Equity and Justice
• There is a Moral Imperative that currently seems to be
Lacking (Not withstanding Glimmers of Efforts like COP21).
46. Highlights
Hosseini, S., Barker, K. & Ramirez-Marquez, J. (2016), A Review of Definitions and Measures of System
Resilience. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 145, 47-61. doi: 10.1016/j.ress.2015.08.006
49. Two Theories of Resilience
Reversion to the Status Quo
1Socio-economic Resilience, Wikipedia. Retrieved 2-15-15..
Unified Theory1
50. Resilience ≠ Absolute Good
Complexity
Subjectivity
Institutional
Neoliberal:
Individual v. Collective
51. Institutional Limitations
of Resilience
“One person’s resilience may be another’s vulnerability…. If
collective alternatives are not sought, the existing institutions
that have contributed to such predicaments not only remain
unchallenged, but are relied upon to steer societal responses
based on the same underlying assumptions that first led to the
problems”
Alexander, David E. 2013. Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction: An Etymological Journey. Natural Hazards and Earth System Science, 13 (11), 2707–
2716. pg. 2714.
52. Institutional Limitations
of Resilience
"It is crucial to note that there can also be a negative dimension of having
high resilience. A system can sometimes become resilient in a less
desirable regime. For instance, urban regions besieged by impoverishment
may be stuck in “poverty traps,” where a suite of socioeconomic factors
have induced a highly robust state of squalor. Low levels of education,
endemism of substance abuse, and poor quality of governance can
generate a series of tight feedback loops that prove immensely difficult to
be overcome. The same genre of dynamics can also affect rural regions,
urban fringes, and other socio-ecological systems, manifesting in
environmental degradation and the depletion of valuable ecosystem
services. This is the case in many urban areas of the developing world,
and illustrates that resilience can work as both a vehicle of sustainability
and an agent of destitution.” [Emphasis Added]
Wu, J. & Wu, T. (2012). Ecological Resilience as a Foundation for Urban Design and Sustainability. In Pickett, S.T.A., Cadenasso, M.L. & McGrath, B.
(Eds.), Ecological Resilience and Urban Design (pp. 211-229). New York, NY.: Springer. Pg. 224.
54. Empirical Limits to Resilience
Amundsen, H. (2012). Illusions of resilience? An Analysis of Community Responses to Change in
Northern Norway. Ecology and Society 17(4), 46. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05142-170446
59. Future of Resilience Research
Hosseini, S., Barker, K. & Ramirez-Marquez, J. (2016), A Review of Definitions and Measures of System Resilience, Reliability Engineering and
System Safety, 145, 47-61. doi: 10.1016/j.ress.2015.08.006
Lam, N.S.N., Reams, M., Kenan, L., Li, Chi & Mata, L.P. (2016). Measuring Community Resilience to Coastal Hazards Along the Northern Gulf of
Mexico. Natural Hazards Review, 17(1), 04015013-1-12.
