First, Explain Resilience
Camden New Jersey (1968) remains resilient through major political, economic, and social harms. Children play in a Cinderella coach amidst older neighborhood rowhouses.
Start With Understanding
What does it mean for a community to be resilient? How does a community ‘get there’? What global communities exemplify resilience, and what actions should other communities adopt to follow those exemplars?
The Rockefeller Foundation brought community resilience to the forefront in 2013 with its launch of 100 Resilient Cities, an effort to “help more cities build resilience to the physical, social, and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century”. The funding and network strategy provided a forum for one hundred cities to identify specific challenges and then find pathways to bounce back in response to threatening events. Yet this robust program was not positioned to provide mainstream media a digestible soundbite as to what makes a city resilient.
In order for places to sustain human life, our cities (and therefore the individuals who populate our cities) must fulfill three basic physiological needs: food, water, and shelter. If any one of these physiological needs are taken from us, how does one replace it? How does one recover? How do communities sustain themselves when food, water, or shelter go missing? How do communities recover or bounce back from that loss?
To be sustainable, we must secure food, water, and shelter for those today and for those tomorrow. We cannot become resilient in the absence of these provisions. But resilience requires more than just food, water, and shelter. These physiological necessities provide a foundation for resilience, but they are just the first building blocks. Long-term community resilience needs much more.
And so we begin a long, possibly never-ending, story.
Listen to Discussions of Resilience
Before we can fully understand how others understand the concept of “resilience”, we must listen to how people discuss the idea. Listening to the way people use words like “resilience” and “sustainability” increases our understanding. During disasters or existential threats, like pandemics, Americans use the word “resilience” to refer to individuals. While individual humans, one-by-one, can become resilient, for planners, “resilience” must be recognized as an attribute of communities. This shift in thinking, from “individual resilience” to “community resilience” changes our perspective dramatically.
Use of the word “resilience” seems new, but the actual places to which it refers have existed for centuries. Some existing cities have lasted over 5,000 years. These long-lived cities were always “resilient” even though the word “resilience”, or a synonym, was not in common usage. Long-lived cities, and the places within them, were sustained years before phrases like “alternative energy”, “renewables”, or “energy management” entered contemporary language. Such language may seem new — not because the ideas are new but because we have forgotten the old ideas.
Discussions of resilience usually include related words such as “sustainability”, “mitigation”, and “adaptation”. Sometimes, the overlap among these concepts is imprecise and therefore confusing. Different professions, disciplines, and sciences use these words in different ways. Multiple meanings can be difficult to navigate.
This diagram may help an audience understand that the concepts of resilience, adaptation, sustainability, and mitigation are not mutually exclusive actions but rather part of an integrated, overlapping set of actions. Of note is the word “resile”: a rarely used active verb that implies bouncing back from a harmful event.
The lack of easily understood language and concepts handicaps planners. It becomes harder to convince the general public (including decision-makers) to be resilient (or to act sustainably, or to mitigate future problems, or to adapt to threatening changes). Policy discussions of resilience become more complex with the use of these overlapping terms like “sustainability”, “mitigation”, and “adaptation”.
Other ambiguities with the definition of “resilience” (or its companion terms) arise if we ask: “What does resilience actually look like?” “Resilience” has no standard “look and feel”. Does one neighborhood in your city “look and feel” resilient but another neighborhood does not? Which neighborhood seems resilient? Is it the wealthiest, the oldest, something else? Is an area resilient because of its infrastructure, its community’s reverence for it, or its self-sufficiency? Our inability to distinguish clearly, in common language, concepts like “sustainability”, “mitigation”, and “adaptation” remains the tricky part in listening to discussions of resilience.
Define Resilience In Terms Of Action
Might we define community “resilience” simply as “the ability to thrive in the face of change?” In abstract cases, the answer is “yes,” but in practice many cases remain unclear:
a dramatic change might help one neighborhood to thrive and another to suffer,
sometimes harmful community changes are minor and do not threaten a community’s ability to thrive,
actions needed by one neighborhood to thrive may make an adjoining neighborhood less resilient.
Definitions of “sustainability” create other quandaries. A simple definition states sustainability as “the ability to continue important functions indefinitely without a decline in quality”. But what makes a community function “important”? For example, is “storage” of cars an important function needed to sustain our communities indefinitely? Is storing junk in our basements important? What about storing great works of art in a basement? Or food supplies?
Many people use the terms “sustainability” and “resilience” almost interchangeably. In 2023, a website developed by ESRI (https://www.esri.com/en-us/industries/blog/articles/resilience-and-sustainability-the-definitions/) described the difference between the two terms like this:
While sustainability looks at how current generations can meet their needs without compromising that ability for future generations, resilience considers a system’s ability to prepare for threats, to absorb impacts, and to recover and adapt after disruptive events.
One effective way to distinguish “sustainability” and “resilience” uses an analogy to individual health care: “preventive” health care helps “sustain” us while “therapeutic” health care implies our well-being has been harmed and “resilient” treatment is needed to recover. In this framework, we can view “sustainability” and “resilience” as two broad, sometime overlapping, categories:
(a) sustainability: actions that sustain, rather than degrade, the helpful, supportive conditions in our communities and
(b) resilience: actions that help us bounce back from harmful changes in our communities.
Planners should focus on specific actions that help implement both sustainable and resilient communities. Specific actions (rather than abstract concepts) may lead to a better understanding and more productive outcomes. Planners must explain such choices and consequences effectively, even when inconvenient, complex, or unpopular. Actionable steps toward resilience and sustainability are often nested within broader topics, watering down the potential impact. It is essential not to treat resilience or sustainability as conceptual “silos” that often result in so-called “shelf plans” that get ignored by decision-makers.
Find Resilient Places (that may be essential)
The long-term resilience of different population groups often rests upon the types of places they occupy. Typical places that enable and facilitate resilience include streets, neighborhoods, districts, towns and cities, corridors and regions. Resilient places survive wars, famines, floods, gentrification, recessions, earthquakes and political upheavals. Some “essential” cities sustain themselves for centuries, such as national capitals, financial centers, cultural centers, major ports, and so on. Moreover, essential places arise around the globe, in different centuries and civilizations.
Professional planners should learn how such a multitude of places “work,” why some seem more resilient and some less so. In practice, smaller places often seem the most relevant places for planners. The most impactful local places may include local streets, neighborhoods, and even a crossroad or corner store — each contributing to the long-term sustainability of a particular community. The essential need for these places derives from the local culture, not just technology, social organization, or commerce.
How much would Manhattan regret the absence of Central Park, Broadway or Times Square? What about Chicago’s Loop or the Magnificent Mile, Washington D.C.’s Mall, San Antonio’s Riverwalk, Venice’s Grand Canal, or New Orleans’ Bourbon Street? Can major cities stay resilient without a major sports franchise/facility? Has Rome been more sustainable because of a Colosseum?
And what about locally essential places like the corner café, local bar, hardware store, beauty salon, or grocery where neighbors share insights that help each other survive and thrive? While internationally recognized essential places (like UNESCO’s World Heritage sites) seem self-evident, the planner’s bigger challenge requires applying this way of thinking at the local level. The loss of a local place (and the associated community regret) often involves a local park, school, museum, historic house, lake, forest, grove, or even one tree. Local historic and environmental preservation may seem more difficult and less well-recognized but it may be the most important place to build a foundation of resilience and expand the breadth and depth of resilient places.
Market photos include Seattle, Copenhagen, Toronto, Jerusalem, Athens, Milwaukee, Venice, and Vancouver — all resilient (1976 - 2002)
Socially resilient places come in all shapes and sizes — do you know it when you see it?
Perhaps “social” resilience is the most complex component of resilient places. There are many ways to think about the social aspects of resilient places. For example, face-to-face markets provide resilient places almost universally. Farmers markets, public markets, kiosks, enclosed market halls, corner stores — all create a face-to-face social and economic vitality. The nature of such places requires environmental efficiency in the form of easy, well-used pedestrian access and easily distributed goods and services. Such places fit naturally into an existing urban area (they do not require a super-block of open space) and often they are found next to parks, squares and existing gathering places.
Not every place, however, can or should become resilient. Too much, or too little, change can be harmful. So how do planners make such choices? What place in your city represents a long-lasting favorite street or park? Is a potential “resilient” place a cultural necessity for the whole community or only a community subset? Does it matter? One quick metric for estimating the necessity of a place for sustainability is the length of time a place has existed. Specifically, a place that has lasted for several generations represents a good candidate for long term sustainability.
Topic Summary
Start With Understanding
Listen to Discussions of Resilience
Define Resilience In Terms Of Actions
Find Resilient Places (that may be essential)