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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters from 2008 by Susan Cutter, Lindsey Barnes, Melissa Berry, Christopher Burton, Elijah Evans, Eric Tate, and Jennifer Webb, published in the Global Environmental Change journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see a framework for disaster resilience of place model. This article investigates and proposes a comparative assessment for disaster resilience at the local or community level with a set of variables for easier implementation.

Although there may be recognition of the hazards in many communities, risk reduction and vulnerability often are not salient concerns until after the disaster occurs. Residents have other issues that assume priority and local elected officials do not want to dwell on the hazard vulnerability of their communities as it might hurt economic investment and growth. However, there seems to be a shift in governmental agencies from disaster vulnerability to disaster resilience, as a more proactive and positive expression of community engagement with natural hazard reduction. While numerous research efforts have assessed various dimensions of community resilience, challenges remain in the development of consistent factors or standard metrics that can be used to evaluate the disaster resilience of communities. This paper tries to provide a conceptual framework for natural disaster resilience drawn from the global change, hazards, political ecology, ecosystems and planning literatures and describe a candidate set of variables for measuring resilience based on the same literature.

In the US, the devastating 1964 Alaskan earthquake started the disaster resilience assessments. In 1999, the second assessment emphasized the interactive nature of natural and human systems, the built environment, and the role of human agency in producing hazards and disasters. The importance of unsustainable environmental practices in increasing societal vulnerability was recognised, especially as it reduces the opportunity for achieving disaster-resistant communities. The 90s were internationally also about disaster risk reduction which resulted in the Millennium Declaration of 2000 and the Millennium Development goals. Based on these, there is an increasing awareness of the integral link between the reduction of both poverty and natural disasters.

Vulnerability and resilience have many different definitions. However, the authors gave their definitions for these concepts in their research domain. Vulnerability is the pre-event inherent characteristics of social systems that create potential for harm. On the other hand, resilience is the ability of a social system to respond and recover from disasters and include those inherent conditions that allow the system to absorb impacts and cope with an event, as well as post-event, and the adaptive processes that facilitate the ability of the social system to re-organise, change and learn in response to ta threat. Although vulnerability and resilience are dynamic processes, for measurement purposes are often viewed as static phenomena. Furthermore, adaptive capacity is often incorporated with resilience, which is the ability of a system to adjust to change, moderate the effects and cope with a disturbance, but this idea is less prevalent in the hazard mitigation field, where mitigation is similar to adaptation with reducing or avoiding the risks.

The researchers viewed communities as the totality of social system interactions within a defined geographic space, such as a neighbourhood or a city. But these communities can have many different sub-communities with different levels of vulnerability and resilience that could result in recovery disparities. The new model tries to capture such disparities by focusing on the place and the spatial interactions among the social system, built environment, and natural processes. The suggested disaster resilience of place, or DROP for short, model is designed to present the relationship between vulnerability and resilience and can be applied to address real-world problems in local communities.

The resilience of a community is inextricably linked to the condition of the environment and the treatment of its resources; therefore, the concept of sustainability is central to studies of resilience. Here, sustainability is defined as the ability to tolerate and overcome damage, diminished productivity, and reduced quality of life from an extreme event without significant outside assistance. An environment stressed by unsustainable practices may experience more severe environmental hazards.

Additionally, the scale, unit and temporal variability change over the previous assessments. The risks and disasters can be global, but the unit of analysis varies from the individual to the continental. The rates of onset of the initiating event measured in minutes to years if not decades is another confounding issue in resilience. Rapid onset events, such as hurricanes or earthquakes require an immediate response and the time for change or modification in behaviours and practices, while slow onset hazards, such as global temperature variations, sea level rise, droughts are not location or time specific. These characteristics make resilience and vulnerability assessments challenging and varying.

The disaster resilience of place, or DROP model is a new conceptualisation of natural disaster resilience. The DROP was created to address natural hazards, but could be adapted to other onset events, such as terrorism or droughts. The DROP focuses on resilience at the community level and the main focus is on the social resilience of places with the acknowledgment that other forms of resilience exist. Natural systems, social systems, and the built environment are interconnected and therefore their separation is arbitrary. Human actions impact the state of the environment, and in turn a degraded environment provides less protection against hazards. Thus, DROP presents resilience as both an inherent or antecedent condition and a process. While the DROP is place-based, there are other external factors that can also influence the community resilience level.

The DROP starts with the antecedent conditions with inherent vulnerability and resilience within the social, built environment, and natural systems. Then the disaster happens with its own characteristics and immediate effects which are attenuated with coping responses. The total hazard impact is a cumulative effect of the antecedent conditions, the event characteristics, and the coping responses. The overall local impact can be moderated by the absorptive capacity of the community, influenced by the coping responses. The community’s adaptive resilience than can get through the effects with improvisation or social learning, aka collective actions which is different from the lessons learned included in the antecedent conditions. The recovery levels vary based on the community’s absorptive capacity. Then, the recovery and the social learning influences the state of the social, natural and built environmental systems and become the antecedent conditions for the next event. Preparedness and mitigation can be enhanced by social learnings, and preparedness and mitigation can enhance the antecedent conditions.

For community resilience indicators, the authors proposed six dimensions with candidate variables, each with their advantages and disadvantages. The ecological dimension could be assessed through wetlands acreage and loss, erosion rates, percentage of impervious surface, biodiversity, and coastal defense structures. The social dimension can be evaluated through demographics, social network and social embeddedness, community values-cohesion, and faith-based organisations. The economic dimension needs to include employment, value of property, wealth generation and municipal finance and revenues variables. The institutional dimension could be investigated through participation in hazard reduction programs, hazard mitigation plans, emergency services, zoning and building standards, emergency response plans, interoperable communications, and continuity of operations plans. The infrastructure domain can be assessed through lifelines and critical infrastructure, transportation network, residential housing stock and age, and commercial and manufacturing establishments. Finally, community competence domain could include local understanding of risks, counselling services, absence of psychopathologies like alcohol and drug, health and wellness, and quality of life variables.

The DROP model presents resilience as a dynamic process dependent on antecedent conditions, the disaster’s severity, time between hazards, and influences from exogenous factors. Although conceptually dynamic, immediately preceding the disaster, the degree of recovery leads to the static depiction of the antecedent conditions. The application of such models could provide sound measurements for assessing what makes some places more resilient in the face of natural disasters than others and would permit the comparison of community resilience over time and across space using the same set of measures. It should provide the guidance for implementing more sustainable practices that empower local communities to take their risks seriously and at the same time provide guidance on the structural, economic, social, and environmental policy changes needed to enhance their own resilience.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. The suggested new disaster resilience of place, or DROP model is based on resilience, vulnerability, absorptive capacity and social learnings, with mitigation and preparedness to assess disaster resilience of communities and places in a continuous fashion.
2. Disaster resilience can be enhanced with the proper preparation, learnings, and mitigation.
3. Such assessment can be the guidance for implementing more sustainable practices to empower communities and enhance disaster resilience.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. Why is it so risky to admit that a place needs better disaster resilience? Wouldn’t the preparation and reassurance of such events’ mitigation be more desirable? Wouldn’t such steps attract more people and investment to places?
2. How resilient is your community and place? Do you have ideas or suggestions how it can be enhanced?

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