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Find the transcript through this link.

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Are you interested in rethinking resilience?

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Summary of the article titled Rethinking resilience: Reflections on the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, 2010 and 2011 from 2013 by Bronwyn Mary Hayward, published in the Ecology and Society journal.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how to rethink resilience after natural disasters. This article presents calls for expanding political imagination about resilience, to include areas of compassion and political resistance.

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

1. Human resilience is best understood as the interrelationships among the individuals and their community, environment, and social institutions and we need to always ask: resilience of what and for whom?
2. Regardless of charges against people not being able to imagine for the long term, they are already exercising their political agency or their ability to imagine and effect desired change in new ways.
3. Human prosperity and flourishing require more than resilience – it requires creative political imagination and agency, the ability to take action to shape our life circumstances.

Find the article through ⁠this link⁠.

Abstract: Resilience has emerged as a policy response in an era of public concern about disasters and risks that include fear of terrorism and environmental or economic catastrophe. Resilience is both a refreshing and a problematic concept. It is refreshing in that it creates new opportunities for interdisciplinary research and vividly reminds us that the material world matters in our social lives, political economy, and urban planning. However, the concept of resilience is also problematic. Widespread, uncritical calls for greater resilience in response to environmental, economic, and social challenges often obscure significant questions of political power. In particular, we may ask, resilience of what, and for whom? My reflection here was written in the context of the ongoing grief, disruption, and community protest in my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, a city that experienced 59 earthquakes of magnitude 5 or more, and over 3800 aftershocks of magnitude 3 or greater between September 2010 and September 2012. From this perspective, I call for expanding our political imagination about resilience, to include ideas of compassion and political resistance. In my observation, both compassion, expressed as shared vulnerability, and resistance, experienced as community mobilization against perceived injustice, have been vital elements of grassroots community recovery.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• ⁠No.020R – Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder⁠;
• ⁠No.023R – Smart cities and disaster resilience⁠;
• ⁠No.165 – Interview with Michael Healy⁠, the Smart Cities Programme Manager at Christchurch City Council;

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