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Are you interested in rethinking resilience?

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Our summary today works with 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.

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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. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

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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. However, living through the New Zealand earthquakes, Hayward discovered the problems with the concept itself. Particularly, we could ask resilience of what, and for whom? Disasters can be a series of slow, cumulative, almost imperceptible daily changes like climate change or a sudden cataclysmic event like an earthquake. When disasters threaten a community, these challenges test more than the physical resilience. But they also bring the opportunity for new insight and a chance to rethink basic principles. The Christchurch earthquakes are the biggest natural disasters and the community living there does not need to define resilience, they live it.

Building on these experiences, Hayward calls for expanding the political imagination about resilience to include ideas of compassion and political resistance for social justice and alternative visions of hope. Social resilience is not just about persistence or robustness in the face of disturbance. Resilience is increasingly used to understand how communities can innovative in the face of complex fast or slow changes by drawing on institutional memories and their ability to self-organise, recombine structures and processes, renew systems and find new trajectories. Viewing in this way, disturbance creates opportunity for doing new things, for innovation and for development.

Resilience in individuals can be the capacity to bounce back from adversities or to maintain competent functioning despite an interfering emotionality, positive adaptation in circumstances. However, scholars also noted that resilience as a personal quality must be treated with caution. Although some stress may be character-building, the expectation of personal resilience can mistakenly imply that suffering and grief are a matter of personal responsibility, or that experiencing vulnerability is an indicator of failure. Individualising resilience can distract us from understanding resilience as a product of interpersonal relationships forged in supportive social and physical environments. So human resilience is best understood as the interrelationships among the individuals and their community, environment, and social institutions.

Moreover, although the definitions of resilience in the ecological sciences and psychology capture something of the determination experienced in Hayward’s community, the concept fails to capture the subtle strength of compassion which was also present, as an acknowledgement of the shared vulnerability. According to Hayward, emphasis on personal resilience can undermined the groundswell of community energy that was ignited in the city in the face of shared suffering. With the collaboration following the disaster, people interacted more across previous differences and professional siloes, learning from and helping each other.

The most inspiring community response for Hayward was the formation of a large group of young volunteers led by then university student Sam Johnson. Johnson used previous experiences of a community organiser, and created a remarkable facebook campaign overnight to connect residents in need with students who could help. This student volunteer army was deployed to assist by cleaning up the suburbs, and even two and a half years after the disaster, the student army is still an active local youth trust, now experimenting with a range of social service volunteering projects.

Unfortunately, too often a systems approach to resilience celebrates a more far-reaching, so-called transformative or comprehensive approach to decision-making by professionals, in which significant long-term change is proposed for communities while they are still struggling to regain their breath and are not yet able to think of the longer term. This approach also lacks the grass-roots projects and creates tensions when impersonal, apolitical and universal concepts or models of science are applied to the very political, local, and everyday experiences of human life.

Resilience also seems to be an inadequate lens through which to view questions of political power, justice and inequality. Many of the communities that are most vulnerable to physical hazards are doubly exposed to economic and social risks. However, the language of resilience too often fails to reflect the non-material values of the community, like iconic places and cultural treasures. Moreover, resilience can be conservative often privileging the established social structures as defined by external experts, like urban and disaster planners. The spectre that planning for resilience might simply secure unsustainable economic practices reminds us why it is important we not eschew normative or moral debate, but continue to ask: resilience of what and for whom?

Finding tools to fight out of submission is proving very important in the Christchurch context. Elections were delayed with 5 years so previous decision-makers remained to allocate resources and a centralised government department marginalised the role of locally elected urban authorities in replanning the city. In this process, institutional memory was eroded and pre-existing lines of communication were disrupted. Most disturbing, these decisions weakened the effective public accountability and scrutiny because few people in the community say that they understand who makes decisions now and how those decisions are made. This seems the antithesis of resilience planning.

Resilience research is often depoliticised. Communities are encouraged to become economically resilient by engaging in market economy, but this also undermines the resilience of indigenous or local economies. With the established market thinking, it is challenging to venture into new thinking, to question the status quo and the basic premises of continued material consumption and growth, for example. Even if a system is resilient to an external shock through such decisions, the community vulnerability can be greatly exacerbated through the internal relationships of class, gender and ethnic inequalities.

Finally, in Hayward’s observation, resilience is often used to justify authorities making decisions quickly and measuring their impact on recovery by the speed with which the city returns to a new normal or experiences certainty – even if many are still grieving. In reality this political speed comes at a steep democratic price. The drive for efficiency is all too frequently used to justify expert command-and-control decision-making with little or no meaningful local scrutiny on community leadership in decision-making.

To address emerging challenges, citizens will need more than resilience, we will need political imagination, creativity and courage. 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. It is the power of political imagination, protest and agency, that we need to challenge the drivers of social and economic change that threaten to destabilise our climate, increase social inequality, and degrade our environment.

If as a society we wish to support this potential for effective political action, we do not need to wait for an earthquake. Our first steps might include rethinking our employment and social policies in ways that are more just, reducing financial insecurity and social isolation, to effect political change and to rediscover the process of forging new community visions of the common good. 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.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, 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.

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

1. What does resilience mean to you on an individual level?
2. What does resilience mean to you on the community level?
3. What do you think would be beneficial beside resilience for your community?
4. How are you helping yourself and your community become prosperous and flourishing?

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