Resilience

The concepts of resilience and the “resilient city” have gained considerable currency in recent years among urbanists, not only as they relate to ecological sustainability but also in terms of urban disaster planning and adaptations to the anticipated threats of the 21st century, among them peak oil and climate change. While resilience emerged from the ecological sciences in the 1970s, it is now widely discussed in many disciplines, and interest in its application to cities has surged since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the 2003 North American power blackout, and Hurricane Katrina. The term is sometime [Page 376]used interchangeably with sustainability, and while they may be closely related in practice, they are distinct, both semantically and theoretically. For example, while sustainability is always considered ...