What Do We Mean When We Speak of Resilience?
Resilience. Everything can be resilient. Well, it seems that way anyway. Everything, from yoghurt drinks, sofas and the worst excesses of British culture to cities, have all been associated with the qualities of resilience. For resilience is a word which, as a result of the pandemic, has casually slid into the everyday, into our consciousness and into our conversations. But, what do we mean when we speak of resilience? An easy question with an obvious answer perhaps, for doesn’t it just mean that you are hard to knock over, and when you are on the floor you bounce back on your feet? Yes, it does; well partially.
This is what is known as ‘engineering’ resilience, which according to Carl Folke and others “refers to the return rate to equilibrium upon a perturbation”; i.e, how quickly something returns to its original state after a disturbance. Think of a stress ball. When you squeeze it, its shape deforms and when you let it go, it pops back into being round, ready for the next tedious phone call or bout of procrastination. A stress ball, or a steel girder, are designed to possess the same resilient traits of absorption of a perturbation and a return to a fixed state of equilibrium. If they fail to return to this state, then they are insufficiently resilient; no one wants an unsqueezable, non-resilient stress ball.
This term, state of equilibrium, is essential in understanding resilience, and for an engineered product the return to equilibrium is the essence of resilience. But, what if there is more to resilience than simply ‘bouncing back’? An example where resilience does not concern returning to a state of equilibrium can be found in the creation of artificial reefs. An artificial reef is created by sinking unwanted man made objects — often boats or public transportation vehicles — in order to create new habitats for aquatic life. Now, if you are a fish carrying out your daily business and a rusty old barge crashes into the sediment next to you, your day and, by extension your state of equilibrium, has changed. Yet, as anyone who has an interest in abandoned buildings will be aware, nature is robust and will absorb any shocks and will continue on unabated. This is ‘ecological’ resilience.
C.S Holling — whose 1973 paper Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems is “often cited as the origin of modern resilience theory” — defined ecological resilience as “the magnitude of the disturbance that can be absorbed before the system changes its structure”. Unlike engineered resilience, which is concerned with bouncing back towards perceived normality, ecological resilience is preoccupied with robustness and absorbing shocks, and subsequently towards establishing a new state of equilibrium. Before the implementation of the artificial reef there was one ecosystem, and after the boat sank and the various creatures gained a new home, there was a new ecosystem which had absorbed the wreck. However, what if there is no state of equilibrium to begin with?
A quotation I often go back to when writing about cities comes from Janet Abu Lughod, who said that “cities are processes, not products”. This remark encapsulates an inescapable essence of cities and urbanism in general; they never stay still. When the authorities seek to preserve a section, or building within a city, they are embalming it from the processes which created it. Marco D’eramo sums up this phenomenon succinctly when discussing the granting of UNESCO World Heritage Status by dramatically stating that “once the label is affixed, the city’s life is snuffed out; it is ready for taxidermy”. So, cities perpetually grow, develop, expand and contract — for instance, roughly 1,273 people each day moved to Lagos in 2020. Therefore, through constant change, there isn’t a state of equilibrium, but rather resilience is viewed as ‘evolutionary’.
According to Duarte Marques Nunes and others, what distinguishes evolutionary resilience from the engineered or ecological, are three key features: “‘adaptive capacity’, which is the ability to generate new ways of operating; ‘self-organisation’, which is the capacity to create order from local systemic interactions; and ‘learning’, which is the capacity to encourage novelty, innovation and experimentation”. Whereas engineered resilience is bouncing back and ecological resilience is robust, evolutionary resilience is concerned with learning lessons and in essence, evolving whilst ‘bouncing forward’.
An example of this can be observed in the strategies produced by cities across the globe as a part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities project, which wrapped up in 2019. Through my own research towards my PhD thesis, I have observed a correlation between recent events and the selection of the main threats facing the city. These threats are identified as either shocks or stressors by a multi-stakeholder process which includes government, academia, business leaders, community organisations and members of the public. Shocks are external threats which happen suddenly such as earthquakes, floods, or critical infrastructure breakdowns, whereas stressors are slow burning issues which weaken the ability to respond to shocks, such as climate change, poverty/social inequality and aging infrastructure.
An example of a city experiencing certain shocks and developing resilience against them can be seen in L.A and the city’s history of earthquakes. Although there is much work to do, the city has implemented a range of measures — as a component of a 96 action, city wide resilience strategy — to enhance the city’s resilience to the effects of two tectonic plates slipping past one another. These include social measures such as ‘a coordinated preparedness campaign that encourages Angelenos to take actions that improve their resilience’, to the city working ‘with earthquake experts to share and implement best practices across city agencies [in order] to fortify the built environment and improve the City’s capacity to prepare for and respond to earthquakes’.
Now the above example may be an obvious case of being resilient, but, it shows the application of lived experience and knowledge in assuaging the worst impacts of natural shocks. If the city adopted a solely ‘engineering’ perception of resilience, they would just rebuild the buildings which collapsed as a result of an earthquake, and not enhance them in any way. Neither would they take the prior experience of earthquakes and apply them to the present if they took a solely ‘ecological’ view of how to be resilient. The city would learn to live with the rubble and continue on otherwise.
The above paragraphs detail three kinds of resilience — engineering, ecological and evolutionary. These three strands of resilience thought are apparent in the best definition I have seen of urban resilience, which comes from the work of Sara Meerow and others
Urban resilience refers to the ability of an urban system and all its constituent socio-ecological and socio-technical networks across temporal and spatial scales-to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity.
This definition entwines all three forms of resilience. From the ability to ‘rapidly return to desired functions’ found in engineering resilience, and the notion of ‘adapting to change’ which is essential in ecological resilience to the transformability of evolutionary resilience — they are all there.
The following question then, is how do we become more resilient? The most impressive book I have read on the subject of resilience is David Chandler’s 2014 work Resilience: The Governance of Complexity, which takes a unique view on resilience and the question of enhancing it. Early on Chandler argues that any divide between subject and object is arbitrary, through his “understanding [of] resilience as an interactive process of relational adaption. The subject does not merely survive through its own inner resources; the subject survives and thrives on the basis of its ability to adapt or dynamically relate to its socio-ecological environment”. In short, we as individuals — or as communities or organisations etc. — are shaped by the world around us, and therefore it is on us to relate to those surroundings; it is through this relation that resilience arises.
An example of this comes later in the book, where Chandler argues that “no event can be separated from the social-environmental evolutionary process from which it is part”. Be it an earthquake or a terrorist attack, the shock exists within the ‘social-environmental’ milieu of where it takes place. Therefore, these events are considered to be “fragile moments which shine a light on the complexity of the world, in which social interconnections are revealed as they truly are”. Therefore, a shock reveals the underlying reality of the place affected. If we take this notion and apply it to resilience thinking in general we could, as Chandler does, view it “as a way of [harnessing] the forces of reality and to latch on to and engage the organic processes at work in society, at every level from the global to the local”. It is through this practice that we are able to accurately glean insights from the very things we are seeking to make resilient.
Therefore, to round this essay up, what do we mean when we say resilience? Well, this depends on the context in which we speak. If we want to make a girder resilient, we need to ensure it returns to its original shape and not ‘adapt’ to its new bent form; otherwise the building will collapse. If we want to understand an ecosystem’s resilience to climate change, we won’t focus on its ability to return to how things were, but rather, we will focus on how it adapts to the emerging stressors being exerted upon it. What of our cities? Well, we will focus on how they adapt and grow by learning the lessons which arise from shocks and stressors, not how we can make them as they were or how we could adapt to live amongst rubble for instance.
Ultimately, my view is as such, for us to be resilient, we need to be self-reflexive, we need to be aware of our position in the world which surrounds us and critically examine what works and what goes wrong when it hits the fan, in order for us to return to our own state of perpetually changing equilibrium. Yet, the ability to be, and in a sense luxury of being self-reflexive, is something which takes education, which in turn takes time, which costs money. Time and money are not uniformly distributed across society. Therefore, when I speak of resilience, I speak of distributing the opportunity of self-reflexivity to all people. This requires assuaging the social stressors which exacerbate the impacts of shocks, which includes (but not being limited to) the alleviation of inequality — for why are some able to be resilient, but not others? — enhancing access to essentials, enhancing community cohesion and wealth distribution to ensure poorer residents aren’t financially snowed under when a shock happens. How these initiatives develop will vary from place to place, but for people, communities, organisations, cities and nations to be more resilient, it is essential that they do.
Resilience is more than just being able to bounce back or be tough. It is all about learning how to effectively bounce back, and also adapt and to bounce forward in the face of whatever is presented to us, whilst ultimately, ensuring that everyone is able to do so as well.
By Will Brown
Doctoral Researcher — Loughborough University
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