ABSTRACT
Disasters periodically damage or destroy parts of cities or even entire city regions. Cities experience both natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis, and earthquakes, and human-made disasters like oil spills, factory explosions, and even nuclear reactor meltdowns.
In this article, written for The City Reader in 2014, Lawrence Vale, a Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of MIT’s Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI), critiques the concept of resilience and proposes a more sharply focused approach to keep it a bounded and useful concept rather than a meaningless cliché.
Vale argues that the concept of resilience can contribute to: (a) theory and a better understanding of cities, (b) urban planning and design practice to design cities to minimize damage from disasters and permit them to recover as fully and quickly as possible, and (c) analytic tools against which plans and policies can be evaluated. Resilience may be applied at different scales from individual buildings to neighborhoods, cities, and entire city regions. Physically, resilient built environments can recover from disasters and adapt to changed conditions better than less resilient ones. Cities with governance structures designed to be resilient will perform better than rigid structures unable to respond to shocks. If cities are to respond effectively to emergencies, Vale argues that they need planning decision support systems that can quickly provide good data on which sound decisions can be based. They also need flexible governmental and administrative structures that can adapt quickly, and good relationships among national, subnational, and local governments and citizens.
