ABSTRACT
The best outcome for communities occurs when their resilience and sustainability strategies are aligned. Yet, resilient and sustainable development has significant issues to overcome. Challenges include reduction in impacts to ecological systems, governance, the time it takes to replace the existing infrastructure through normal rates of renewal, and changing current practices. Additionally, current design practice does not address consideration of damage levels and associated impacts on recovery of building functions – an essential element of resilience. When strategies and solutions for resilience and sustainability goals are aligned, there will be benefits at the community and individual levels, and a reduction in unintended consequences from competing goals.
This chapter focuses on three key issues. First, any community approach needs a system of systems perspective that includes dependencies and consequences. Second, infrastructure needs to be designed to minimize damage and rapidly recover from hazard events. Third, fundamental inequities need to be addressed for those who are impacted by failed infrastructure and have the least capacity to recover. These issues are explored by considering the concepts of resilient and sustainable communities, how changing conditions in the natural and built environment and sustained stressors may require new approaches, and suggests methods and tools to advance community resilience and sustainability. Topics include paradigms and associated challenges in resilience and sustainability practices, considerations related to traditional approaches and changing conditions, the impacts of nonstationary processes on current practices, the local community perspective for developing unified resilience and sustainability goals, and next steps toward advancing community resilience and sustainability.
