ABSTRACT
Sustainability and resilience are two design paradigms that have attempted to frame relationships between the built environment and its ecological and social context. Both address complexity, design for the long-term, and suggest an ethical framework for action. However, the two suggest different emphases and modes of operation, which are at times compatible and at times in conflict, and usually conflated. Sustainability has both a “strong” and “weak” meaning, suggesting either a system of bounded growth or a system of balanced growth and conservation, respectively. Resilience has both an engineering sense of the term, meaning an ability to return to original shape, and an ecological sense, which suggests a continual cycle of growth and crisis. This chapter uses a subject-object-mechanism framework to assess the extent to which each of these terms is manifested through the primary sustainability and resilience planning document for New York City.
