Resilience, what's that again?

Tonight's AIA Dallas Architecture on Tap focused on the topic of resilience (or resiliency). The Communities by Design committee put together a diverse panel, featuring Krista Nightengale from The Better Block, Tom Reisenbichler of Perkins+Will and David Whitley from DRW Planning Studio. Maggie Parker of the TREC Community Fund moderated. In my experience, resilience has been notoriously difficult to define and this discussion proved little different. Maggie offered the definition of the Rockefeller Foundation's (now defunct) 100 Resilient Cities initiative to open the discussion:

“the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.”

I found the conversation that followed to be interesting, but a bit too wide ranging to lead to any specific or actionable insights. David mentioned floating infrastructure in New Orleans. Tom reached beyond hospitals as critical infrastructure to describe healthcare as just one part of a community's ecosystem. This felt a bit closer to the big point. Krista talked about people knowing their neighbors, toward the end of being able to rely on each other during a crisis. Transit and land use came up. Finally, engagement, that vaguest of measures, was the ending point.

We can compare the Rockefeller Foundation's definition to the "original" definition of sustainable development from The Brundtland Report:

"development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Both definitions compare current abilities with the vagaries of the future. The Rockefeller definition appears more specific by identifying the components of a city as well as giving some shape to the issues of the future. I don't believe the additional terminology provides a meaningful distinction between the two ideas. I do believe this continuing difficulty reflects a truth that may be more subtle. Resilience and sustainability are very much the same thing, viewed over differing timescales. Generally, they are both the ability of a system to maintain its functions despite outside disruptions. What differs is how long. In systems theory, this is a nested hierarchy. A robust system is relatively discrete and can take a knock over the short term (like a bridge under the stress of an overloaded truck). A resilient system can respond to a larger, slower moving disturbance (a hospital in a blackout or a city facing a hurricane). A sustainable system responds to the slowest but most broadest of threats (the availability of water, food, and energy, changing demographics, rising sea levels). The boundaries between those domains will never be clearly defined as every complex system is deeply interconnected.

I'll finish on the same note, but a different emphasis. To build robust, resilient, and sustainable communities, we need to engage. But it has to be across disciplinary boundaries and in public. There are board and commission vacancies in every city and county government in this region. Architects should be on those boards, listening for opportunity and reaching out to make connections.