Measuring Resilience in the Assumed City

Abstract

The malleable nature of both the idea of a city and the idea of resilience raises an important question—why measure? Resilience is assumed to be located in the physical infrastructure of specific places or as a quality of the people located there. For disasters, we are often trying to conceptualize, measure, or render legible resilience in physical structures. But what is it that we are trying to measure, and is the idea of a city reflected in these measurements? If cities are organized around something other than resilience, is resilience their natural by-product? What is necessitating the need for increased—and measured—resilience? Using interpretive policy analysis, we explored five well known disaster resilience frameworks (UNDRR’s Making Cities Resilient Campaign, UN-Habitat’s City Resilience Profiling Programme, The World Bank and GFDRR’s Resilient Cities Program, Arup and The Rockefeller Foundation’s City Resilience Index, and The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities) to identify the working definition of “city” and of “resilience.” We conclude that if the demand for cities to become more resilient is an acknowledgment of the risk produced by globalized urbanization, then the call itself is an indictment of the current state of our cities.

Waiting during disasters: Negotiating the spatio‐temporalities of resilience and recovery

“…The strategies outlined above—among them, buying generators, taking out loans, and growing vegetables—have been well‐documented in other disaster‐affected contexts, and the disaster literature has been instrumental in conceptualising these behaviours as acts of resilience that reduce and enable people to respond to and recover from the impacts of hazards (Cheek & Chmutina, 2022; Saja et al, 2021). Here, however, we have developed these debates by analysing the time and spatio‐temporal dimensions of grassroots resilience.…”

Towards a liberatory pedagogy of disaster risk reduction among built environment educators

“…Our survey results show that many opportunities are already being taken to promote discourse in DRR curricular; to grow empathy, we encourage these existing pedagogical practices and call for deeper engagement with diverse philosophical positions, particularly those outside Eurocentric traditions. Love is a model of development based on collective ties and interconnections, including all human and non-human beings. Framing DRR curricular through such interconnections can encourage students to engage with more critical perspectives – for example, critical urban theory can help students to recognise the city to be a physical manifestation of modern capitalism that reflects technocratic and authoritarian planning regimes that reaffirm unequal relationships in the BE (Cheek and Chmutina, 2022). This has implications for DRR as the solutions a love-based response might generate, with central values of care and solidarity, are diametrically opposed to the long-term consequences for those bearing vulnerability under the status quo.…”

“…Bosher et al (2016) show, for instance, that in the UK and Australia, a predominant number of DRR-related modules offered within BE programmes are optional and focused on a particular hazard. In the USA, a wide range of resilient design programmes exist (Smith et al, 2018), but these are largely focused on engineering aspects and are guided by industry performance standards and an overtly neoliberal "resilience-building" frame, which plays a legitimising role for a political economy intent on continuing risk-producing activities and buttressing the status quo (Von Cheek and Chmutina, 2022). Although many postgraduate DRR-related programmes exist globally, these mainly focus on emergency management and thus fall beyond the realm of the BE professionals, or focus on specific hazards (e.g.…”

“…These choices reflect not only the bias of a profession but also the public perception that the BE is 'value neutral'. But the BE is inherently political (Cheek and Chmutina, 2022), and can be (and indeed, is) used as an instrument of control and marginalisation. This is particularly salient when we discuss the relationship between disasters and BE.…”

Standardised indicators for “resilient cities”: the folly of devising a technical solution to a political problem

“…Funding and political will are often absent. There is also a gap between the actual activities that effectively take place and both the messages of urgency (characteristic of UN agencies and other international organisations) and frameworks to guide governments and municipalities on what should be done (Kelman, 2020; Marlow et al , 2022; Cheek and Chmutina, 2022). Most international organisations have consistently argued that to promote and mainstream urban resilience, it is necessary to monitor the effectiveness of adaptive measures – and this can be best done through the implementation of standardised indicators (Figueiredo et al , 2018).…”