What is Resilience?

With over 30 million hits on Google, it seems resilience has arrived. But the search continues for a definition of resilience that applies to its varied contexts and situations.

Recovery, bouncing back, re-grouping or coping come up as definitions of resilience. Yet, if significant social, economic or environmental change can transform a whole community, are such words adequate to explain resilience? Maybe resilience is more about shaping change, not just adapting to it.

One of our favorite definitions of resilience at the Center for Resilient Cities comes from the book Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change by Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer:

 


Courtesy of Island Press.


 In a resilient city every step of development and redevelopment of the city will make it more sustainable: it will reduce its ecological footprint (consumption of land, water, materials, and energy, especially the oil so critical to their economies, and the outpost of waste and emissions) while simultaneously improving its quality of life (environment, health, housing, employment, community) so that it can better fit within the capacities of local, regional, and global ecosystems. Resilience needs to be applied to all the natural resources on which cities rely.

There is also debate regarding who or what is resilient. Some researchers and practitioners see resilience as a characteristic of an individual. Others believe resilience applies to the context in which an individual functions or the community in which he/she lives. Can we agree that the capacities to perceive change and to shape a response are fundamental to resilience? Building that awareness of change and the capacity to respond in a way which benefits everyone is central to the Center for Resilient Cities’s work.

Questions remain. In a world of persistent social, economic and environmental change, does resilience mean adaptation or something else? Please share with us the definition or idea of resilience which drives your organization, your projects, programs or research. Maybe you don’t use the word resilience, but you believe it is what you are working towards.