Resilience
In the face of climate change and a world composed of increasing natural disasters, building resilient communities with strong networks of people and resources could be the difference between a community that thrives and one that dissolves. Resilient communities are networks of people that 1) can undergo change but still retain the same structure and function; 2) are capable of self organization; and 3) build and increase the capacity to learn and adapt (Carpenter et al. 2001). This is different from sustainability because instead of trying to maintain a constant average that lasts indefinitely, resilience acknowledges that systems go through cycles of change, and it even acknowledges that some disruption might be important in generating more diversity and variation. This idea of disruption can even be argued to be dystopian — resilience thinkers are assuming that something bad will happen that will contribute to a kind of demise of the current state, which is why this framework came into fruition in the first place. Simultaneously, it possesses utopian qualities such as increasing connected social networks, acknowledging that cities are nodes within a network, and promoting social capital (Pepper 2005).
Resilience began as a biological term to describe ecosystem cycles, but has recently been applied to social systems as well, and from the two, socioecological systems (SES) were born. One of the biggest things that sets social resilience apart from ecological resilience is the capacity for human agency (Davidson 2010). Humans, unlike ecosystem functions, are able to learn and adapt to their surroundings. Davidson also argues that resilience isn’t the only result we should aim for; it’s one of three, including adaptation and transformation. She argues that resilience is one pathway but it can’t be forced since sometimes the current system has flaws of its own. This takes a bit of Holling’s 3D adaptive theory into account — sometimes in the cycle of death and rebirth, a society is reborn somewhere else, in a different form: transformation. I think it’s important to acknowledge these other two options so resilience theory doesn’t turn into a one-sided, rigid “plan” like today’s sustainability.