After reading Urban Centers: An Assessment of Sustainability by McGranahan et al., I realized that I needed a new way to disagree with the idea of sustainability. I knew that I didn’t quite agree with what McGranahan brought up, but I wasn’t sure how to disagree. Brown et al. and Sellberg et al. introduced me to the application of resilience through From Practice to Theory: Emerging Lessons from Asia for Building Urban Climate Change Resilience and Resilience Assessment: A Useful Approach to Navigate Urban Sustainability Challenges. In the same way that sustainability suggests a lack of change or impact, these articles describe the concept resilience as the ability to change and cope with problems and still come out on top.
Brown et al. in particular generalizes the way in which resilience can and should be used as a development tool with “new social, ecological, institutional and technological capacity to provide greater flexibility, protection, reliable early warning and effective post-disaster coordination to urban citizens ” (2012). Where sustainability suggests that concepts like Think Global Act Local will prevent catastrophes or problematic ecological degradation, resiliency acknowledges that such consequences are inevitable to a certain degree, and how urban centers deal with such consequences shows the importance of the concept. Unlike sustainability, resilience prepares to react to situations in a way that will keep urban centers functioning and flourishing.
Both Brown and Sellberg make resiliency sound like the next best thing, waiting to be implemented into society. Sellberg et al. addresses a significant question that needs to be answered when talking about resiliency as more than a conceptual idea, “How can a resilience assessment complement existing planning and management within a local government?” (2015). This is one of the questions that I ask as I have been delving into my concentration. It seems to me that it is difficult to implement resiliency in a system that has already been set up for sustainability. Because we have so many development plans funneling sustainability into different aspects of our urban centers, it seems almost impossible to replace those pathways with resiliency pathways. Reading these two articles has pushed me to ask about the relationship between sustainability and resiliency, and to dig deeper into both in order to answer some of these unanswerable questions.
Brown, A., Dayal, A., and Rumbaitis Del Rio, C. 2012. “From Practice to Theory: Emerging Lessons from Asia for Building Urban Climate Change Resilience.” Environment and Urbanization 24 (2): 531–56.
Sellberg, My M.,Wilkinson,C., and Peterson,G. D. (2015). “Resilience Assessment: A Useful Approach to Navigate Urban Sustainability Challenges.” Ecology & Society 20 (1): 563–86.