The first goal that I worked on was re-reading the cited articles of my proposed concentration. Do they still make sense? I started with the Benson and Craig (2014) The End of Sustainability, because it is the article that I felt had the most relevance when I wrote my proposal. Re-reading it, I remembered that it provided an important backbone to my ultimate concentration framework: sustainability is not inherently bad, but does not stand up to the application in which the word is used. Benson and Craig write, “The pursuit of sustainability inherently assumes that we (a) know what can be sustained and (b) have the capacity to hold onto some type of stationarity and/or equilibrium” (2014). There are still ways in which the concept of sustainability can be applied, but in light of the inevitable changes we will face due to climate change, resiliency provides an alternative, more flexible concept to apply.
Knowing that Benson and Craig provided a lot of framework for the resiliency concept, I found that many of my other resources were redundant. They all have similar approaches to how and why sustainability doesn’t work as well today. While I don’t intend to get rid of them as sources (framework is always good!), I think an important next step would be to really bolster up the areas of my concentration that I fell short on. Specifically I think I need to bring more sources in that apply concepts to certain contexts, such as resiliency in action, or environmental concepts in Japan. I also think that an area that I really lacked during my initial proposal was the effects of the Pacific Rim and the risk of earthquakes. I am in some other classes right now that have been helping me gather resources that can help me, such as Hall (2011), Fukushima Daiichi: Implications for Carbon-Free Energy, Nuclear Nonproliferation, and Community Resilience; Sato, Formation of the resource concept in Japan: pre-war and post-war efforts in knowledge integration; Herrendorfer et al. (2015), Earthquake supercycle in subduction zones controlled by the width of the seismogenic zone.
There are obviously a lot more resources out there to find, so I am considering tweaking one of my next goals to include more article collection.
Great, Tasha! It seems like focusing in and really investing time in finding new resources is the most important thing for you right now, I agree that changing your next goal to include more of that is the best way forward right now (and very resilient if I do say so myself). Also, something that really helped me this past week was making a new draft of concentration questions. You may or may not end up using them, but for me they challenged me to think more constructively and specifically. Of course, your concentration is more established than mine at this point, but I still think it could help! I’m so excited to keep hearing about this!!
I think it’s a good idea to reread your sources, especially because I find myself just ignoring a lot of my old sources instead of trying to read them again to get something new out of them. It seems like a good idea to examine what resilience actually looks like in an urban contexts, something that you mention. I came across this article, “Urban Governance for Adaptation:Assessing Climate Change Resilience in Ten Asian Cities,” last week while looking for new literature for my concentration. Might be a good starting spot!
Hello Tasha,
I think re reading your articles is a great idea because it will allow you to view them in a different perspective and you can also decide which ones are the most relevant to you in your current concentration topic. I have also found it difficult to find sources that provide different perspectives to the topic of urban planning and as you suggested to me being able to do that will allow you to have a more nuanced approach. I think that questioning sustainability is a route I also need to follow because as you noted resiliency is a better alternative. I tend to start with exploring different situated example to understand a theories draw backs, because even if you do not use those examples you gain a better understanding of its drawbacks in different settings.