Resilience and Sustainability in Relation to Natural Disasters: A Challenge for Future Cities

Economic resilience is a prerequisite for sustainability. If cities cannot cope with short-run natural and man-made disasters, they will not thrive in the long run. This presentation will explain the role of economic resilience in the survival of cities and how experience with disasters can be transformed into actions that promote sustainability. I begin with a discussion of features of cities that make them both vulnerable and resilient. I then define economic resilience and offer an operational metric. Next I discuss individual tactics to implement it at the micro, meso, and macroeconomic levels. Then I summarize studies of the relative effectiveness of resilience tactics and their costs. I conclude with a discussion of broader strategies to make cities more resilient in the short-run and emphasize the importance of translating them into adaptations for the long-run. A key strategy is to translate ingenuity in coping with disasters into decisions and practices that continuously promote sustainability.

A social network framework was used to examine how vulnerability and sustainability forces affect community resilience through exposure, evacuation and resettlement. Field work, undertaken in volcanically active areas in Ecuador and Mexico, involved structured questionnaires and ethnographic studies of residents and their social networks, and interviews with government officials and political leaders. Networks were categorized into: (i) closed networks–everybody interacts with everybody else; (ii) extended networks–relatively closed cores with ties to more loosely connected individuals; (iii) subgroup networks–at least two distinct groups that are usually connected; and (iv) sparse networks–low densities that have relatively few ties among individuals. Additionally, it was found that people with less dense networks in the least affected site were better adjusted to chronic disasters and evacuations, while those with more dense networks had better mental health in the most affected sites.

Resilience of urban structures towards impacts of a changing climate is one of the emerging tasks that cities all over the world are facing at present. Effects of climate change take many forms, depending on local climate, spatial patterns, and socioeconomic structures. Cities are only just beginning to be aware of the task, and some time will pass before it is integrated into mainstream urban governance. This chapter is based on work in progress. It covers urban governance and planning aspects of climate change adaptation as studied in the CLUVA project (CLimate change and Urban Vulnerability in Africa), as well as some experiences from Denmark. Focus is on the responses and capacities of urban authorities, strengths and weaknesses of the efforts, data needs and possible ways forward. The chapter concludes that many adaptation activities are taking place in the CLUVA case cities, but that they need integration at city level to form strategic adaptation plans. A combined rational and pragmatic approach is advisable as is involvement of stakeholders in the production of relevant knowledge.

Several cases of risk management ventures, predominantly post-disaster recovery experiences, have evidenced the individualized and liberal nature of Resilience to Risks and Hazards. This has been addressed by several authors some of whom have arrived at provocative suggestions regarding the role of Resilience, such as that “Resilient/adaptive systems actively try to turn whatever happens to their advantage” (Waldrop 1992), or that “Resilience refers to agents interacting locally according to their own principles or intentions in the absence of an overall blueprint of the system” (Stacey et al. 2000) or even that “Cities’ transformation after disasters come in response to conflicting or multiple resiliences” (Vale and Campanella 2005). Above authors advocate the view that resilient to hazards can be any entity, agency or system from single individuals and businesses to Local Authority Organizations, National Governments or International Institutions. Each one of these actors should actor be faced with a single or multiple risks will opt solutions and actions matching own interests and own risk and vulnerability trade-offs. These self-centered solutions may exacerbate vulnerability and exposure of other actors, either collective entities or individual households. Besides, these solutions may trigger off new hazards currently or in the future. If this is the case indeed, i.e. individual comes in conflict with collective Resilience, one might wonder how could both objectives of “Urban Resilience” and “Resilience for all individual Citizens” be simultaneously accommodated. Also how these objectives impact one another. The present paper addresses these problems and suggests ways out of the impasse.

Resilience and sustainability are now primary goals for future cities. On one hand, the extreme natural and man-made events that have recently hit urban systems (earthquakes, tsunamis, terroristic attacks) makes resilience a principal challenge of our society. On the other hand, the high environmental, social and economic burden that cities have today, combined with the high exposure of the world population in cities, makes sustainability as well a main objective for future development. However, how the two concepts are linked and how we should imagine future cities in terms of resilience and sustainability, represent an issue for scientific debate. An approach aimed at hinging the concept of resilience within a sustainability-based framework is being proposed here, where safety of city inhabitants is considered as a main requirement for sustainability of future cities. Here, the city is seen as a complex and dynamic organism for which sustainability should be ensured at each stage of the urban development. The proposed approach moves from the point that, for the city, an extreme event and the resulting changes moving the city to a new point of dynamic equilibrium, represent a stage in the life cycle, i.e. the Hazardous Event Occurrence phase; hence, it is stated that resilience represents the sustainability of this phase, from the economic, social and environmental point of view, for all the present and future actors, directly and indirectly involved in the recovery process. Furthermore, since urban systems are interconnected with each other by a complex network of relationships, it is also stated that city resilience must be sought on a “glocal” scale, as it also happens for sustainability; that is, the objective of city resilience must be pursued both on a local scale, referring to the physical and social systems within cities, and on the global scale, referring to the system of relationships which connects cities to each other.

Natural hazards will have a growing impact on future cities because the climate change dependent hazards will increase in intensity and because of the increasing vulnerability of cities. The global impact of each hazard in any city can be conveniently described through a probabilistic quantified approach to risk and a quantification of resilience. The supply chain must be included in the estimate. Real time methods of risk reduction must be implemented to manage emergencies in future city. It is essential the participation of citizens nudging them to proper behaviors and using also social networks and low cost networked sensors to get the needed information. Several advanced technological methods are available for effective real time risk mitigation as shown in Japan. The application in other countries is hindered by the lack of proper laws and people information programs.