Resilience thinking

[Seemore]

Hello all,

I am working on my dissertation and would love to know what the term ‘Resilience’ means to you?

Any feedback would be of huge help,

Many thanks,

S

[anthony c jefferies]

Presumably your dissertation is a little more complex than the information provided here but having a stab at a context you don’t provide I would say that ‘resilience’ is the ability to deal with failure or rejection. Not every project you pitch will result in accolades or even success and maintaining your professional integrity may be a challenge as a result.

[Seemore]

Hi Anthony, thanks for your reply.  I was deliberately leaving it open to interpretation to try and determine how familiar people in the industry are with Resilience theory, particularly in relation to ecological resilience and Social Ecological Systems.  My dissertation is arguing that it is currently a very misunderstood or unfamiliar concept and perhaps it would be of value to use the methods involved as a design tool for landscape architects.  Reading over my question, though, it is a bit vague. Thanks for the feedback

http://www.resilientcity.org

[anthony c jefferies]

I am unfamiliar with this usage so I will check out the web site in your post. I am interested in what may be the difference between this theory and that of sustainability so I will check in later.

[anthony c jefferies]

I think I understand it a bit better now and I guess the damage seen to be done by the likes of Sandy makes your thesis topical. I think designing and building for this kind of eventuality offers two alternatives: either to construct to resist or to ‘go with the flow’, in other words to make buildings that are easy to put back together if damaged. I think it is fairly evident that the social element in the damaged community has the same alternatives. In my opinion a change of emphasis that allows us to understand better the impermanence of the environment would make us more resilient.

[tim schauwecker]

Resilience, to me, is the rate at which a system returns to its normal steady state following perturbation.  The concept is complex, and has as much to do with the ability of a system to return to a normal state and whether that should be expected in dynamic environments.  For your dissertation, a good reference might be:

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss1/art23/

you may already have it, but it is a good summary of the different definitions and categories/contexts of the term.

Building on your reply to the first post: designing for resilience can be a conceptual framework, but will be very hard to test empirically.  Following ecological research that is beginning to show that diverse systems are more stable, it follows that designing for diverse communities would make those communities more resilient. Evaluating the social/political/economic systems at play in the face of disturbance will prove to be very difficult, which is why the discussion will remain primarily conceptual. It is encouraging that designers of all stripes are talking about the concept.  However, most are not trained in ecological theory and most clients  don’t require the application of ecological principles.

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