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.
