Another breakout track at the July Hazards Conference in Boulder focused on Environmental Change and Patterns of Vulnerability. I wrote a bit about that in my first blog on the meeting.

            In that blog I mentioned that Dr. Peter Wenger from NSF participated on the panel and talked about Dr. Peter Berke was researching the “new urbanism” and its impact on community resilience.

            The panel, “The Maddening of Crowding: Urban Vulnerability,” was interesting in and of itself. It focused mostly on what were called “megacities,” those with 19 million plus residents. Wenger talked about the most vulnerable being “SINs”—Small Island Nations and the need for a global platform to look at vulnerability. He also referred to cities as having large “concentrations of resources.”

            Dr. William Siembieda from California Polytechnic Institute—San Luis Obispo, echoed that comment. Only he also pointed out that these cities contain large poor populations and both the need to increase income for these as well as form international “insurance pools” where they can ensure the leverage of these resources.

            All of this echoed for me Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campella’s edited volume, The resilient city: How modern cities recover from disaster (Oxford University Press, 2005). I highly recommend the book. Various authors in that book talk about how major cities are located in important places and there was a commitment to building them in the first place. That suggests that we don’t need to look exclusively at megacities, we could include a whole lot more on the list. New York City of course, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and Charlotte all have a lot of resources at their disposal.

            This predisposes (pun intended) most all big cities to be more resilient. While researching for a paper I’m just finishing up, I was quite surprised to discover that Hiroshima’s population returned to pre-atomic bomb levels by 1955. Undoubtedly, this is a good example of resilience, acknowledging that Japan is a small nation and enjoys cultural homogeneity.

            The resilient city is an excellent read. It recounts, among other things, how Berlin was rebuilt after WWII, San Francisco recovered from the 1906 combined fire and earthquake, and Washington, DC after it was nearly destroyed by the British Invasion of 1814.

            In all these cases, and many more, there was a huge will among the cities leadership (public and private) to restore and recover. In fact, Vale suggests it is an axiom of resilience that it is a test of the very legitimacy of those leaders. They have to inspire people and leverage resources to go on.

            It was the fact that these cities had large numbers of differently skilled leaders that were able to leverage the resources they possessed.

            “Large” is a relative number—what was large in 1500 AD might be small now—but I’d opine that in today’s world, most cities with 5 million or more residents possess that inherent resiliency that comes from making themselves unique and creating a sense of place and capitalizing on their economic engines. There are exceptions, of course. Pompeii was in no position to recover after Mount Vesuvius erupted.

            It may come down to simply a large population, poor or otherwise that points to their inherent resilience. I’d say not. One of my favorite quotes from Charleston’s Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. is that city “places”—parks, promenades, cultural venues, sports arenas, boulevards—are places where “memories are made.” People seek to preserve those.