Contradictory Information

November 23rd, 2011 - Ian Moore

When we are presented with information that fits with our beliefs or tentative decisions we will tend to accept any information that fits and not investigate further. When presented with information that contradicts we will tend to look further and check the validity of the information.

This leads to a skewing of the information that we take in. Most information will have caveats and situations in which it does not apply. When we dig deeper we may find more information that contradicts our position but we are also bound to find information which confirms our distrust of the initial contradictory information. Of course if the initial situation concurs with our initial ideas we don’t look further and so never find any subsequent information that might contradict us.

Psychologists have shown repeatedly that when people taking part in an experiment are presented with a mixed body of information they will pick out that which confirms their beliefs and find reasons why contradictory information does not apply. In a group with opposing beliefs the same information will be interpreted by both sides as supporting their own positions.

For effective decision making we need to firstly be aware of this behaviour and then develop techniques and approaches to ensure that we investigate supporting and contradictory information to the same depth and apply objective criteria to the assessment of both type of information.

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A Path to Economic Recovery and Resilience

November 10th, 2011 - John Plodinec

Just over a year ago, I wrote about what a more resilient economy might look like (see Recovering from the Great Recession – What Might a More Resilient Economy Look Like?). I talked about a value-driven rather than a consumer driven economy. That post begged the question, though – how do we get there from here? In the next few paragraphs, I’ll try to outline an answer to that.

Before I do, however, my disclaimer. I am clearly not an economist (I’m not sure that’s a disqualification, since the economists are all over the map on how to recover!). Further, politicians will be making the most crucial economic decisions over the next few months, and they are clearly not economists (not to mention their roles in getting us into this mess in the first place).

Our national economy is in what economists call a liquidity trap. In a liquidity trap, there is relatively little investment because those with money are very risk averse. Consumers don’t spend, businesses don’t hire, and everyone looks at the economic glass as half empty. And that’s what we’re seeing right now – individuals and businesses are paying off their debts, individual debt is at levels not seen since the early 1990’s; those who can are saving at rates not seen since the 1970’s; and businesses are sitting on their cash (and not borrowing) rather than investing in new products and jobs.

The two antipodes of the debate over how to fix our economy – escape the trap – are characterized by the “Spend, Baby, Spend” school and the Tea Party’s call for government austerity. The Spend, Baby, Spend school is epitomized by economists such as Paul Krugman, who vehemently believe that our federal government should be spending more, much more, to spur demand for goods and services. This group points to our nation’s crumbling infrastructure as a place where investment would create jobs, creating demand, and facilitating economic recovery. At its core, this view sees lack of demand for goods and services as the problem that needs to be addressed.

The Tea Party-ers, on the other hand, see the size of our government as the core problem. In this view, a smaller government, with fewer regulations and lower taxes, would put money back into people’s hands to spend on goods and services, thus jump starting the economy.

You’ll notice, however, that neither view really addresses the core problem – how we get out of the liquidity trap. Or, said a little differently, how do we help businesses, in particular, become less risk averse so that they will invest the cash they are now sitting on in new equipment or new jobs. Framed this way, it seems that government spending per se is somewhat irrelevant to getting out of the trap. Recovery will come only when people have confidence once again that there is a secure future. That’s not to say that government spending is unimportant, just that stimulus spending doesn’t really seem to be the right answer.

If this is true, then what should government do to put us on the road to a resilient economy? Simply put, governments should do those things that will remove uncertainty from people’s minds and those things that will make people more confident in their futures. In this light, it seems that we need to take some of the medicines prescribed by both schools of thought to help bring us out of our national malaise.

We need to recognize that the current pace of regulation creation is creating great uncertainties for businesses and individuals. In the first two years of the present administration in Washington, we created more regulations than we did in eight years of the previous administration. Further, whether we like it or not, small businesses are already telling us they won’t be hiring in the near term because of the possible impacts of health insurance reform (and those impacts won’t be fully known until 2014 at the earliest!).

We also need to recognize that our national debt is unsustainable – if we continue on our present path, we as individuals eventually will end up paying exorbitant amounts in taxes to support intolerably high interest rates to service both our national and personal debt. We as individuals or investors or business owners recognize this and are saving at almost unprecedented rates to provide our own safety nets for ourselves.

However, we also have to recognize that the government must continue to make investments that will help us to have a more certain future. We must invest in our infrastructure – not to stimulate spending but to ensure that we can continue to move goods, people, and information where they are needed. If we don’t, we will spend far more to respond to and recover from the disasters that will expose our infrastructure’s fragility.

We also need to heed the lessons we have already learned about what went wrong and put regulations in place that address the root causes of those problems. The current regulatory framework for the financial industry has much that is wrong with it; recently passed legislation is likely to drive smaller community banks – who in the main were not at fault in getting us into this trap – out of business. This will make it more difficult for entrepreneurs and small businesses to get the capital they need to start up or expand their businesses, i.e., will make our economy even less resilient. Meanwhile, many of the more speculative financial sectors remain unregulated even though they were prime actors in our economic tragedy (and are doing nothing to help us recover).

We must provide a safety net to those of our citizens with special needs. Not because of their vulnerability but as an investment in their future and in ours. The safety net should be focused on outcomes – for example, living healthier and more productive lives – rather than means, for example insurance. Just as with our physical infrastructure, if we don’t make these kinds of investments we will spend far more to respond to and recover from the human tragedies that will result.

I don’t think it requires a rocket scientist (or a Ph.D. economist!) to see a path to recovery. It only requires a clear recognition of where we are as a nation, and then some common sense actions to move to where we need to be. We have to cut government spending and the pace of regulation, but we also need to invest in ourselves and take actions to prevent us from falling in the same trap again. At its core, we have to restore our confidence in ourselves if we are to recover. Neither school of thought, neither political party, can or will be successful unless they grasp this simple truth – this is the only path to economic recovery and greater national resilience.

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Resilience for Dummies: What is Community Resilience

November 8th, 2011 - John Plodinec

I read a lot – if I don’t have a newspaper or a magazine or a journal article to read, I’ll read cereal boxes. Or I’ll get on the internet and find something there. In doing this, I’ve discovered a new phenomenon – the proliferation of books “X for Dummies” – Puppies for Dummies, Stained Glass for Dummies, Relationships for Dummies. All designed to help the neophyte learn enough to at least be unafraid of the subject and willing to take basic actions. For those like me, whose ignorance is legion, there is even a website – dummies.com – where you can find basic help on almost any topic.

So, over the next few months, I’m going to be writing Community Resilience for Dummies – detailing what this neophyte has learned about community resilience in a way that I hope others can use. As we in CARRI have talked to people about resilience it has become clear that – like sustainability – resilience is a word in danger of losing its meaning because it is being used by so many in so many different ways. So I’ll start by talking about what community resilience is.

As do so many others, we at CARRI have our own definition of resilience:

A community’s ability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce back rapidly through adaptation, evolution, and growth in the face of turbulent change.

In fact, on the CARRI website, you’ll find a document that compares and contrasts many of the definitions.

Most people who are using the term resilience are doing so in a crisis context – a crisis being anything that strains the community’s resources. While resilience may be an inherent trait of a community, its resilience is only seen in how well it recovers from the crisis. As a community evolves over time, it may become more or less resilient. Thus, in these parlous economic times, most communities have become less resilient toward natural disasters or human-induced crises due to dwindling resources – both human and financial. Those communities that have maintained their same level of resilience (and the few that have enhanced it) have generally done so by finding ways to adapt to the financial crisis they face.

Adaptation is the key to resilience – it’s the ability to turn disaster into opportunity; to create social capital to augment finance; to form partnerships to replace or repair needed infrastructure when no one entity has enough money to fund projects. Greenburg, KS’ response to the devastating tornado that hit the town is an example. Prior to the 2007 storm, the town was in danger of dying. It used the opportunity provided by the devastation to attempt to create a different and more sustainable Greensburg.

Mayor Tom Tait’s (Anaheim CA) “Hi, Neighbor” campaign is an example. It recognizes that in the event of an earthquake, one’s neighbors are the real first responders, and should be the enduring support structure for individuals and families. The campaign seeks to build up the “social capital” of Anaheim’s neighborhoods.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey provides another example. It has formed a public-private partnership to fund and operate a replacement for the Goethals Bridge that links New York and New Jersey. This type of arrangement would have been unheard of even five years ago; now, it represents a very innovative way for a community to do what’s necessary with less.

Thus, while resilience is not a uniquely American trait, this ability to make lemonade when you’re handed lemons is embedded in the American spirit. And it doesn’t take a dummy to see that our resilience is being tested as never before. In the next post in this series, I’ll begin looking at what makes up community resilience – starting with leadership.

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Searching for Resilience: A Walk in the Woods

October 20th, 2011 - John Plodinec

I read an interesting article recently that crystallized several other thoughts for me. The paper – with the somewhat dry title of Resilience as Resource-based Design of Anticipated Situations (www.resilience-engineering-asso.org/ACTES/2011/Papers/13.pdf) – is couched in the language of safety and risk, but takes a very different approach to identifying resilience than I’ve seen before.

The authors start by talking about traditional safety and risk management approaches. To paraphrase the authors, these approaches have inherent limitations:

• They are based on analysis of failures. They do not reflect either that risks can emerge from “normal” situations, or that some of the greatest risks may actually be unanticipated surprises.
• They seek to mitigate without considering either the real gap between intended actions and real capabilities, or that coping with crises is dependent on “the strategies, initiatives, tinkering and ingenuity brought by individual and collective skills in real time.

The application of these to emergency management seems straightforward and very appropriate.

The authors then go on to quote a definition of resilience by Hollnagel:

The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.

I’m not a big fan of defining resilience – too many have spent too much time in what becomes an unproductive exercise in navel contemplation – but the authors put legs under this one by trying to determine how anesthesiologists make decisions both in routine cases and in complex ones. Their conclusions are worth noting because they seem to apply so well to the relationship between the federal government and local community leadership.

• Resilience – in addition to vulnerability assessment – involves consideration of local resources and capabilities.
• Decisions are designed to empower those coping with crisis, and not to control them.
• Organizations should be structured so that local standard practices can be shared.

While some may argue about the conclusions, what was striking to me is the very different way of trying to find resilience. Most of the resilience literature focuses either on vulnerability or on case studies of past disasters. What the authors have done is look at behavior – both in routine and unexpected situations – to try to find clues to resilient behavior.

Thus, if we are trying to judge the resilience of a tree to a high wind, we may walk through the woods looking at one that has fallen and try to judge the cause and how to prevent it from falling. Or, as the authors have done, we can study the forest, during both calm days and those with brisk winds, and see how each tree adapts in its own context.

As we were putting the Community Resilience System (CRS) together, one of the strongest sentiments expressed by our Community Leaders Group was that the CRS had to improve normal operations as well as easing the transition to a new normal. This paper not only agrees with that, but shows that understanding how the community functions in normal conditions is a key to understanding its resilience to a crisis.

In other words, watching how trees bend and sway in the wind can often tell us more about the resilience of trees than exhaustively researching why one fell.

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Piloting the System

April 5th, 2011 - Warren Edwards

Less than a year ago, CARRI set a goal of creating a practical, usable Community Resilience System (CRS) based on evidence gleaned from academic research and practical experience. The software that will power that system is being written now. We are on track to have a web-enabled prototype system ready to be tested by mid-summer.

This has been a team effort combining the work of over 175 participants – researchers from numerous disciplines and community leaders representing all aspects of community life drawn from across the nation. We believe that we have developed a good, functional prototype – a system of processes and resources that any community can use to increase its resilience across a wide spectrum of disturbances. But – and it is a big but – we won’t know if what we have cooperatively created has value until we get it in the hands of real communities and watch it operate. For that, we need a group of pilot communities that will agree to work with CARRI and the CRS to help us understand what works, what doesn’t work, and what needs further development.

CARRI is in the process of actively recruiting 5 to 10 CRS Pilot Communities. While we would like for this set of communities to include the diversity that will allow us to understand how the system operates in a variety of settings – different sizes, different economies, different threats, and different geographies – the most important factor in pilot community selection is commitment. The communities that undertake this journey to resilience must have a dedicated core of committed leaders who understand that this is a lengthy trip – a long-term commitment to making their community different, better, more resilient.

The CARRI team, working through the Community Resilience System Initiative Steering Committee, has identified a number of potential pilot communities. Other communities have come forward and indicated a desire to participate in the pilot program. Between now and mid-summer, we will carefully work with each candidate community to ensure mutual understanding of the tasks, the pitfalls, and the rewards. Simultaneously, we are working to identify the resources required to undertake these pilots and anticipating a full pilot community launch by the end of the summer.

We know that the system is neither as complete nor as robust as we hope that it will eventually become. These pilots are designed both to test the system and allow conclusions about its usefulness, practicality, and effectiveness; they will also help us identify additional supporting resources and processes that will make the system more powerful. In this sense, these pilots are both tests and creative development opportunities.

While we have identified several communities and have begun discussions we have made no final selections. Communities who may be interested in becoming pilots should contact CARRI and let us know of your interest.

We at CARRI, acting as the Community Resilience System Initiative Steering Committee’s representatives, are excited about the prospect of taking the work of so many dedicated initiative participants and watching it operate in US communities. We think that these pioneer resilient communities will set an example and the standard for building a truly resilient America anchored in resilient American communities.

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The Status of the Community Resilience System Initiative

March 10th, 2011 - Warren Edwards

For those blog readers who are interested in the status of the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) Community Resilience System Initiative – a quick update. Just about a year ago we at CARRI with the concurrence of our DHS colleagues decided that our experience in over two years of research that combined the insights of a distinguished group of academic researchers with practical experience in a number of communities warrented an effort to build a practical, useful, web enabled Community Resilience System. Our goal was to take a year and coordinate the effort of a much wider group of experts from academia, from the full fabric of community life and from the private business sector to create a robust set of processes and tools that would allow any community to understand, assess, measure, improve and reward community resilience. Our plan was (and is) to have this web-enabled system completed as a prototype ready for initial testing and refinement by April 1, 2011 and fully functional and available for community-based developmental pilots by July. We are on track.

All three working groups that came together to assist us in this project – a group of researchers (the Subject Matter Group); a group of community representatives (the Community Leaders Group); and a group representing government and the private business sector (the Resilience Benefits Group) have completed their formal work, although we remain in constant contact with them and continue to benefit from their wisdom and experience. In all, well over 200 individuals provided input, advice, ideas, and constructive criticism. We have documented hundreds of hours of in-person workshops and telephonic listening interviews, numerous short surveys on specific topics and a significant amount of individually produced thoughts, ideas and suggestions in summary reports for each work group. Each of these reports will be published on or about April 1 as annexes to the full project report of the CRSI Steering Committee. The final Steering Committee report will also include a set of policy and other recommendations flowing from the working groups’ reports that bear on community resilience.

We know that every community is a complex social organization with its own characteristics, needs, challenges and potential solutions. The Community Resilience System acknowledges this and provides a framework from which communities will be able to tailor their individual resilience vision, programs and action plans without being overly prescriptive. It guides communities in how to think about resilience and provides a well conceived set of actions that will lead to community self-knowledge; to outcome driven actions; to an implementable, sustainable plan; and, we hope, to community improvement.

We are indebted to the scores of people who have shared their experience and wisdom to make the system possible. We are keenly interested in any suggestions, connections and ideas our readers would care to share.

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Resources, Resilience and Recovery Following Disaster

September 29th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

I was doing some online searches last week and encountered an editorial by Columbia University’s Dr. John Mutter in Nature Vol. 466 26 August, 2010. The title was “Disasters widen the rich-poor gap” and focused on the fact that recovery from Katrina in New Orleans has been significantly slower for the urban poor than the middle and upper classes. Poorer neighborhoods have not rebuilt, the poor have lost jobs and had less access to basic services.

Mutter opines, “In many ways, this disproportionate effect is no surprise. Poorer people’s homes tend to be constructed to a lower standard, and occupy marginal areas such as swampy, low-lying land. But it is surprising that even in the developed world — where much effort and strategy goes into recovery efforts — the division between rich and poor is allowed to broaden in the wake of a disaster. The same thing happened after Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992 and the Chicago heat wave of 1995.”

This observation struck me because in many ways, the same logic was applied in developing the Great Society programs in the 1960s. How, many leaders argued, could the world’s wealthiest nation tolerate the fact that significant portions of its population lived in at least some degree of depravation? A War on Poverty was declared—we would use our wealth to eliminate poverty in a generation. I’m certain we have not yet won that war, but also hope that that is not taken as a reason we should stop fighting.

Looked at through that lens, we should critically examine Mutter’s base logic that we have placed much effort and strategy into recovery efforts just because we are a developed nation. From early on, we at CARRI have argued that resources are only one leg of a tripod of recovery with the other two being (a) the capacity to utilize those same resources and (b) anticipate (and mitigate) losses from disasters. Having resources (wealth) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for recovery.

To be sure, we spent a lot of money on post-Katrina recovery efforts. But we should keep in mind a comment Alesch made in 2001 after looking at several communities and their recovery from disasters—including those affected by Hurricane Andrew:

“[We have] . . . seen many anomalies in disaster sites, including immediate adjacent communities with markedly different post-event experiences. We have seen millions of dollars directed at activities with no apparent long-term benefits to the community. Some locales get better, some get worse, and a few wither away.”

Developing more community resilience seems a better way to address post-disaster issues such as those raised by Mutter and myriad other issues as well. As we have said all along, a community’s trajectory before a disaster will likely be echoed during recovery. And a goal to develop more resilience puts a community on a positive trajectory.

About a year and one-half after Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston many noted that the City had not looked as good since before the Civil War. But the city had its poor as well. What was the difference in this case? Resources were used in that recovery to buy paint, deal with ongoing drainage issues, clear debris, and myriad other problems and the end product was different than that observed by Mutter. Perhaps it is because area was more resilient. By the way, in Charleston swampy land is highly valued for its vistas.

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Recovering from the Great Recession –What Might a More Resilient Economy Look Like?

September 14th, 2010 - John Plodinec

The Great Recession has had devastating impacts on every part of every community in the country – individuals and families with nest eggs severely depleted or disappeared often along with their jobs, businesses treading water, governments caught between the greater demand for services and fewer resources to provide them. Recovery will be protracted, and may potentially take a decade.

In any and every sense, the Great Recession has been a disaster. But we will recover – we are already seeing communities that are using the Great Recession as an opportunity to look at themselves with a new perspective and to do things better than before. We are also seeing the classic dichotomy of views about what “recovery” should look like – some want to rebuild the economy the way it was; others want to build a new and more resilient economy.

If we could describe our pre-Recession economy in one word, it would be “consumption.” We as individuals piled up debt to buy things we couldn’t afford, and might not have needed. Government encouraged (and in some cases coerced) financial institutions to make risky loans. Speculators packaged those loans into even riskier investments, offering outlandish rates of return. We were living off of our futures, while ignoring the lesson of the past that the future is never certain.

It is clear that the American people have recognized that the economic model of the recent past is not very viable, and certainly not resilient. Instead of spending, most of the almost 90% of us who are working are saving more than ever. Individual savings are at a level not seen in decades. Clearly, those who want to go back to a consumer-driven economy are likely to be disappointed. This begs the question, what might a more resilient economy look like?

I’m sure there are several possible alternatives. One that I can envision is what I call a “value-driven” economy. In a value-driven economy, economic decisions are made on the basis of overall value at each step of the economic chain. Individuals and families would make their purchasing decisions balancing protection from future contingencies against the value of the goods or services to be purchased. Thus, we would see a return to saving for a house or a car, and a lessening of future debt. Instead of spending so much on health care, individuals and families might spend more on health – eating better, getting outside more, spending more time together (Somehow in the debate about health insurance all sides seem to have lost sight of the fact that Americans rank somewhere in the 25-30 range in terms of almost all health measures – when we don’t rank even worse!).

Businesses would recognize that employees are not interchangeable parts, but significant assets to be nurtured (Loyalty might even make a comeback!). Businesses would recognize that we live in a time of almost frenetic technological change, but that success in business is built more on relationships than technology.

Government and business would forge a new relationship. In times like these, government would not try to create jobs (at $240K per job!), but would help businesses – especially small businesses – create many more and better ones. Government would not champion energy measures that actually add to our already bloated energy budget (e.g., carbon capture), but would encourage and reward efficiencies that reduce that budget. Communities would balance incentives to attract new businesses against actions to nurture the ones they already have. Communities would also recognize that the natural environment is just as important to the community as the built environment. And most importantly, communities would encourage and help individuals and families to be as self-reliant in the face of disaster – of any type – as possible.

An unrealistic pipe dream? Perhaps. But clearly the old model didn’t work – this one just might.

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If Vulnerability is the Dark Side, Resilience is the Force

September 7th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

Recently I had a conversation with a colleague who works at the National Science Foundation. I shared with him some of the work I’ve been doing with CARRI and community resilience. His response to me was interesting. He recognized that resilience was finding its way into researchers’ and practitioners’ lexicon and opined that he viewed it as the opposite of and a more positive take on vulnerability.

My colleague was following the logic of John McKnight and his research on poor communities. McKnight argued that rather than constantly talk about what poor communities need, we should focus on what they already have; rather than doing a needs analysis, we should do an assets analysis.

It is an interesting conceptualization—seeing vulnerability and resilience as two sides of the same picture. I confess to not being entirely convinced and that makes it a good topic to blog on, seeking input from readers of this.

Some researchers, especially social work academics and social psychologists, write about the resilience of vulnerable populations. Their arguments are cogent: disadvantaged, vulnerable populations can see each day as a stress test—they are only an illness or broken down car or temporary job loss away from personal disaster. Their ability to survive and even thrive is testament to their resilience.

This likely speaks to the building of social capital in some groups we see as vulnerable. But then, are they as vulnerable as we think they are, looking from the outside?

The biggest difficulty I have in seeing vulnerability and resilience as closely related is that what might not look like a vulnerable population may become one as the cascading and rippling effects of a disaster unfold. Small business owners may look to be in reasonably good shape pre-disaster. But they can quickly become part of a vulnerable population if they lose their businesses six months or a year after a disaster.

The same might hold for the underinsured. If they lose a business or home and the insurance settlement just pays off their debt, those that appeared to be middle class can quickly look very different.

Edmund Andrews, an economics reporter for the New York Times, wrote last year about his slow spiral into a $500,000 mortgage by borrowing constantly to pay off old debt. Andrews was finally unable to meet his debt obligations after paying his alimony and child support. It is doubtful that he would look vulnerable until the house of debt cards he constructed completely crumbled.

Interestingly, in a conversation with Dr. Dean Kilpatrick, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina, who looks at psychological effects and disasters, I opined that older people might be more vulnerable. He immediately said his data did not support that observation. Older people often don’t have many of the obligations of middle class workers—high mortgages, children to care for, jobs to worry about and even parents to look after.

It may be that populations vulnerable to disasters can be just about any place we look for them. That is why a more comprehensive view of a community, as we have consistently taken with CARRI, is a better way to see resilience than as the opposite of vulnerable.

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Cities and Resources

August 24th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts

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.

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