Resilient Community: A concept and vision for community action, city planning and state policy for the 21st century (original) (raw)

Resilience for a community or a city is the ability to maintain essential quality of life functions and services for its residents when a severe disruptive event or sequence of events occurs. Resilience is fundamentally a local capacity. No matter how widespread a disruption’s impacts may be, people will always have to deal with immediate, on-the-ground impacts that affect lives and infrastructure in their local areas. Nevertheless, strategies and policies for building resilient communities must be both bottom-up and top-down. This paper is intended to stimulate a broader conversation about what resilience means and the reasons why it is important, and an exploration of strategies and policies we can undertake for building resilience at each level of our social and economic systems.