Design‐driven resilience and the limits of geographic critique

Abstract

In a world of cascading climate catastrophes, shrinking budgets and growing demands for public services, building resilience seems impossible to oppose. The term, as defined by the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative, refers to individual and systemic capacities to anticipate, recover from, and transform amid shocks and stressors. In its six years of operation, 100RC oversaw the development of countless resilience efforts in cities around the world,

People in a pandemic: Rethinking the role of ‘Community’ in community resilience practices

“…Bringing the case of the siege of Leningrad into juxtaposition with New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, DeVerteuil et al (2021) argue that the responses to these events reflect the possibility for co-constitutive resilience practices produced through the synchronisation of ‘top-down’ government action and the ‘bottom-up’ improvisations made by local communities. These forms of synthesis (See Cox et al, 2022 ) between different groups that resilience opens up as a possibility is elaborated also in David Godschalk’s (2003) theorisation of urban resilience as grounded in the development and consolidation of multiple connections between different communities of practice and expertise that exist in cities. For Freitag et al (2014) , creating such networks would pave the way for what they call ‘whole community resilience’ (2014, 324) that seeks to integrate non-state based, local perspectives on that which is valuable to communities into emergency preparedness.…”

Placing critical geographic thought. A commentary on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’.

“…Work on the post‐political, for example, reflects a concern with the modern (and post‐modern) debasement of an originary ground of politics, the political. Its pursuit of political purity leads to predictable diagnoses of any form of technical or calculative practice as post‐political, and thus always ethically and politically compromised (see also Beveridge & Koch, 2017; Cox et al ., 2022). Work on more‐than‐human ontologies, from a different angle, similarly strives to locate an alternative ground for truth and politics outside the humanist subject (Wakefield, 2020).…”