Resilience

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Introduction

In security research, resilience is an evolving concept. According to scientific evidence, urban planning should contribute to increasing community resilience. In particular with respect to planning for secure systems of different kinds, resilience can be described to be based on the following characteristics:

• It reflects the extent of change that a system can experience while retaining its order, or normative (formal) as well as its dynamic organization.
• It reflects the capability level of a system for self-organization.
• It requires both acceptance by as well as symmetric competences of the citizens.
• It reflects the capability of a system to learn and adapt to changing environments while retaining its characteristics and identity (or, technically, its operational closure).

With a view to building quantitative indicators for resilience to plan for improved systems, resilience can be defined as determined by the degree to which a social system is capable of organizing itself to increase its capacity for learning from past disruptions and disasters for better future protection and to improve risk reduction measures.

Resilience and the comprehensive approach

Applying a comprehensive approach to urban planning can help increase societal resilience, because it acknowledges that an urban system can be confronted with all the phases of the crisis management cycle simultaneously.

Essentially, resilience thinking in the urban planning process should be grounded on a holistic view by incorporating the following five interconnected functional components: social, economic, political, demographic, and environmental.

Resilience and societal security

Approaches such as "new urbanism" have been led by the assumption that societal resilience could be increased by informed, progressive architectural design that per se would meliorate human behavior and reduce insecurity as well as citizens’ feeling thereof, however this physical determinism will not hold. Threat and vulnerability perception by the “users” of a city/an urban environment has to be taken into account. Urban planning should be sensitive to a society's security culture and in particular be based on citizens’ perception of insecurity, feeling of vulnerability and acceptance of technological solutions for security problems. For example, while the need to provide for sufficient lighting clearly shapes the planning process of urban public space, thorough analysis of the relevant users and user groups are required to better assess how lighting can contribute to heighten individual security perception and to reduce “fear” in public space.

While resilience requirements can have to do with the process of urban design itself, they also and inevitably comprise psychological and social aspects. The model of reflective fear for example holds that a person's (reflective) fear will decrease of increase, depending on the information available concerning personal risk or hazard exposure. In other words, and in case of alerts, this model can describe how reassurance of citizens could contribute to an increase in resilience, while alerts, rather, tend to increase the imbalance of factual and felt (or sensed) fear.

Generally, a “multicultural sensibility for planning” is necessary, that includes considering how cultures, “which prescribe members’ relations with the community, orient their actions, and, among other things, suggest how they might use formal planning processes.”

Resilience and vulnerability

Improving general resilience levels also requires tackling and understanding vulnerability. While vulnerability in general is the susceptibility of a community to the impact of hazards, it should in particular “involve a predictive quality: it is supposedly a way of conceptualizing what may happen to an identifiable population under conditions of particular risk and hazards.”; “Social vulnerability is the complex set of characteristics that include a person’s: initial well-being (health, morale, etc.); self-protection (asset pattern, income, qualifications, etc.); social protection (hazard preparedness by society, building codes, shelters, etc.); social and political networks and institutions (social capital, institutional environment, etc.).”

By identifying potential vulnerabilities, urban planning can directly contribute to the strengthening of community resilience.