Urban Resilience: How Cities Recover After Disaster

Urban resilience is a city's capacity to absorb a disaster, recover and reorganise without losing its identity or its essential functions. The book that fixed the concept in urban studies is The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster (2005), edited by Lawrence Vale, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Thomas Campanella, a historian of urbanism. Its starting point is a striking historical fact: almost no major city destroyed in the last two centuries has disappeared. Chicago, San Francisco, Warsaw, Hiroshima and Mexico City were rebuilt, and the book's question is how and at what price.

From Chicago to New York: the cases in The Resilient City

The volume gathers case studies of disasters of natural and human origin. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which elites used to rebuild according to their interests. The bombing of Gernika in 1937 and the destruction of Warsaw, rebuilt stone by stone after 1945 as a national statement. Divided Berlin, Tokyo and Hiroshima after the war, Beirut after fifteen years of conflict, Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake, Oklahoma City after the 1995 bombing and New York after 11 September 2001. Each case shows a different path, but all share the tension between restoring what was there and using the ruin to build something new.

Resilience narratives: who tells the story of reconstruction

Vale and Campanella's central contribution is the idea of resilience narratives. Rebuilding a city is not only putting up buildings: it is telling a story about what happened, who suffered, who is responsible and what future the city deserves. That narrative is written by governments, media, developers and communities, and they do not always agree. San Francisco's reconstruction erased the Chinese of Chinatown from the first plans; Warsaw's turned the old town into a symbol of the nation; Lower Manhattan's argued for years over what should occupy the site of the Twin Towers. Whoever controls the story controls the reconstruction.

The twelve axioms of urban resilience

The book closes with twelve axioms of resilience that distil what was learned. Among them: resilience narratives are political constructions; disasters reveal the resilience of governments as much as of cities; recovery is unequal and usually reproduces prior hierarchies; reconstruction is justified by appealing to the future but decided by the interests of the present; and memory, monuments, museums, rituals, is as much a part of recovery as infrastructure. Vale and Campanella insist that resilience is not a physical property but a social one: it depends on the strength of institutions and communities.

Katrina, climate change and resilience as policy

Published months before Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, the book anticipated what happened next: a rapid recovery for wealthy neighbourhoods and a slow or non-existent one for poor and African American ones, disputes over which areas to rebuild and an official story of rebirth that hid the displacement of tens of thousands of residents. Since then the concept of urban resilience has been institutionalised, with programmes such as the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities, and has also been criticised for turning into an individual virtue what should be a public responsibility.

The lesson of The Resilient City remains valid in the age of climate change, when floods, heatwaves and fires strike cities every year. Recovery is possible, history proves it; recovering justly is the hard part. It requires that affected communities take part in deciding what is rebuilt and how, that the memory of the disaster is not erased under the marketing of rebirth, and that reconstruction corrects rather than reproduces the inequalities that made some more vulnerable than others.