Key points
- At every jump of the word, disaster became a natural fact and the question changed from why it happened to how much we can take.
- Evans and Reid: the resilient subject accepts permanent danger; protection becomes an individual duty while the system keeps building on floodplains.
- 100 Resilient Cities was dismantled within months of losing its funding; institutional resilience was not especially resilient.
Resilience can be a mask for resignation: a street covered in mud, residents bailing water with buckets and brooms since dawn, an official delegation that steps carefully, faces the cameras and delivers the expected line, we must admire the resilience of these people, and nobody asks why the water reached the bedrooms. The scene could belong to almost any recent city, and it raises a question worth holding: when power calls you resilient, is it praising you or apologising to you? And a provocation: what if asking for resilient cities means accepting, in advance, that we are going to flood them?
The word's trail: from physics and Holling to the disappearance of causes
Follow the word's trail. Resilience comes from materials physics, the capacity of a body to recover its shape after a blow; ecology adopted it through Crawford Holling's 1973 research on ecosystems that absorb disturbance without collapsing; from there it jumped to psychology, and from psychology to planning and global agendas. At every jump a decisive semantic operation took place: disaster became an external fact, almost natural, something that simply happens, and the question changed from why did this happen to how much can we take and how fast can we recover. The causes vanished from the picture; only adaptation remained.
Evans, Reid, Neocleous and Kaika: the resilient subject who expects no security
That shift has political consequences. As Brad Evans and Julian Reid argue in Resilient Life (2014), the resilient subject is one who accepts living in permanent danger and no longer expects security but trains to absorb the blow; protection stops being a promise of the system and becomes a duty of the individual, buy insurance, raise your sockets, pack an emergency bag, learn to evacuate, while the system keeps building on floodplains, cutting maintenance and heating the atmosphere. Mark Neocleous summed it up in a slogan, do not be scared, be prepared, and Maria Kaika, in her 2017 article Don't Call Me Resilient Again, showed how the agenda asks vulnerable communities to absorb crises they did not cause. The slogan turns responsibility into attitude.
Katrina, 100 Resilient Cities and Valencia: three cases
The cases confirm it. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, public discourse celebrated the extraordinary resilience of its communities while reconstruction advanced unequally: the poorest neighbourhoods, hit hardest by the failure of the levees, were the slowest to return, many residents never came back and the recovered city was whiter and more expensive than the flooded one. The Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities programme, launched in 2013, funded strategies, consultancies and a new municipal post, the chief resilience officer, and dozens of cities competed for the label; when the foundation withdrew its money in 2019 the programme was dismantled within months.
Institutional resilience turned out to be not especially resilient. And when the DANA storms devastated the south of Valencia in October 2024, killing more than two hundred people, the word arrived before much of the help did: officials praised residents organising with buckets and hot food, deservedly, while far less was said about why thousands of homes and industrial estates sat in known flood zones or why the warnings failed.
The counterargument, transformative resilience and resourcefulness
The counterargument is strong and deserves loyalty. The climate has already changed, adapting protects lives and refusing adaptation would be irresponsible; ecological resilience is a serious scientific field, not an excuse; many communities claim the word with legitimate pride; and some authors, such as Mark Pelling, propose a transformative resilience that does not seek a return to the previous state but a change in the model that produced the damage. All of that is true. The answer is not to abandon adaptation but to name it in full, and critical geographers such as Danny MacKinnon and Kate Derickson propose another criterion, resourcefulness: what matters is less whether a community endures and more whether it has the resources, the power and the voice to decide how it is protected.
The lesson is that celebrating the capacity to endure is convenient for whoever produced the risk. The political question is not how much a neighbourhood can take but who manufactured the danger, who pays for adaptation and who decides what gets rebuilt and for whom. A city that calls its residents resilient and keeps approving housing on floodplains is apologising, not praising; one that names the causes, funds protection where the risk is highest and gives the flooded a say in the plan is doing what resilience was supposed to mean before it became a mask.
Frequently asked questions
Why is resilience criticised as a mask for resignation?
Because when the concept travelled from physics and ecology to urban agendas, disaster became an external, almost natural fact and the question shifted from why it happened to how fast we can recover, so that celebrating a community's capacity to endure lets whoever produced the risk avoid discussing causes, responsibility and who pays for adaptation.
Does criticising resilience mean rejecting adaptation?
No: adapting to a changed climate protects lives, ecological resilience is a serious science and some authors propose a transformative resilience that changes the model that produced the damage; the point is to name adaptation in full, asking who manufactured the danger, who pays and whether the affected have the resources and voice to decide.
