Key points
- Campanella: a city is more than the sum of its buildings, and its resilience is that of the families, parishes and associations that decide to return.
- Broadmoor and the Vietnamese community of Versailles saved themselves through organisation; the Lower Ninth Ward recovered barely a third of its residents.
- Narratives of resilience forget those who could not return; Road Home penalised Black neighbourhoods by calculating aid on pre-storm value.
Urban resilience, according to Thomas J. Campanella, is a city's capacity to recover from a disaster, and it depends less on its buildings than on its citizens: on the families, parishes, neighbourhood associations and networks that decide to return. Campanella, an urban historian and professor at Cornell, co-edited with Lawrence Vale The Resilient City (2005), the study of how modern cities recover from catastrophe, and a year later published in the Journal of the American Planning Association the article Urban Resilience and the Recovery of New Orleans, written with the city still flooded after Hurricane Katrina. His thesis is that a city is more than the sum of its buildings and that rebuilding physical infrastructure is useless unless the social fabric that inhabits it is rebuilt too.
Cities do not disappear: why resilience belongs to citizens
The argument comes from history. Almost no major city has disappeared after a disaster in the last two centuries: Chicago was rebuilt after the fire of 1871, San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906, Warsaw, Hiroshima and Tokyo after the war, and that constancy, Campanella argues, is explained by the persistence of property, sunk investments and, above all, people's attachment to place. The resilience of the city is the resilience of its inhabitants: they return because their lives, relationships and memories are there, and the task of planning is not so much to design the new city as to enable and accompany that return.
New Orleans: the green dot map, Broadmoor and Versailles
New Orleans put the idea to the test. In January 2006 the Bring New Orleans Back commission presented a map with green dots over the lowest, most flood-prone neighbourhoods, among them Broadmoor and part of the Lower Ninth Ward, proposing to turn them into parks unless they showed within a few months that enough people would return. Broadmoor's response, organising its own association, surveying its residents, drafting a plan and winning support from Harvard University, became Campanella's example: the neighbourhood saved itself by its capacity to organise. Likewise, the Vietnamese community of Versailles, in the east of the city, returned within weeks thanks to the parish of Mary Queen of Vietnam, while the Lower Ninth Ward, poorer, with fewer homeowners and fewer formal networks, had recovered barely a third of its residents ten years later.
Memory, narratives and Road Home: whom the recovery left out
Memory is the third piece. Campanella and Vale argue that cities also recover through stories and rituals, commemorations, monuments, the narrative of the city reborn, and that those stories are at once necessary and dangerous, because they tend to tell the resilience of those who returned and forget those who could not. In New Orleans, the Road Home programme calculated aid according to each home's pre-storm value, which penalised Black neighbourhoods, where houses were worth less though they cost the same to rebuild; a court forced the formula to be corrected in 2011, when many had already left. Healing a community's wounds, in Campanella's reading, requires recognising whom the recovery left out.
The counterargument: social resilience without letting the state off
The counterargument matters. Entrusting resilience to citizens can become an excuse for the state to withdraw resources, and the most organised communities are not always the neediest: Broadmoor had professionals, homeowners and university contacts other neighbourhoods lacked, so rewarding organisation can reproduce prior inequality. Campanella accepts the objection and replies that social resilience does not replace public resilience but demands it: government has to guarantee the return of those who cannot organise, with housing, services and aid that do not depend on the market value of what was lost.
Campanella's lesson for an age of floods, fires and heatwaves is that reconstruction is a physical, social and political problem at once, and that the decisive question is not how to raise the buildings again but who will be able to live in them. A city that rebuilds levees and bridges and loses a third of a neighbourhood has not recovered: it has changed inhabitants. Resilience worthy of the name is measured in who returns.
Frequently asked questions
What does Thomas Campanella mean by urban resilience?
A city's capacity to recover from a disaster, which depends less on physical reconstruction than on the resilience of its citizens: families, parishes, associations and networks that decide to return; planning must enable that return and guarantee it for those who cannot organise.
What did New Orleans teach about recovery after Katrina?
That the most organised neighbourhoods, such as Broadmoor or the Vietnamese community of Versailles, returned first and avoided being turned into parks, while the Lower Ninth Ward, poorer and with fewer networks, recovered only a third of its population, and that aid calculated on pre-storm home values penalised Black neighbourhoods.
