Architecture and Resilience

Interdisciplinary Dialogues

Kim Trogal, Irena Bauman, Ranald Lawrence, Doina Petrescu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351659659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Resilience will be a defining quality of the twenty-first century. As we witness the increasingly turbulent effects of climate change, the multiple challenges of resource depletion and wage stagnation, we know that our current ways of living are not resilient.

This volume takes resilience as a transformative concept to ask where and what architecture might contribute. Bringing together cross-disciplinary perspectives from architecture, urban design, art, geography, building science and psychoanalysis, it aims to open up multiple perspectives of research, spatial strategies and projects that are testing how we can build local resilience in preparation for major societal challenges, defining the position of architecture in urban resilience discourse.

Chapter 16 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

1

Introduction

Architecture and resilience on a human scale

Kim Trogal, Irena Bauman, Ranald Lawrence and Doina Petrescu

Resilience will be a defining quality of the twenty-first century. As we witness the increasingly turbulent effects of climate change, the multiple challenges of resource depletion and wage stagnation,¹ we know that our current ways of living are not resilient. Our urban infrastructures, our buildings, our economies, our ways of managing and governing are still too tightly bound to models of unrestrained free-market growth, individualism and consumerism. Research has shown that the crises arising from climate change will become increasingly frequent and increasingly severe. It is also known that the effects of climate change are not evenly distributed across places and people, and neither are the resources needed to meet these challenges. We will need place-specific responses that engage with, and emerge from, citizens ourselves.

Visions of the near-future city often feature ‘big ideas’, especially technologically driven ones. These include the use of ‘big data’ for the ‘smart’ control of urban resources, artificial intelligence, or the ‘Internet of Things’, in which our devices, fixtures and services will communicate with each other wirelessly, independently and seamlessly to make our homes, buildings and cities more resource-efficient. Here, information and data are the new(ish) ‘assets’ of the city, raising urgent questions of security, ownership and profit-making around that data. Yet the development of new technology alone, however valuable, fails to address the most important point – that the most significant life-changing aspects of climate change require the development of a new paradigm in which scientific inquiry and technologies are applied to better the society and environment in which we all live. In their current manifestations, the Internet of Things, forms of automation and other technological fixes do not address vital, social, cultural and political dimensions of resilience. The shift in paradigm we need is ultimately an imaginative endeavour, and one that equally demands ‘big ideas’.

In response, this book emerges from the international conference organised by the Sheffield School of Architecture in 2015, Architecture and Resilience on the Human Scale. The conference focused on research, spatial strategies and projects that are testing how we can build local resilience in preparation for major societal challenges such as climate change, scarcity of resources, increases in extreme weather events and shifts in demographics. The conference and this book aim to define the position of architecture in urban resilience discourse, and more significantly, describe how architecture and urban practices can make a transformative contribution. To this end, the conference and this collection of essays have privileged the ‘human scale’: those initiatives working with local participation and the fostering of social relationships and empowerment as a key to building resilience.

In recent years, resilience has moved from being a radical term in ecology, permaculture and grassroots movements (Hopkins 2008) to something like a catch-all which ‘has become the preferred means of maintaining business as usual’ (Diprose 2015, p. 44). It is a term that has been defined by governments and experts, external to those communities, who are told they should ‘become resilient’ (MacKinnon & Derickson 2012). A simplified definition of resilience as simply ‘being strong’ or ‘bouncing back’ is used ubiquitously, from describing a football team’s victory, workers’ capacities to manage stress, to the Bank of England and the former chancellor George Osborne’s discourses around building a ‘resilient economy’.² The ubiquity of the term is potentially due to the fact that resilience in this definition does not say anything about what is good or bad; it says nothing of the political and ethical implications or motivations for action. With cities rapidly adopting resilience as a framework to shape development, we find it crucial to question these dimensions.

In this introduction we trace the emergence of the concept of resilience in ecology and its reception in urban development and the field of architecture, setting out the important interconnection between the ecological and climate imperatives for resilience, to be considered with social justice and community imperatives. The focus of this book is concerned with resilience at the ‘human scale’, the lived scale of buildings, neighbourhoods and everyday life, and it is in this important dimension that we consider architecture must intervene.

Resilience: the re-definition of a radical concept

During the 1970s the term ‘resilience’ emerged in different disciplines, from psychology to engineering and ecology. While very different in scope, a common feature concerned the ability of a person, material or ecosystem (respectively) to withstand, absorb and recover from stresses or shock. In the ecological sciences, the introduction of the term is credited to C.S. Holling, and it is from this field in particular that resilience has had success in spreading across many different fields. Holling’s contribution to the science of complex systems shifted the focus away from the concepts of stability and equilibrium in an ecosystem to resilience, which he defined as ‘a measure of the persistence of systems and their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables’ (1973, p. 14). His initial study, since further developed by him and many others, retains significance in our dramatically changing climate, as we move to more extreme conditions and greater instabilities. His study of resilience along with other studies since have been particularly concerned with the impacts and inter-relation of human activity and ecosystems.³ As Folke et al. put it, ‘social–ecological resilience is about people and nature as interdependent systems’ (2010, p. 2).

The application of complex systems theory to urban environments has therefore been particularly appealing in that it goes further than sustainability in addressing our changing and unstable climates, connecting the social and the ecological. Yet, as numerous scholars have pointed out, while the term has some advantages over sustainability, the translation of a concept from ecology to social realms and to the city brings a range of difficulties (Davoudi 2012; Fanstein 2013; MacKinnon & Derickson 2012; Vale 2014). A primary problem when applied to social realms is that it is unable to account for power and inequity. If social processes of change and decision-making are seen as taking place within complex systems represented by ‘networks’ of actors, this is a representation in which, as Fanstein argues, ‘everything is connected to everything else, there appears to be no overriding logic, no agents, and no targets for effective action’ (2013, p. 7). With social and political scientists Walker and Cooper demonstrating strong ideological links between resilience and neoliberalism (2011), concerns have been raised that resilience as a policy framework for cities can ‘produce outcomes that further entrench vulnerabilities and socioeconomic impoverishment’ (Ziervogel et al. 2017, p. 126), whereby ‘scarce public resources [are directed to] areas of high economic value without giving commensurate attention to historically neglected neighborhoods’ (Shi et al. 2016, p. 132).⁴

Given that exposure to crisis and insecurity are already uneven,⁵ urban resilience needs to be understood as not only about resilience to large-scale shocks, but something that is significantly conditioned by everyday life and by the conditions of austerity, poverty, exclusion and marginalisation. As Derickson and MacKinnon put it: ‘the ability to meaningfully influence climate futures and contribute to the process of imaging and enacting alternative futures [is unevenly distributed]. This uneven capacity is shaped and conditioned along persistent axes of sedimented social difference’ (2015, p. 305). Or, put in other words: ‘resilience itself is distributed in unjust ways’ (Khalil et al. 2013, p. 3).

For these reasons among others, resilience in urban planning, geography and architecture has recently become a more expansive call, connecting to ideas about the right to the city (De Carli Chapter 7), social justice and empowerment, with Petcou and Petrescu in particular articulating the ‘right to resilience’ (2015, see also Chapter 21 in this volume). With these authors arguing that a resilient city must inherently be a more just city (Khalil et al. 2013; Vale 2014; Ziervogel et al. 2017), resilience is thus seen as needing to engage with material redistribution of resources and capacities (the means of resilience), and become more just in terms of its processes, citizen participation and empowerment. It concerns a right to participate and a right to imagine and shape the future (Petcou & Petrescu 2015). This is one of main reasons why this book engages with resilience on a ‘human scale’, discussed further below.

One of the discussions in urban resilience literature has concerned the problems of transferring concepts from physical sciences to the social realm,⁶ with some scholars preferring to eschew the term ‘resilience’ altogether.⁷ However, we agree that resilience should still be viewed ‘as having the potential to develop as a more radical and transformational agenda’ in that it is linked to local, grassroots environmental initiatives and ‘approaches to climate change that argue for resilience as a “de-centred, de-commodified and de-carbonised alternative” (Brown 2011, p. 14)’ (Shaw 2012, pp. 309–310).

Resilience, as it was developed in ecological systems analysis, emphasised certain qualities that make a system resilient, such as diversity; redundancy; connectivity; continuous learning and experimentation; high levels of participation; and polycentric governance (Biggs et al. 2012). While they do and can align with neoliberal approaches, they are also potentially transformative concepts when thinking about urban locations and development. How can we have, for instance, diversities of tenure, ownership and inclusive access to housing? What kinds of diverse economies are being performed, and what kinds of non-market forms of collectivity and participation are being developed? Could we have a diversity of energy sources, and diversity of forms of their control and management? How might a diverse, creative and participative future for energy be imagined and realised (see Tyszczuk & Udall, Chapter 3)?

Similarly, supporting the ‘redundancy’ of a system requires a different approach to thinking about people, place and time. If resilience requires ‘redundancy’, would it therefore mean rethinking ‘idleness’, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1932) once formulated, and demand an engagement with critical perspectives on ‘work’ (such as Weeks 2011)? Resilience science has also emphasised the importance of learning, adaptation and self-organisation within a system (Folke et al. 2010), and indeed in urban resilience learning and capacity-building at the level of households, neighbourhoods, cities and regions, are all seen as crucial to address current ecological crises (Archer & Dodman 2015). If resilience involves ‘high levels of participation’ and ‘continuous learning and experimentation’, how can resilient practices enable empowerment and the autonomy of a locality?

Taking resilience as a transformative concept, our concern with this book is to ask where and what architecture might contribute. This might mean forms of architecture that are in themselves more resilient (such as resilient or autonomous buildings) or could contribute to wider urban and neighbourhood resilience. What is the ethical, political and social capacity of architecture in helping to build alternative, resilient futures?

The human scale?

Cities, while being one the major proponents of consumption and waste, and a major source of emissions, are also seen by some as being the best scale to tackle resilience and global ecological problems. Barber (2013), for instance, argues that cities hold the best democratic potential for change, being the scale at which ‘bottom-up citizenship, civil society and voluntary community’ emerges. There is acknowledgement that it is cities that are taking action, and by sharing knowledge through city-to-city networks, collaborations are enabled that aim for greater effectiveness in challenging global-scale problems than isolated endeavours. Yet there is also an acknowledgement that of course not all cities work well, and in fact that it is the neighbourhood, understood as the ‘building block of cities’, which is equally important, but has received comparatively less attention (Mayer 2012; Moulaert et al. 2010).

Research has suggested that place-based approaches are key in building resilience, highlighting a need for ‘placemaking [… and a] basic infrastructure of public spaces’ in building neighbourhood resilience, especially in areas under socio-economic stress with retrenching local authority services (Platts-Fowler & Robinson 2013) (see the interview with Tina Saaby, Chapter 20). It is in recognition that not only can ecological loops be closed effectively at this local level, but moreover that new material infrastructures can be made and claimed by citizens. Recognising that architecture is always located somewhere, it is in these places where change happens with people. In the age of climate change and peak oil, resilience requires qualities of so-called ‘social capital’ – trust, collaboration, cooperation and leadership – which is rooted in the place where people live (Lewis & Conaty 2012, p. 26). In its more radical and critical formulations, it is the only way transformative resilience can really be achieved (Petcou & Petrescu 2015), and it is through the spatial, social and community practices on the ground that resilience is made.

The focus on ‘the local’, as contributors here highlight, does not mean ‘localising’ structural problems. Rather, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Introduction: architecture and resilience on a human scale
• DIALOGUE I: Narratives of resilience
• DIALOGUE II: Community resilience and the right to housing
• DIALOGUE III: New pedagogies of resilience
• DIALOGUE IV: Challenging climate denial
• DIALOGUE V: Resilience ethics and interdependence
• DIALOGUE VI: Scales of resilience concerning the city, the region and globalisation
• Index