Resilience & the City

Change, (Dis)Order and Disaster

Peter Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138248038
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317065319
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política pública de planificación local y regional

Following the turbulent events of the first few years of the 21st century, the growth of new security and disaster measures have led to significant changes to urban design and the management of urban space. This book blends the genealogical method of Foucault with the theory of rhythms by Lefebvre to examine these changes. The spatial history of urban disaster is linked to the rhythms of everyday urban experience to offer a revised understanding of the regulation of order and disorder in the city. In doing so, the book highlights issues of 'hardening' space, the drift from civil defence to civil protection to civil contingencies and resilience; this assessment realigns the potential impact of tightening security practices and resilient ways of thinking, doing and acting on societal security. This also links to growing concerns about quality of life over the use and potential abuse of security and disaster legislation for managing social unrest. Examples studied include the increased exclusion of minorities (such as young people) from democracy and public life; security oriented interventions in the ethnic minority communities, the use of automated technologies in policing civil and minor offences (e.g. digital plate recognition and speeding) and the interplay of diverse social groups in more commercially aligned and increasingly 'securitised' public spaces of the 'entrepreneurial' city. This book highlights many significant problems with the direction of British democracy and suggests there may be both positive and negative results from becoming more resilient. While providing a critical appraisal of the realignment of neoliberal democracy at large, it also links discussion on 'gentrification', 'revanchism' and 'urban security' to a forward looking agenda for further research.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Baruch Spinoza

What’s the Idea?

This book seeks to offer, if not a totally new idea, then perhaps a new way to approach a very old one. This study grew out of several years reading the work of Marx, Lefebvre and Foucault, both their own work and what others have written on them; but it is not a book of theory. This study also grew out of several years of research on the topic of security, resilience and the city, but this is not a case study of empirical research. This book seeks to apply a novel reading of social science to both the theory and empirical study of the city as a ‘resilient’ phenomenon. In this book, an argument is made that (1) the concept of resilience is of growing importance to enquiry, and (2) this importance can be enhanced and meaningfully grounded in a project of spatial history. The point is that resilience is not a new idea – it is not an innovation springing into the world fully formed. It is a very old feature and characteristic of how we go about living, surviving and thriving. The goal in this book is to find a way to theoretically inform and empirically ground how this idea has emerged, has changed, and is informing the change happening around us in the city today. What we think about it, how we know what to do and how we then act out ‘resilience’ in the city can give us some real insight into this idea.

As the struggle to bring order to risky times, spaces and places appears increasingly disordered, there is much interest in how we can change, adapt and become more resilient. Change and adaptation over time affect the similarities and differences in the beliefs of different groups (e.g. theology, rationalism), the abstract knowledge of how to do certain things (e.g. worship, masonry, scientific method) and how everyday lives are acted out (e.g. preying, building a house, running an experiment). Change can create fear and uncertainty, as adaptation acknowledges that new ways of thinking, doing or acting are possible or may become necessary as the world changes around us. Change creates cascade effects, meaning one change that triggers others in both negative and positive ways. A change in beliefs can affect the interests of a group, which alliances are made or broken, the groups or coalitions that individuals, tribes, nations choose to be members of. When looking at changing cities, a tipping point can affect whom particular spaces of the city belong to, or change what a place means to the different groups that use it. How authority is used to manage or govern the changing city informs the way that people think, the knowledge of how to do things and the way they act out their everyday lives. Change demands adaptation; those who adapt become more resilient, those who do not may not, but change and adaptation are two sides of the same coin. This complex interplay can be aligned in different ways at different times, shaping individuals, locations, cities, societies and civilisations to become more or less resilient. Some alignments persist, are adaptable and resilient, others falter, decay, fall prey to war, disaster or are absorbed by other ways of thinking, of doing or acting and fade away as times change.

This book uses the city as a crucible. Its key contribution is the use of the city to explain the features and characteristics of resilience. The key questions are how did cities happen, where did they come from, why did people come together to make settlements, villages, towns and cities? What were the agreements made that allowed people to cooperate to raise houses, walls or temples? How did technologies help them to progress? What institutions and organisations underpin the creation, destruction and recreation of an urban everyday life? This might seem like a lot of questions, and it is. These questions overlap in so many ways as to make up delightful contradictions. They shift and oscillate to shape our understanding of the world, of each other, of time, space and place in different ways at different times. Sometimes we are resilient through our positive adaptation to change. We are able to learn from our exposure to danger, shift and transform our ways of thinking, doing or acting to come out stronger than we were before. Sometimes we are resilient because we refuse to yield to change. We resist and remain obdurate and unchanged despite the damage or danger faced. This book seeks to open up the debate on positive and negative forms of resilience by using the lens of change in the city to crack open the old questions of who we are, and how safe we are in the face of dangerous and ongoing change.

In order to get to the city of today, though, we must first make an effort to open up the debate. To such an end this book is split into two parts. The first uses the method of spatial history to develop a deeper understanding of change. If we can assume in broad terms that religion is the seed of philosophy, and philosophy is the seed of science, then none in their current form could exist without the interplay they have had with each other. Very simply put, could the modern scientific method exist without the combination of Persian mathematicians, the European philosophers and the tipping point where reaction against religious dogma triggered the Enlightenment? Could modern democratic government exist without the interplay between the corruption of the aristocracy and the economic poverty and decades of disease that created the ripe conditions to trigger the English Civil War or the French Revolution? These oversimplified points suggest that there is an ongoing interplay between different theories, different knowledge of how to do things and different ways of acting upon that knowledge. These three (theory, knowledge, action) constitute beliefs (as ways of thinking), rules (as ways of doing) and norms (as ways of acting). Through their interplay and alignment, order and disorder emerge, the features and characteristics of which can be traced to highlight the trajectory of change over time. The term ‘trajectory’ is used here loosely; inferring the alignment of beliefs, rules and norms as they interact is a process of fluctuation, of oscillation and realignment across complex and interdependent forms. These forms create and destroy systems as they realign, the thread of which coalesces into a particular way of thinking, of doing and of acting at a particular time. Using this theory to identify evidence allows an analysis of the ‘meta-stable equilibrium’ as it goes through the process of becoming something else. Civilisations adapt as the interplay between forms of beliefs, rules and norms are perturbed and disordered, and reordered again. Tracing the trajectory of change throughout history can show how resilience and the city are (re)constituted through a process of struggle between order and disorder that stimulates adaptation and transformation in those resilient orders that survive, and often helps to show how those that are too rigid or unable to adapt can struggle, decline or fall foul of the conflicts that result from a lack of resilience. The second part of the book extends this theory to look at mapping out the present in more depth. This engages with the features and characteristics of a democratic, entrepreneurial and capitalist social order, and the challenges to that order that are posed by ecological, technological and human hazards, risks and threats.

Concepts and Context

In order to achieve this end there are some difficult concepts that need to be unpacked along the way, first amongst them: order, disorder and resilience, but also authority, risk, disaster, hazard, security and more. These are far from simple or uncontested concepts. Indeed, a large part of the discussion that follows is taken up with unpacking (in Part I) what these concepts mean and how they can be unpacked differently at different points in history, and (in Part II) what they mean today and how or why they are important. There is almost always a struggle at the heart of defining a concept, and more struggle involved in turning that concept from raw knowledge into a form of thinking, doing or acting that has an effect on the world around us. This struggle runs throughout the discussion, but it should always be remembered that this definition and categorisation are a means to an end, not ends in and of themselves.

The analysis emerges from a personal struggle with the increase in cross-disciplinary research on disaster and security in recent years. An intellectual explosion of sorts has seen contested ideas come forth over how we should understand the next world order, or in sociological terms what the next meta-narrative is to be used for bringing the current global (dis)order into focus. Of course, this has far-reaching implications for those studying core concepts in crisis, disaster, catastrophe and the urban. Such an approach requires that the analyst touches upon and cuts across the ‘world risk society’ (Beck, 1999), the social science of disaster (Rodriguez et al., 2006), climate change and environmental hazards (Pelling, 2003; Vale and Campanella, 2005), the search for urban resilience (Coaffee et al., 2008) and attempts to model the urban as complex systems (Fujita et al., 1999; Bretagnolle et al., 2003; Batty, 2008). Many crossovers emerge across such diverse approaches to the study of urban space. The topics blur and cut across urban security, emergency or crisis, muddying the analysis across scales of territory, place and networks as the urbanising world struggles to be prepared for the worst.

One of the central features of such crossover is the integration of ‘resilience’ as a useful concept in theory, governance policy and the management of urban space (Coaffee and Wood, 2006). What we understand as risk, hazards and threats are now being reconstituted within new theories, taxonomies and typologies to bring the ongoing process of change into debate. Any effort to clarify the muddy waters of this complex discussion must now take into account both the real and imagined crises, emergencies, disasters and catastrophes – be they urban and rural, anthropogenic and technological, legal or cultural and so on. At the same time there is a growing fragility inherent in the increasingly urban, capitalist and democratic social order. In a world of ‘shocks’, ‘clashes’ and ‘tipping points’, numerous approaches can be useful, but in amidst all the competing arguments order can easily become disorder. One must not lose sight of change as a contested process of becoming something else.

One might easily make assumptions to bring order to this chaos. One might assume that ‘security’ and ‘order’ are two sides of the same coin. One might say the same about ‘disaster’ and ‘disorder’. However, when we dig deeper there are subtle and important differences in how we know or think about, understand, do and act in orderly or disorderly ways. Security can create disorder, as shown by the Western investment in paramilitary groups used to secure the Middle East during the Cold War, many of which have since been radicalised by geo-political extremism into terrorist organisations. Equally, disaster can stimulate positive growth, as the chain of recent disasters in the twenty-first century have stimulated both economic growth in reconstitution of affected locales, regions and nations and in new ways of thinking about disasters around the world. There are also fluctuating interdependencies between different forms of knowledge, of thinking, of doing and of acting on knowledge linked to customary beliefs, traditional rules and established norms, themselves idiosyncratic to a given moment in time. Any analyst will find complex typologies and taxonomies of sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary, ideas on what we know, should be able to do, the best way of doing it and enacting that as a course of action. Our efforts to better deal with danger appear differently at different moments, and it seems that, no matter how deep one digs, change over time is the only constant.

Aims and Outcomes

The aim here is ambitious. The aim is to rethink urban history as a process of struggle that creates different forms of order and disorder. From the particular alignment of the orderly and disorderly in everyday life change can be traced, identifying which resilient features and characteristics emerge as positive and progressive adaptations or negative and regressive resistance to change at different times. Order is the alignment of the pattern towards a meta-stable equilibrium, disorder towards perturbation, crisis or even catastrophe; resilience emerges as analysable features and characteristics of change sliding between these poles. A very basic definition of resilience is the struggle to adapt within complex, interdependent systems in order to survive, and to thrive. Resilience is a process rather than a subjective or objective ‘thing’. As such, the study of resilience in the urban is the study of interplay between different forms of thinking, doing and acting to understand the process of change in space and place over time. Now, in fulfilling this aim and reaching this outcome one must engage with some dense philosophical notions, and even more dense theoretical language, but the end result will be a much richer understanding of the process of change and the importance of the struggle for practical resilience of use to academics, researchers, policymakers and practitioners.

Understanding change as a process of interplay harnesses ideas around ‘mapping the present’ (Elden, 2001) to show how diverse categorisations of knowing, doing and acting are an elaboration on the existing content of what is already concrete in life around us. Resilience is something built on the interplay between the real and the imagined. As such, it is interplay between our knowledge about the world and the lived experience of that world over time. As the world in question is increasingly urban this discussion takes place in a predominantly urban context. It will provide a toolbox for the future analysis of the concrete in everyday life, drawn from the interplay of the concrete with the abstract – i.e. what we know, what we do and how we act. It is, as such, less a repackaging of previous theoretical, political and economic frameworks and more a reconstitution of philosophical and sociological enquiry alongside a spatial history of urban social change. In short, this book will look deeper, further back, and with a more critical eye unpack the antecedents of contested discourses of the resilient city. This is overly simplistic, and the detail is unpacked throughout the book, but at its most basic, time is the lens for understanding how change occurs, space is the lens for understanding where it occurs and place is the lens for unpacking the meaning of change for those who experience it. By reconstituting change over time–space–place we thus redefine our dialectic understanding of traceable patterns that (re)constitute ‘everyday life’ (Lefebvre, 2004 [1992]). This can help to chart the resultant ‘discursive formation’ (Foucault, 1970) of given ‘truths’ and how they inform the decision-making that leads people to settle in a location; we chart some applications of this method through the city in history (Part I). When this is reapplied to the city of today (Part II) it gives the analyst a way into unpacking urban order or disorder and the emergence of challenges posed by emergency, crisis, disaster and catastrophe in more detail and with more depth.

Now, it might be possible for this discussion to bring some clarity to muddied waters, but given the complexity of the project it could equally stir up more confusion for some readers. For example, throughout this discussion questions are asked on how authority is linked to both order and disorder. The analysis addresses the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the creation of order and the potential for it to be changed – sometimes by forms of thinking, sometimes by forms of doing, sometimes by dangerous events that are beyond human control. The increased focus on the interplay between different ‘forms’ draws out the character of a given order but also the perturbations of the disorderly that both inform the trajectory of change. The forms of influence are diverse and can include particular types of knowledge – theology, philosophy, scientific method – specific technologies or functional practices – writing, construction, computing – social relations between individuals or groups – exchanges, conversations – the environmental conditions of a space or location – temporary or permanent, rural or urban – as well as the institutions – forms of politeness, religious doctrine, code of laws, democratic elections – and organisations – church, army, judiciary, civil government. All of these forms are a part and parcel of ordering everyday life. Who has access to them and what they do with that access is also important for the complexity and adaptability of the system. Understanding the interplay between these forms will enliven the understanding of the anthropological context through which our everyday lives are ordered and enacted. This helps to elucidate the impact of change in the present, enabling analysis of the current trends in policy and practice. As an aim and outcome of the book it is hoped that by reflection on these trends a more positive sense of how resilience has developed and can be understood will be used to build cyclical adaptations into the ordering of everyday life. This will stimulate debate over the need for more meaningfully democratic forms of urbanism. It is possible for a deeper meaning to underpin urban resilience. One that draws together the themes of disparate research, highlighted above. Rather than simply a passive ‘bounce-back’ to a pre-existing stable or steady state, we can adapt, we can change and we can transform. Contributing to this debate as it evolves is a central aim of this book.

Themes and Questions

There have been a number of influential arguments in the discussion of a dominant archetype or ‘meta-narrative’ of our contemporary social order, from ‘risk society’ to a ‘clash of civilisations’ or the ‘end of history’. These often define not just the topic or theme of enquiry, but also the kind of questions one can ask in empirical research. Rather than more prosaic research questions (RQ1, RQ2, etc.) this book operates across these themes to draw out questions for further debate. First, the book offers a way into theory and practice, stepping away from a history of the political and economic towards a spatial history. This does not refute the utility of political economy, but rather seeks to avoid reducing analysis ab initio to political and economic processes. The political and the economic are vital forms to include, but they are not the only way to get at the meat and bones of complex change over time. For example, what effect does a location or site have on what people do there? What other forms of beliefs, customs, habits or traditions are enshrined as institutions? Which coalitions combine into authoritative organizations? How do these deep roots develop? Of special interest are the patterns emerging over time, whereby individuals gain or lose in the range of choices available to them; how the beliefs, rules and norms underpinning choice link with particular locations, institutions, organisations. Is there a trend in the trajectory of change that allows us to trace these shifts over time in the alignment of beliefs, rules and norms as schools of thought, as laws or ways of behaving?

The well-intentioned, but oft misguided, treatment of such discussions in policy and practice has set up a context for enquiry in which the analysis of technique and actuarial tools (e.g. risk assessment, risk management and risk mitigation) too often take precedence over ‘making sense’ of the everyday world around us. The result of such an approach is a more pragmatically defined and efficiently managed series of governance techniques, struggling to match the territoriality and organisational capacity of the nation-state with the needs of global capitalism, and leaving the individual citizen behind subject to the whims of choice in a market of indecision. Such a view potentially omits the experience of people on the street, being more focussed on the ‘space of flows’ through which capital and information now move, or with the nuance of institutional and organisational wrangling for the best way to meet the requisite obligations of government – to create, ensure and maintain order. It also misses the chance to draw on characteristics of people, society or civilisation that underpin these techniques, mechanisms and institutional or organisational processes. Notions of persistence, durability, recovery, efficiency, adaptation can be drawn on to give a much more positive view of the future than a bleak, paranoid, disaster-ridden quagmire of dangerous people, risky places and alienating markets. The interests of experts and citizens can be moved back togethe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I: THEORY, GENEALOGY AND HISTORY
• PART II: THE HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
• References
• Index