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Hazards
understand how to future proof our communities.
Architects, engineers, planners and land- scape architects are among those who need to focus on reducing the vulnerability of people and our cities and towns to unforeseen events.
Resilience is a relevant and transferable concept that resonates loudly in New Zealand. However, de ning and formulating operational resilience goals and practices across built environment stakeholders in government, civil society and the private sector is far from straightforward.
Institutionalising resilience
Resilience has several meanings and has been rapidly accepted and promoted across many disciplines, sectors and scales and in the broader community.
It often refers to a con guration of attributes that are exclusively positive, inherently desir- able and widely relevant. But a resilient system is not necessarily a good system – organised crime, for example, is remarkably resilient.
Recent research and capability-building initiatives have been designed to help trans- form resilience from a promising notion to successful practice.
There is a compelling need to develop a shared understanding of the meaning and practices of resilience and to develop better links between built environment disciplines, professions and stakeholders.
In short, resilience governance needs to be institutionalised and built environment professionals will play a pivotal role in this.
De ning resilience
We use the term ‘resilience’ to describe the ability of a system (from an individual to a building, city or the world) to:
● absorb impacts (to persist) in the face of
external shocks such as natural hazards and
social, economic and political disruption ● learn, reorganise and adjust to change
incrementally over time (to adapt)
● undergo systemic changes (to transform) as past practices are no longer undesirable
or feasible.
Vulnerability can be thought of as the antithesis of resilience. It is determined by: ● the degree of exposure to hazard impacts ● susceptibility or sensitivity to loss and
damage from hazard impacts
● capacity to cope with hazard events in
the short to medium term, using available strengths, attributes and resources, and adapt to longer-term or slow-onset change.
Reducing vulnerability to speci ed hazards is key to building resilience in the face of escalating disaster risk.
Resilience, therefore, is particularly appli- cable to the built environment.
Building professionals shape resilience
How might the next generation of built environment practitioners develop a shared understanding of resilience and work together to implement it?
First, better integration is needed within and between disciplines to develop a shared understanding of the concept of resilience. Planning can play a part
Second, resilience practice encompasses both the ability to cope with and recover from disturbance, to adapt to change and to avoid that disturbance altogether. This is where built environment professions can work more closely together.
For example, architects and engineers focus on design measures to mitigate hazard risk. They construct a building to withstand an extreme event like an earthquake and use materials that are repairable in case the event exceeds design thresholds. Measures such as these play a crucial role in saving lives.
However, people are still living in harm’s way – they do not avoid the risk altogether. For those facing escalating disaster risk, such as on low-lying shorelines subject to rising sea levels, design approaches that protect against or accommodate hazard impacts will become too costly and unfeasible.
Expensive and contentious relocation will eventually be necessary, and this is where planning will be at its most useful. Planning provisions can stop development in high-risk locations such as along low-lying
coastlines or areas prone to seismic risk and liquefaction.
Planning can also help to reduce social vul- nerability through provisions for community development and livelihood sustainability.
Built environment professionals need to work together to reduce exposure to hazards, limit susceptibility to loss and damage and strengthen coping and adaptive capacity to sudden shocks and disruptive change. Collaboration needed for resilience governance Third, institutionalising resilience in the real world will require more than forging better linkages within and between built environment disciplines and professions.
Built environment stakeholders, including government, civil society and the private sector, will need to work together more collaboratively with built environment profes- sionals, specialists and experts to develop and e ectively implement resilience governance.
Towards resilience governance
Government has legitimate authority to ad- minister public a airs, including elected and appointed o cials who form the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the state.
Governance is not the same. It is the inter- actions between key players and networks in government, society and the private sector to address societal problems through coordina- tion, power sharing and collective action.
Societal resilience cannot be achieved by any one governance actor alone. Resilience governance has to successfully navigate turbulence, complexity, uncertainty and contestation.
This will need built environment disci- plines, professions and governance players working together more e ectively through deliberation, social learning and collabora- tive problem solving.
Built environment professionals have a particularly important role in institution- alising resilience governance – as resilience champions, educators and enablers.
To do so, they themselves will have to embody the resilience characteristics they want for the built environment.
60 — April/May 2016 — Build 153
FEATURE SECTION