The Urban Resilience Program of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) just published “Ten Principles for Building Resilience,” with funding from The Kresge Foundation and The New York Community Trust.
The report emerged from a workshop of ULI members who had previously participated in volunteer, pro-bono, group consulting assignments (called advisory panels) to help various communities with resiliency questions or challenges. Workshop participants included a multi-disciplinary group from around the country.
The publication provides the following ten principles:
- Understand Vulnerabilities
- Strengthen Job and Housing Opportunities
- Promote Equity
- Leverage (Existing) Community Assets
- Redefine How and Where to Build
- Build the Business Case (for Resilience)
- Accurately Price the Cost of Inaction
- Design with Natural Systems
- Maximize Co-Benefits
- Harness Innovation and Technology
It also includes a good definition of resilience, which states that resilience is:
the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover
from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events.
When I read this definition my big take away was this: this definition acknowledges that some future adverse event WILL happen. This definition does not shy away from the reality that we can’t reduce the risk of a future adverse event occurring to zero.
The graph below illustrates this point. The horizontal axis is the amount of time you are willing to wait to see if a rare event will occur. The vertical axis is the probability of that rare event occurring over during that time duration. Each colored line indicates the annual chance of the adverse event occurring.
This graph illustrates that if the finished floor of the living room of your house is 1-inch below the 100-year floodplain water elevation (which has a 1% annual chance of happening – the red line) you have a 26% chance of having 1-inch of water in your home during a 30-year mortgage period. If you read the horizontal axis of the graph over to the 30-year duration mark (the second line to the right of the 10-year mark on this log scale), you will see it intersects the red line at exactly 26% on the left axis.
I support resiliency planning and thinking about our response to Harvey and other adverse events as a risk reduction effort and as a process to reduce the negative outcomes. This approach is much better than the old-school thinking that suggests that we can use engineered infrastructure to “control” nature, flooding, or other adverse events from occurring in the first place.
We can use planning, engineering, and architecture to reduce risks, to prepare for adverse events, to stage recovery efforts ahead of time, and to adapt to the eventual (certain) arrival of the next adverse event.
We can use insurance, reinsurance, and catastrophe bonds to hedge against residual risks that are not possible to eliminate.
I think I like where this is going…