Community Resiliency

(Video via The Landscape Institute)

Community Engagement and Civic Ecology - The Integrated Frameworks for Resiliency Planning

The term resiliency is usually heard around natural disasters and a region's ability to endure the devastation and swiftly rebuild. After the destruction caused by severe environmental conditions like superstorm hurricanes, droughts and floods, urban planners and citizen organizers are taking action to protect themselves from harm and equip themselves with the tools needed to bounce back. Throughout this article I will breakdown the various and intertwined planning components and the frameworks that can be utilized for holistic resiliency design.

Ecological Resiliency – Building Natural Infrastructure

Environmental or ecological resiliency focuses on focuses on the capacity of the natural and built environments to withstand severe weather events. For decades civic and environmental engineers have devised regional resiliency by installing seawalls, levees, and beach erosion prevention. Designers and engineers are learning that grey infrastructure, technology using concrete, steel and other manmade structures, is often more expensive, more imposing on the environment, less flexible for future plans and not adequately effective in the long term. A more adaptable form of resiliency planning that utilizes the environment has emerged in the practice of green infrastructure — using natural elements as tools to protect shorelines, reduce flooding and provide ecological services and societal benefits. One major benefit of green infrastructure is water management.

Designers are installing vegetated gardens and bioswales that are more effective at retaining and absorbing water than the grey sewer systems that inadequately store and direct combined overflows. Urban streets paved with asphalt and cement are ill equipped for managing heavy rains and flood frequently. Conversely the black stone cement creates an artificially unpleasant heat island effect that traps solar heat and automotive exhaust in confined urban corridors.

Adding a few trees to these asphalt deserts have a a variety of generous benefits including permeable surfaces where water can drain and regenerate aquifers, shade that has cooling effects and visual greenery that can improve human health. Cultivating resilient ecosystems can be achieved by strategically implementing green areas that host native plants and enhance ecological functions such as restoring groundwater aquifers, mitigating storm water surges, hosting wildlife, preventing erosion and providing other social and economic benefits to the community. New York City has been a major proponent of integrated resiliency implementing green infrastructure initiatives into their city planning and disaster mitigation strategies. They have taken initiative as a municipal leader by linking ecological resiliency to quality of life and surfacing progressive solutions that improve civic adaptability, ecological resiliency and social capital.

Civic Ecology – Socio-Ecological Services

Public planning authorities have expanded the framework of resiliency outside of the natural and built environments to include the restoration of social capital and civic systems. In the aftermath of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, and man made ones like the Gulf Oil Spill people acknowledged the need to adequately address the emotional and spiritual healing that was needed by the victims of the devastation. Communities are realizing that they can recover their spirits by restoring their natural areas. Social or community resiliency is the community’s psychological, emotional and spiritual adaptability and capacity to endure and recover from a detrimental event. Through collaboration and community engagement towns, cities and regions damaged by disaster are able to mentally recover and physically rebuild. Neighbors, businesses and institutions connecting, communicating, supporting each other and sharing knowledge and resources to reestablish the basic functions of their community.

Community resiliency at its foundation is the ability to organize and respond after a disaster deploying survival services like food, water, first aid and shelter. Public leaders sought to go beyond emergency responsiveness and understand the civic initiatives that cultivated a systematically enabled residents to emotionally and spiritually build themselves back. Scholars found a fascinating relationship between the health of the environment and that of the community. They found that the resiliency of local ecosystems and that of the local community are interconnected. As community members clean up debris off beaches they feel a sense of hope and pride in making a tangible contribution to the renewal of their environment.

Another form of this dual purpose socio-ecological restoration can come from community projects such as establishing neighborhood gardens which give residents who have suffered significant loss a renewed purpose in producing substinence and maintaining self-sufficiency during their financial upheaval. The correlation between community engagement and active environmental stewardship has been called civic ecology, a term coined by a team of researchers led by Cornell professor Marianne Krasny.

The study of civic ecology further develops our understanding of social systems and how they can be enhanced through outdoor recreation and the stewardship of natural areas. The key to civic adaptability is having a foundation of organizations and community projects steadily in place who can proactively and collaboratively improve socieo-ecological resiliency and mount a collective response to larger challenges. Civic ecology is a critical component for community resiliency, promoting the establishment of community groups, ecological restoration projects and other opportunities that preserve natural areas and revitalize human spirit, hope and motivation.

Economic Resiliency – Versatile Economies and Community Support

The third component of civic adaptability is maintaining the economic dynamics of any affected area. Commercial and industrial operations can be disrupted for lengthy periods of time negatively affecting businesses of all sizes potentially suspending hundreds of jobs temporarily or indefinetly. The affected small businesses have a much more difficult time rebounding and many times aren't able to recover. However, creative community initiatives like local spending initiatives and grassroots fundraising campaigns help to build awareness, provide financial support and reaffirm the public’s commitment to their local businesses.

Stakeholders like Local business, civic institutions and other stakeholders without large financial reserves have partnered with neighbor citizens to implement creative strategies for funding and designing their community. Establishing a cooperative is an innovative mechanism that has been used to restore vacant sites and stimulate economic activity. Cooperatives can act as a local fund with neighbors and businesses investing money for shares. Cooperatives usually elect a board that directs funds into revitalization projects of commercial assets or local infrastructure.

Across the country local citizens are organizing to finance grocers, theatres or a community solar farm. In one case investing in a successful bicycle shop, a bakery and a brewery that filled vacant store fronts and brought energy and growth back to a Minneapolis neighborhood. Community cooperatives can play a direct role in the economic health and direction of a region by strategically investing in local ventures. Cooperative community projects have also redesigned parks and public spaces improving the community’s appeal and placemaking value. These cooperatives are a proactive and innovative approach for communities to design and implement resiliency in tandem with social impact solutions.

The integration of these frameworks, environmental resiliency, socio-ecological resiliency and economic resiliency are a broad and holistic approach for strategically designing urban systems and facilitating community development. Municipalities and citizens are taking willful action to solve impending economic, social and environmental challenges. Accounting for these three factors while cultivating civic engagement enables innovative ideas to arise and smart socio-ecological designs to prevail.