As planners, many of us are familiar with Scott Campbell’s sustainable development triangle, which calls for a balance between ‘Social Justice,’ ‘Economic Growth,’ and’ Environmental Protection’.1 During the planning process, should we focus on bus services that are cheaper and accessible to lower income citizens? Or train lines that produce fewer carbon emissions? Are new developments that revitalize a neighborhood’s economy worth the risk of displacement due to rising property values? Or should retaining the spirit of the community take precedence over economic advancement?
As two North American university students hailing from Baltimore, Maryland, and Vancouver, Canada, our views of city structures are shaped by our personal experiences with these conflicting priorities. In our quest to expand our perspectives, we discovered the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Project, focused on “helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century.” Urban resilience refers here to a city’s ability to bounce back from shocks, that nature of which can vary widely. We felt particularly intrigued by Durban, South Africa, where a 40% unemployment rate, a divided post-apartheid social sphere, and massive housing backlogs create a storm of sustainable development challenges. We planned interviews with seven key actors in Durban’s resilience challenge, and travelled to the southern hemisphere to meet them and hear their views on Durban’s progress.
Resilience as a term can be understood in different ways. In engineering, resilience refers to returning back to an original form. Ecological resilience means transforming into a new stable state/equilibrium. Social resilience, on the other hand, is the process of communities and groups withstanding shocks without significant upheaval (Mehmood, 2016, Beilin et al., 2015). Given these variations in meaning, the usefulness of the term in planning depends heavily on how it is understood and enacted in a regionally specific context.
Stakeholders we interviewed in Durban were generally critical of the term resilience. The city’s Chief Resilience Officer described resilience as a “bad word” in Durban because it implies returning to the city’s undesirable status quo. She prefers the word “transformation” to describe the work they do. Dr. Catherine Sutherland of the University of Kwazulu-Natal offered a similar critique, questioning the relevance of planning-focused urban resilience in dealing with informal settlements or traditional Zulu territories, neither of which abide by eThekwini Municipal planning regulations. Dr. Tasmi Quazi of the nonprofit Asiye eTafuleni, which assists informal workers, cautioned that building resilience could become a neoliberal effort to offload government responsibility for supporting the vulnerable onto individuals and communities.
The question therefore is whether there is truly a place for resilience planning in the context of Durban’s development. This depends on whether the term, despites its flaws, contributes any new understanding or perspective to city planning. Dr. Aldrich, Co-Director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University, adamantly advocates for resilience as a relevant concept. He explained to us in an interview over the phone that, previously, disaster planning was only about preparation for extreme events. ‘Resilience,’ as advocated by organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, pushes us to look instead at long-term characteristics of communities. Dr. Aldrich further argued that the irreversible reality of climate requires planners to drive behavioral change (adaptation), as well as continue mitigation efforts. While ideas about social capital and ecosystem services existed before, resilience brings these concepts together in the framework of planning for disaster – something new and valuable.
Nevertheless, groups such as the Rockefeller Foundation cannot push formulaic resilience plans on cities with contexts vastly different from US cities such as New Orleans and New York City. Indeed, planners in Durban expressed frustration with the requirements to fit structured pathways defined by international funders. However, they also spoke highly of the funding and international profile that the Rockefeller Foundation program brings to the city. Durban’s Preliminary Resilience Assessment lauds resilience for its “potential to provide a framework to synergize a range of agendas in a way that increases the probability of cities ‘bouncing forward’ to an improved state” (eThekwini Municipality, p. 18).
Resilience can be used as a framework to tackle issues in Durban including poor social capital, crumbling physical infrastructure, and degradation of biodiversity. The concept links separate objectives – dealing with drug use, decreasing crime and fortification, providing better services to informal settlements – to create an integrated strategy with which to approach change and disaster. While we found that ‘resilience’ as a term is not widely supported in Durban, the funding and support from the Rockefeller Foundation have the potential to create real change in the city if, and only if, implemented in deference to regional and political contexts.
- Scott Campbell, “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities? Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development,” Journal of the American Planning Association (1996), accessed April 20, 2016, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sdcamp/Ecoeco/Greencities.html
About the Authors:
Martha Isaacs is a third year undergraduate studying the Geography of Human Activity and City and Regional Planning. Her current areas of interest include analyzing diversity in communal living and making mass transit more accessible for disabled riders. When not making short films about public spaces or exploring cities through running, she enjoys tea parties, ducklings, and listening to podcasts.
Ariana Vaisey is a third year Economics and Geography major. She is interested in understanding how the places where we live affect our health and economic opportunity and is writing her senior honors thesis on the spatial distribution of heat-related illness in North Carolina. Growing up in the rain-soaked shadow of British Columbia’s coastal mountains, Ariana’s favorite sound is the patter of rain on skylights.