The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster [Paperback]

I was attracted to the premise of this book; a collection of essays addressing the sometimes astonishing ability of urban systems to recover from catastrophe. And in that regard there is much to recommend here, there are few texts that can match this one for the wealth of examples and information about the myriad of disasters that disrupt a city's basic functions and the immediate social impacts of such an event.

Were the purpose of the book a standard reference guide I would rate this book much more highly than I do, and it would be an invaluable guide. Unfortunately the actual purpose of the collection is so different, and because it fails so often on its own terms, its usefulness as a reference to urban disaster is difficult. Many of the essays are peppered with sections that reach so far to make a case for resiliance against the evidence that ultimately my experience was of near continual frustration.

A consistant error of the collection, and a fallacy that is sketched out and embedded deeply in the opening chapter, is the reification of The City as an organic system that operates as an entity independent of the residents. Aside from the obvious questions of agency and teleology that arise from that approach, this presentation reenforces a tendency of the authors to represent disasters as psychological as well as physical disturbances to the City itself. The transposition of the Toxic Narrative concept from an individual and clinical condition to a disorder of the polis was particularly unfortunate and ill-concieved.

A basic problem of this collection is that it largely fails to address the very important question of how cities are changed following a disaster. In the current context we can see this in the rebuilding of New Orleans. The recovered city a decade from now will be a very different place than it was prior to the levee breaks. In that same way, the present day communities of Warsaw, Tokyo, and Berlin share a site and a name with the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century but share little of the spirit and identity, and certainly not the residents obliterated by the horrors of WWII.

In addition, some of the articles seem to be included for topical appeal and seem a little out of scale with other entries. In this comparison the the quarter of a million dead in the Tangshan earthquake is rendered banal while simultaneously trivializing the Los Angeles riots with its mere 60 deaths.

Stronger editing and a less restrictive framework might have saved this collection. As it is, it has enjoyed a degree of timely relevance because of the 'year of disasters', but this should not be the last word on urban resiliance and I beg someone please to fill this gap in the literature.

Unfortunately, there is little to learn here.

Pompeii or Chernobyl, Hiroshima or Dresden, Banda Aceh or New Orleans: Some towns did not come onto the legs after a catastrophe, others rose again. Bombarded or struck by earthquakes, contaminated by radiation or flooded: The inhabitants of every town want the resurrection of her identification object - provided that it is only appropriately feasible. The big fire in Chicago is examined in the book or the earthquake in San Francisco. One looks at the reconstruction of Warsaw and also Berlin after the second World War. Perhaps it makes sense to give up a town like New Orleans, three meters under the sea-level, as a housing area definitely. On the other hand, a tendency of all residents of maltreated towns is to be felt globally, which speaks about to rebuild their symbol object as unchanged as possible. Maybe it is better to manage some variations, considering the presumable future of a city during an alternated reconstruction. Towns are works of art, culture products, how to save their threatened identity? This book will remain currently a long time ...

Pompeii or Chernobyl, Hiroshima or Dresden, Banda Aceh or New Orleans: Some towns did not come onto the legs after a catastrophe, others rose again. Bombarded or struck by earthquakes, contaminated by radiation or flooded: The inhabitants of every town want the resurrection of her identification object - provided that it is only appropriately feasible. The big fire in Chicago is examined in the book or the earthquake in San Francisco. One looks at the reconstruction of Warsaw and also Berlin after the second World War. Perhaps it makes sense to give up a town like New Orleans, three meters under the sea-level, as a housing area definitely. On the other hand, a tendency of all residents of maltreated towns is to be felt globally, which speaks about to rebuild their symbol object as unchanged as possible. Maybe it is better to manage some variations, considering the presumable future of a city during an alternated reconstruction. Towns are works of art, culture products, how to save their threatened identity? This book will remain currently a long time ...