Sustainability vs Resilience
Today's lecture is from Prof. James Weirick, the Director of Urban Development & Design Program, UNSW. He presented a series of papers on the issue of resilience and sustainability. A paper by Charles L. Redman (2014) is contrasting the elements of resilience and sustainability and the elements of adaptation and transformation. Redman is mainly asking whether or not to combine resilience and sustainability or keep them two distinct discourses. To answer this question, Redman links resilience to adaptation and sustainability to transformation.
Prof. Weirick continued his lecture by taking the history of Canberra development and what we can learn from it. The site was selected to be Australia's capital in 1908 to solve rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. In relation to resilience, it has experienced at least two major disasters: the 1971 Canberra flood and the 2003 Canberra Bushfires. In relation to sustainability, Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy (1999) critiqued Canberra's car dependence in a book: Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence.
Devastation from 2003 Canberra Bushfires (abc.net.au)
Going back to the discourse of sustainability and resilience by looking at Canberra case, we can see that sustainability and resilience are both required and inseparable one to another. Although the nature of resilience and sustainability approaches are difference in such a way, they share the same working principles and objectives (Redman 2014). The following diagram shows how sustainability and resilience can work together in synergies or trade-offs (Fixel 2014).
Example of Sustainability and Resilience synergies and trade-offs (Fixel 2014)
The world keeps changing. It has faced many unexpected shocks such as natural disasters throughout the history. In many cases, the people has been able to overcome these shocks and recovered quickly. In other cases, civilizations have failed, as I covered in my previous post. The success of society and cities relies on their ability to combine sustainability and resilience as two distinctive approaches in the most appropriate and effective way to create a better future.
References:
Newman, PD & Kenworthy, JR 1999, Sustainability and cities: Overcoming automobile dependence, 2nd edn, Island Press, Washington, D.C.
Redman, CL 2014, 'Should sustainability and resilience be combined or remain distinct pursuits?', Ecology and Society, vol. 19, no. 2, ISSN; 1708-3087.
Fixel, J, Goodman, I & Hecht, A 2014, 'Resilience: Navigating toward a Sustainable Future', The Solutions Journal, vol. 5, no. 5, pp.38-47,
