Resilience and smart growth

We’ve written that New Urbanism and smart growth offer advantages in “sustainability,” a term that expresses the capacity of society and the environment to endure for the long term. Sustainability is a popular and useful word — yet one that also has shortcomings. It begs the question, for example, of what we want to sustain. Those who are invested in suburban, automobile-dependent living may contend that their way of life deserves sustenance — regardless of its impact on carbon emissions. The federal government’s recent bailout of bad mortgages is a policy that kept many suburbs afloat.

Sustainability implies judgments that divide people. We run the risk of sounding self-righteous when we argue that urban patterns are more sustainable than sprawl. So the question must be asked: Is there a less divisive and more precise way to make this argument?

Andrew McMurry, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, argues that “resilience” is a better word. “To be resilient suggests an inner toughness: the strength, as its etymology tells us, to ‘jump back’ to a previous state,” McMurry says in “The Rhetoric of Resilience,” published February 17 in Alternatives Journal. “Sustainability, by contrast, suggests a defensive posture: a desire to stay the same, to resist change, without the attractive ability to push back against change and win out.”

The idea of resilience is appealing because it gets beyond arguments that plague “sustainability.” Many who resist this term attack the science of climate change or projections of shortages of resources like oil. They are successful in casting doubt because both the best scientific judgments and the future are inherently in doubt.

Resilience, on the other hand, doesn’t carry that baggage. It is based on the idea of risk — a universally accepted fact of life. Nobody can say whether a house will burn down or a driver will be involved in an accident. Yet the need for fire and automobile insurance is rarely questioned from any political perspective. Insurance increases resilience. If the worst happens, it’s better to be covered.

Parallels with smart growth
I see many parallels between New Urbanism and smart growth and resilience. We don’t know what the future will be, but we suspect that it will be warmer and will include less oil. Maybe global warming skeptics are right — and maybe ExxonMobil is on target in assuring us that massive new oil reserves will be found in the near future. But how resilient are we if the skeptics or that company are wrong, or if any number of unforeseen problems jeopardize the current system?

The answer is: not very. The communities we have built in the last 60 years, especially in the US, are mostly dependent on car and truck transport. If this system fails because petroleum gets very expensive due to declining reserves, or if global warming or geopolitical forces impose constraints on oil use, we are in trouble. Efficient walking and mass transit are impossible in most places. Some will say the answer is alternative fuel vehicles, but what about the cost and the time required for making the transition? Counting on technologies that have not been developed or adopted on a broad scale is not resilient.

Walkable, mixed-use communities, by contrast, have been around for thousands of years — and they work regardless of whose vision of the future turns out to be right. If the future demands more mass transit, walking, and bicycling, then compact urban places facilitate that change.

There are many who say that everything will work out just fine if we keep to the status quo. Most experts made similar arguments when housing prices were rising to unprecedented levels fueled by lax lending standards in the first half of the last decade. Don’t worry — be happy. But that attitude lacked resilience, and we have paid dearly for the shortfall.

So here’s to resilience, and to the hope that this concept gains wider currency in environmental and economic discussions.