Resilience
"For me...what it boils down to
is building relationships and sharing resources."
Nancy Edelstein,
Jamestown Resilience Leader
Our philosophy is rooted in the theories and practices from the burgeoning field of resilience.
The field of resilience originated in the mid 1980s to address complex challenges in developing and least developed countries. Resilience work migrated to the US in response to an increase in natural hazards, climate change stressors, political and social strife, and unmet community needs.
As challenges become more complex and the future less certain, the drive to build resilience is stronger.
Resilience is the capacity to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce forward in the face of shocks or stressors.*
A shock is an acute natural or man-made event that has the potential to damage assets, afflict the human psyche, cause major loss of life, and negatively impact an individual's or a group's ability to function.
A stressor is a chronic (ongoing) natural or manmade condition that creates strain on a community's, an organization's, or an individual's ability to function.
*definition derived from BoCo Strong
BoCo Strong developed the Resilience Lens as part of their 2016 Boulder County Resilience Assessment. They built upon the collective input from years of work in the field of resilience. The Resilience Lens is a fundamental way of viewing and building resilience. It guides the approach, analysis, and implementation of resilience based on eight (8) characteristics:
The BCFR team has been a part of the development and implementation of foundational local, regional, domestic, and international resilience frameworks. The BCFR draws on the collective knowledge of these frameworks and the lessons learned from their development and use.
The Climate Resilience Framework: ISET
The Climate Resilience Framework guides resilience building by providing a lens for analyzing the interactions between people, institutions, systems, and climate. In so doing it frames an approach for identifying points of vulnerability and areas where resilience actions can be implemented.
Resilience Framework: 100 Resilient Cities
The 100 Resilient Cities Resilience Framework (developed by Arup) provides a framework for understanding how to build resilience within urban centers. It delineates four categories, each with separate drivers, which provide cities with a lens for implementing resilience building actions. These categories include Health & Wellbeing, Economy & Society, Infrastructure & Environment, and Leadership & Strategy.
Resilience Frameworks
CO State Resiliency Framework:
Department of Local Affairs
The Colorado State Resiliency Framework guides local resilience building around the state. It includes six (6) sectors that represent the fundamental building blocks that supports the State's overall resilience. These sectors include Community, Economic, Health and Social, Housing, Infrastructure, and Watersheds and Natural Resources.
What is Resilience?
Resilience is a way of functioning in the world. We all have the ability to be resilient as individuals and groups.
Resilience is a lens to view the world through. We can see the world as collective resources, relationships, assets, and opportunities.
Resilience is a thriving system of interconnected individuals and organizations, legal and cultural norms, flows of communication and transportation, ecosystems, and infrastructure.
The Resilience Lens
Community Systems: ISET
The Community Systems framework emphasizes the inherent complexity of systems (i.e. cities) and their many characteristics. It uses a holistic approach rooted in the concept of Panarchy (a set of nested systems that interact across scales). Each system (i.e. city) includes the people, organizations, infrastructure, ecosystems, and legal and cultural norms that interact to contribute to resilience. The Community Systems framework enables problem solving and an analysis of the connections and leverage points between systems.
Panarchy: C.S. Hollings
Panarchy delineates a larger scale system that consists of systems within systems that interact across scales. The Panarchy Framework guides an exploration of how these nested systems adapt and change over time and how they react to disruptions. The resilience of these panarchies is dependent on the resilience and adaptations of their smaller sub-systems. Understanding how these systems interact is key to understanding how to build resilience in urban centers.