Understanding what resilience means in era of COVID-19

“Resilience” in recent years has emerged as the sexiest new addition to the lexicon of urbanist jargon — a word that denotes a kind of core strength, what we all hope we have in times of crisis, but elevated to the level of societal institution.

Thanks to the allocation of some philanthropic dollars, many municipalities have hired chief resiliency officers, who dutifully set to work trying to figure out what resiliency actually looks like in the context of local government services. The City of Toronto last year even published its first resiliency strategy.

To my ear, however, the buzzy resiliency debate is a bit like the sound of one hand clapping. Resiliency against what, exactly? There is the list of familiar threats – widening income inequality, rising sea levels, Biblical storms, power interruptions, heat waves, etc. — but the project still has had something of a theoretical quality about it. (The document is packed with sentences like, “A shock is a sudden sharp event that threatens the immediate well-being of a city…”)

Of course, the high-speed COVID-19 narrative of the past week has, with ruthless efficiency, revealed which societal institutions are truly resilient and which aren’t. It’s worth noting, in passing, that the City’s 160-page resiliency strategy, for all its soothingly anticipatory rhetoric, doesn’t once mention pandemic prepardedness – an impressive instance of missing the point.