Supporting Citizen-initiated Neighborhood Resilience
The accelerating climate emergency may overwhelm public and private institutions, forcing citizens to respond unaided. But how well could neighbors care for themselves if events gravely reduce the availability of local services? Not that long ago, this scenario would be rejected as completely unrealistic. However, to residents of San Jose, California, it is their new reality; PG&E cut power to nearly 800,000 citizens in Northern California starting October 9, 2019 and expect to have to do this repeatedly during the coming decade. Consistent with this scenario, the mayor of San Jose told residents to prepare to be without power for as long as seven days, while another official asked citizens to “Prepare yourself, prepare your family, and help your neighbors” (CNN 2019).
This situation is astonishing; intermittency of essential services and uncertainty about the duration of an outage is an almost unheard of combination in our modern techno-industrial society. It may, however, be the new reality to which we must adapt our everyday expectations and behaviors. Unfortunately, although plausible, this new reality is very difficult for people to accept. Thus, many individuals, families, and neighborhoods remain unprepared.
A leader in our community, in conversations with citizens, presents this stark scenario with a local context. They asks how well a neighborhood could take care of itself if a major event were to shut down an entire area for an extended period, gravely reducing the ability of city, county, and regional services from providing immediate help. Notably, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) includes such scenarios in its work, and now supports citizens who already are on-site. This is a significant and welcomed change from earlier approaches to disaster response, which were centrally staffed and managed. Previously it was assumed that financial resources, outside responders, centralized management, and level of damage were the key predictors of recovery. But recently, disaster response transitioned to encompass a strategy that follows the work of Aldrich (2018, Aldrich & Meyer 2014), who found that “disaster resilience comes from internal factors: How connected are we? How much trust do we have in each other? How often do we work together?”
Cities throughout North America are developing the means of supporting citizen-led approaches to enhancing neighborhood resilience. Past approaches tended to be centralized and top-down in nature, rarely increasing neighborhood-level capacity to respond. Experts informed citizens about threats and told them their needs. In contrast, the current approach empowers neighbors to self-determine their needs and then design the means to meet them. Ultimately, neighborhood needs cannot be provisioned without direct citizen participation. Such prior engagement increases connectivity and trust, outcomes essential for enhancing neighborhood resilience (Aldrich & Meyer 2014).
But efforts are also being taken to extend the time-frame of the scenario beyond short-term disaster recovery. These efforts focus on helping citizens transition to the new environmental and social conditions being caused by the climate emergency, even when a short-term disaster is not a precipitating event. While older approaches focused on helping neighborhoods to weather a storm and then bounce back to normal, these new efforts are developing the means of helping citizens slowly but steadily bounce forward to a new normal. It encourages early adapting; anticipating and making changes before circumstance force a response.
In the process of developing responses to the climate emergency, city programs are making new demands on researchers and consultants. Cities now insist, rightfully, that new programs should not pre-identify citizen’s needs; the effort should not be expert-driven, top-down, or merely a piece of academic research. This principle, one of citizen-based participatory problem solving, is a value which these Localization Papers completely support. This principle can be stated succinctly: each neighborhood’s needs are better defined by the community members themselves, not by distant experts (e.g., FEMA), national institutions (e.g., Red Cross), federal agencies (e.g., Ready.gov), or academic researchers. Undeniably, community members are most familiar with the day-to-day needs that they and their neighbors face. Furthermore, distant and/or generic expertise is never a substitute for local knowledge.
Nonetheless, guidance in articulating neighborhood needs is needed. Resilience building efforts center on community meetings, often comprised of people who have not previously worked together. Furthermore, these meetings often have two ambitious goals: (1) to help neighborhoods start the process of resilience planning and preparation, and (2) develop an initial design for a small-scale, neighborhood resilience center. These centers are a physical building out of which future neighborhood resilience activities is conducted.
SOME NEIGHBORHOOD RESILIENCE EFFORTS
Efforts to create resilient neighborhoods are just beginning but growing rapidly. The Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) has worked extensively on the notion of resilience hubs (USDN 2021a, 2021b). Other organizations have made significant contributions, including work done by the Communities Responding to Extreme Weather (CREW 2021) on climate resilience hubs. Many examples exist although with slightly different goals, designs, organizational frameworks, and names given to the result. For instance, the city of Baltimore has piloted Resiliency Hubs for vulnerable populations (City of Baltimore 2017). These hubs involve gathering places that provide short-term emergency supplies, resources, and meeting space. These hubs serve as education and training centers for technical skills, such as emergency response training (e.g., Community Emergency Response Teams), weatherization, solar installation, as well as a place to get to know neighbors. Seattle has piloted Community Emergency Hubs. These are locally designated areas where neighbors can gather in times of distress, accessing information and resources, including volunteers trained to assist with community needs (Seattle Emergency Hubs 2018).
Finally, no one owns the notion of neighborhood resilience or the various designs and implementations of resilience centers. What we are witnessing is the rapid and diverse innovation by many independent groups intent on increasing neighborhood resilience. And, as is always the case, this on-the-ground practice is quickly moving ahead of academic theorizing, NGO planning efforts, and professional relationships. At times, the result will seem messy, incoherent, and disorganized but then again adaptive muddling is always so.
REFERENCES
Aldrich, D. P. (2018) Social Capital in Disaster Mitigation and Recovery. FEMA: PrepTalks. Retrieved from https://www.fema.gov/preptalks/aldrich
Aldrich, D. P. & M. A. Meyer (2015) Social capital and community resilience. American Behavioral Scientist. 59(2): 254–269.
City of Baltimore (2017) Disaster preparedness program and plan (DP3) – 2017 Status. City of Baltimore Department of Planning. Retrieved from http://www.baltimoresustainability.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/DP3-2017-Status-Report-October-2017.pdf
CNN (2019) Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/09/us/pge-power-outage-wednesday/index.html
CREW (2021) Climate Resilience Hubs. Retrieved from https://www.climatecrew.org/resilience_hubs
Seattle Emergency Hubs (2018) Seattle Emergency Hubs. Retrieved from http://seattleemergencyhubs.org
USDN (2021a) Resilience Hubs. Retrieved from http://resilience-hub.org
USDN (2021b) Resilience Hubs: Shifting Power to Communities and Increasing Community Capacity. Retrieved from https://www.usdn.org/resilience-hubs.html
Raymond De Young
School for Environment and Sustainability
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Original paper: February 2, 2020
Updated: January 15, 2023
Copyright © 2023 Raymond De Young, All Rights Reserved.
