What Is a Resilient City?

President Obama took the stage to address the impacts of climate change and laid out a plan for how America should deal with it.

President Obama took the stage at Georgetown University yesterday and laid out his plan for preparing our nation for the impacts of climate change. You canand shouldwatch his speech. Former Vice President and environmental activist Al Gore called it, "the best address on climate by any president ever." Though his agenda was inspiring it will mean nothing if it does not galvanize communities across the country into action.

Obama's plan builds on work started in his first term. In 2009 Obama created an interagency task force called the Climate Change Adaptation Task Force to deal with the effects of climate change. In policy circles, the term "adaptation" used to refer to our response to change and management of extreme weather events. More recently however, "resiliency" has become the term people prefer.

In the 237 days since Hurricane Sandy dissipated, the word "resilience" has become a regular part of our nation's conversation. New Jersey's rebuilding effort has even been branded under it. There are resilient cities, states, neighborhoods, companies, and even people. There are even products being created with resilience in mind.

To dive deeper into this concept of resilience, I attended Pop Tech's one-day conference titled "The City Resilient" at the state-of-the-art relic that is the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. The setting was like a vision of a storm-ravaged future where high-tech sound systems, monitors, and Wi-Fi contrast with the exposed brick, jutting pipes, and ripped out layers of the walls. Attendees had no choice but to see how painstakingly developed yet delicate our built environment really is.

I took away one big idea from Pop Tech: instead of focusing on obsessive efficiency like a centralized grid, we should create smaller and smarter grids and other systems that can gracefully fail. That way, in the lull between one disaster and the next, we can bounce back quicker and stronger.

But to understand resilience, we must first understand what resilience is not. I like the definition shared by Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Resilience, she said, is not solving for the last problem.

Let me pause here and illustrate what the "last problem" looked like; you know it very well. In a span of less than 215 days, we endured Hurricane Sandy, a horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, bombings at the Boston Marathon, a massive fertilizer factory explosion in Texas, and severe flooding and tornadoes in various parts of the country.

So resiliency is not just about climate change or weird weather. It is about the shock and awe of the unknown and about what we do before and after those disruptive events.

Resiliency is also not a trait people are born with. While the recovery of New Jersey versus the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina should give us pause to reflect, there is some debate here. Are certain communities and people inherently better at managing shocks and interruptions than others? If you believe, as I do, that almost any skill can be learned, then yes, you can teach people to recover, persist, and even thrive during disorder. You learn how to be resilient in the lulls between those shocks.

Finally, resiliency is not simply emergency response; it is how people survive and get stronger even when things are very tough.

And things are going to get very tough. Columbia University Professor Irwin Redlener described what we can expect: more severe weather, pandemics, cyber attacks, nuclear plant meltdowns, chemical spills, and earthquakes. There is also that which we cannot anticipatethe unknown. The reality is that there are more strange events coming. Whether they are caused by nature or by man, the key question is this: are we ready for them?

Professor Redlener asked the crowd that same question. Mind you this is a crowd made up of people who have contributed to "A Stronger, More Resilient New York," Mayor Bloomberg's comprehensive plan to rebuild New York City following Sandy, and their peers from all over the world. This crowd also included technologists, designers, and planners. Still, only a few of these "resilient elites" believe we are ready.

The future resilient city will have lots of data points and technology will be embedded into every major system. Imagine UV filters in every home, solar water heaters on every building eliminating the need for oil and gas alternatives, and complex storm water management systems that mimic salt marshes to reduce the need for storm walls at the coastline of cities.

Yesterday it was heartening to hear Obama support ideas that protect our communities from the effects of climate change and produce economic development and family-supporting wage jobs. These initiatives have the potential to offer relief that lasts after the storm and all the first responders have gone. That's true resilience.