A Framework for Resilient Communities

Abstract

Housing projects being developed in the future, must challenge the previous problematic development trends built on efficiency in the past. In order to do so, Jan Bredenoord, Paul Van Lindert and Peer Smets state, within their book ‘Affordable Housing in the Global Urban South: Seeking Sustainable Solutions’, that new communities being developed for the future must foster resilience. Resilience is a systems ability to adapt to change. Cities and urban spaces make up, as Charles Correa once said, “a whole system of spaces that people need (Correa, 1989).” “Urban living involves... a whole system of spaces that people need.” Charles Correa In nature, Bredenoord and his colleagues explain, “ecosystems have survived over time by adjusting to changing circumstances resulting in a search for equilibrium between two opposing poles, of efficiency and resilience. The healthiest systems have an optimum balance between the two extremes, which may be described by the term sustainability (Bredenoord et.al, 2014).” Furthermore, cities and urban spaces can be seen as patchworks of “green space, biodiversity (including people), non-biological structures (buildings), biophysical processes and energy flows, and are in that way comparable to natural ecosystems (Maddox, 2012).” The balance between the two extremes, sustainability, can be defined as a trade-off between efficiency and resilience. On the one hand, too much efficiency will lead to little diversity and stagnation in the system, while too much resilience will lead to too much diversity and a lack of coherence and purpose to grow. The goal for future housing developments should therefore be at aiming for an optimum balance between the two. It is upon this background that the graduation project’s topic of ‘Resilience’ and the research question of the project was defined.