Late Modernity to Postmodern? The Rise of Global Resilience and its Progressive Potentials for Local Disaster Planning (Seattle and Paris)

ABSTRACT

This paper studies how approaches to disaster planning have been changing with the rise of ‘resilience,’ a concept that has been widely recommended by various international institutions. The critical studies on resilience argue that resilience only serves to legitimise a neoliberal policy agenda that is compatible with a global economic system of capitalism. Contesting that position, this paper argues that the rise of resilience can imply a shift in the mode of governance, and an opportunity for planners to engage with more progressive practices. To make this argument, we propose a ‘postmodern lens’ through which resilience can be seen as an attitude and a style of governance that goes beyond neoliberal assumptions by embracing uncertainty and complexity of governance challenges. Postmodern framing of resilience notes (1) how the concept can initiate a shift in the planner’s view of and practices on knowledges (going beyond ‘expert knowledge’), (2) how the flexibility of the concept can be used for developing political narratives that are progressive (3) how the concept can open up potential venues for nonconventional powers to intervene in policy making processes. To demonstrate how this lens works, we compare the cases of Seattle and Paris, which have drastically different risk governance political structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• disaster planning
• 100 resilient cities
• Seattle
• Paris

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank interviewees who took their precious time to talk with us, which often exceeded more than one hour. Their voice and insights were pivotal in the conception and writing up of this manuscript. We would also like to thank the editors for their support and encouragement, as well as three anonymous reviewers whose support, comments and critique substantially improved this paper. In addition, Ihnji Jon would like to thank Prof Mark Purcell and Prof Branden Born for their support and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This paper focuses on ‘resilience’ used in the context of natural hazards management and risk governance, where the city governments and planning practitioners try to grapple with the idea of uncertainty and strategize the ways in which they can make more effective interventions.

2. We acknowledge that there is a substantial body of literature on resilience, comprised of divergent traditions and topics, including evolutionary resilience (Gunderson & Holling, 2002) and flood management (White, 2013). At the same time, we would like to note that this paper mainly concerns the philosophical implications of using resilience in local disaster planning, limiting the scope of our literature review to the works that contain critical reflections on resilience as a legitimate public policy concept.

3. Essentially, the third characterization of postmodern resilience that we present in 3 – i.e. opening up new venues for unconventional actors to intervene into territorial governance and planning – overlaps with the theme of citizen engagement and participatory practices.

4. We note here that while our postmodern framing of resilience offers possibilities for it to perform in a progressive way, it does not assure a specific kind of normativity. Our general framing of “progressiveness” in urban planning is the degree of care and attention put into creating more inclusive and just urban space; however, on what logic and basis that progressiveness and normativity should be determined – is another question, one that postmodern planning theorists have long debated (Allmendinger, 2001; Jon, 2019; Sandercock, 1998; Soja, 1997).

5. One should note that joining 100 RC itself does not necessarily draw the line between ‘before/after’ bringing resilience into practice. Seattle’s use of ‘resilience’ has been advanced well before its 100 RC membership. We assume that this was partly thanks to the presence of academic community in Seattle that has been working on developing a progressive vision of resilience in disaster planning practices (see Freitag, Abranson, Chalana, & Dixon, 2014).

6. Ile-de-France is the region that Paris belongs to (as Seattle belongs to the King County region).

7. Translated as “how to get used to living with risk”; disaster planning documents state that public education, information availability, and emergency exercises can enhance citizens’ awareness of natural hazards risks/potential impacts and therefore develop the “culture of risk.”

8. Direction Régionale et Interdépartementale de l’Environnement et de l’Energie (DRIEE); Interdepartmental Regional Agency of Environment and Energy – which is a regional branch serving for the Ministry of Ecologic Transition and Solidarity (Ministère de la Transition écologique et solidaire).

9. It should be noted that PGRI is a document whose production was imposed by a European directive (Flood Directive 2007/60/CE of 23 October 2007).

10. “Quartier Resilients” (i.e. Resilient Neighborhoods) is a 2018 policy initiative by the state-led regional agency, Prefecture de la Region Ile-de-France (“Charte d’engagement pour ‘concevoir des quartiers résilients’ face au risque d’inondation”). It primarily concerns how to build or organize space differently, using innovative architectural designs.

Additional information

Funding

This project was partly supported by the Chateaubriand Fellowship, provided by The Embassy of France in the United States and hosted by École Normale Supérieure (Paris, Campus Ulm).

Notes on contributors

Ihnji Jon

Ihnji Jon is a Lecturer in International Urban Politics at Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, where she studies urban disaster resilience, global environmental politics, and political theory. Her work has been published by various journals, including Planning Theory and Global Society. She obtained her PhD in Urban Design and Planning at University of Washington, and she is currently working on a book project entitled Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Environment Politics (Pluto Books).

Magali Reghezza-Zitt

Magali Reghezza-Zitt is an Assistant Professor in Geography at École Normale Supérieure and the Director of Centre de Formation sur l’Environnement et la Société (CERES). She has been for a long time working on urban resilience and risk governance particularly in Ile-de-France (Paris) region, and collaborated with a wide range of practitioners and public officials in the field. Very present in French mainstream media (often with France Inter), her work appears in Cybergeo, L’Espace Politique, and Annales de Géographie.