Resilience and ‘technicity’: challenges and opportunities for new knowledge practices in disaster planning

Abstract

With increasing exposure to environmental catastrophes and natural hazards, the terminology of ‘resilience’ is becoming ubiquitous in the planning field. As a part of this continuing discussion, this paper examines how the concept of resilience has been used in disaster planning, especially with a focus on the creation and use of knowledge to ‘build resilience’ in response to potential future natural hazard events. In discussing the practice of creating and using knowledge in disaster planning, I draw insights from the interdisciplinary critical studies of science and technology literature, which has been developing rich discussions on the challenges we face in producing geographical knowledge. I demonstrate in this paper how resilience theory can be linked with the concept of ‘technicity’ used in the virtual geography literature, and how that association can have meaningful implications for the production and application of knowledge in disaster planning.

Keywords:

• Resilience
• technicity
• disaster planning
• virtual geography
• knowledge practice

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank the editorial team and anonymous reviewers, as well as Prof Sarah Elwood-Faustino and McKenzie Darr for their comments that improved the manuscript.

Notes

1. Definition from Merriam-Webster: to convert (as energy or a message into another form, essentially sense organs transduce physical energy into a nervous signal). In the context of virtual geography, see Kinsley’s discussion of how immaterial, virtual/coded space can have ‘transductive’ potential ‒ enabling ‘a means of accounting for the various constituents without reductionism’ (Kinsley, 2016).

2. For example, disaster planning in practice often uses income level or racial categories to map out or represent a community's ‘social vulnerability’ on GIS, which lacks contextual and local knowledges that community members themselves can identify with.