Month: May 2014

What exactly does ‘resilience’ mean when it comes to disasters?

Posted on by Julia Havens

BUILDING RESILIENCE is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events — both natural and man made — and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger from these shocks and stresses.

Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience OPDR Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience OPDR Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience OPDR

In July 2013, Dr. Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, addressed the crowd of The City Resilient, an event co-hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation and PopTech at BAM in New York City. The event focused on how to build communities that can recover, persist or even thrive amid disruption. Following is an excerpt from her presentation:

All cities deal differently with these shocks. Some will return quickly to a full way of life. Others will take much longer. And even others will never fully recover at all. What makes this true? Why do some cities never recover, while others seem to rebound in just a matter of weeks?

The answer, as I am sure you have surmised by now, is resilience. We define resilience as: “…the capacity of individuals, communities and systems to survive, adapt and grow in the face of changes, even catastrophic incidents.”

In other words, building resilience is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events — natural, climate change-driven, and man-made — and able to bounce back more quickly and sometimes even emerge stronger from those shocks and stresses.

As we unpack what resilience is, it’s helpful to talk briefly about what resilience is not.

It is not solving for the last problem.

For example, after 9/11, property owners were so worried about attacks from the air that they buried their generators underground, where they were submerged by storm surge during Sandy.

It is not an innate human quality that bubbles up in times of stress — as it is often talked about, for example, after the Boston bombings.

And it is not the emergency response after the disaster has hit.

Rather, resilience is what we build in those moments between catastrophe and the next big disruption, a skill that can be learned, and a quality that can be adapted, from toughening up building codes in San Francisco to withstand the shocks of the next earthquake to the creation of “Evacuspots” in New Orleans to ensure a speedy evacuation of residents ahead of future storms.

And building resilience is critical to protecting the poorest and most vulnerable among us, those who typically live in the most easily impacted areas and who are least likely to have savings stashed away or insurance to protect them in case of disaster.

© The Rockefeller Foundation, [1998-2013]. All rights reserved.
Read more about “The Rockefeller Foundation 100 Resilient Cities” challenge.

Article reprinted with permission from Community Vitality Publication, Spring 2014, © 2014 The Ford Family Foundation. For the full Community Vitality edition of ”The Time to Prepare”, visit http://www.community-vitality.org/Spring2014TimeToPrepare.html

Dr Judith Rodin President of The Rockefeller FoundationAbout the Author:  Judith Rodin is president of The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world’s leading philanthropic organizations. A pioneer and innovator throughout her career, Dr. Rodin was the first woman named to lead an Ivy League Institution and is the first woman to serve as The Rockefeller Foundation’s president in its nearly 100-year history. She has also been recognized as one of Forbes Magazine’s World’s 100 Most Powerful Women in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

Let’s Get Focused

Posted on by Julia Havens

Eugene BRT bus-rapid transit RVTD ROgue Valley Transit District CPW Community Planning Workshop

Using Focus Groups to Understand Attitudes About Bus-Rapid Transit (BRT) in Southern Oregon

Our Community Planning Workshop team (CPW) recently traveled to Southern Oregon University to facilitate our second of five focus groups as part of our community engagement report for Rogue Valley Transportation District (RVTD), which is seeking to better understand public perceptions of transit enhancements.

Focus groups provide the opportunity to gather information from the public in a somewhat organic fashion; they bring people of varying attitudes and backgrounds together to engage in conversation with each other and facilitators. One of the primary causes of disconnect between planners and the public is created by planners’ tendency to concentrate on the future, which—especially in the case of something more technical and abstract, like transit enhancements—can be alleviated through dialogue.

Focus groups help bridge this gap; we are there to ask for their perceptions and opinions, but have the unique opportunity to inform and answer questions—something more difficult to achieve through surveys and interviews. At each focus group, we used renderings from Pivot Architecture to help illustrate some of the enhancements that may be studied for feasibility in the future and asked about different elements that are often incorporated in bus-rapid transit (BRT) systems.

BRT is seen by many transit districts as the most cost-effective way to move people more efficiently than a traditional bus service, borrowing heavily from light rail systems through designated right-of-way and the use of stations (as opposed to the traditional bus stop). The implementation of BRT, however, has been anything but easy for ambitious transit districts in the US, in-part because there are so few systems throughout the country.

Only a small handful of the people we have spoken to throughout the entire engagement process—which includes focus groups, key person interviews, RVTD rider intercept surveys, business surveys, and a community survey—are familiar with BRT, further illustrating the importance of focus groups. Giving citizens the opportunity to converse, ask questions, and see illustrations is crucial in making the potential changes seem less abstract. This, in turn, makes the public outreach process far more useful and informative for both planners and the public.

Should RVTD decide to move forward in the planning process and pursue BRT or any other enhancements, it will be crucial to use similar engagement strategies to avoid the all-too-common divergence that occurs between planners and the public. Our CPW team will provide RVTD with a number of public engagement recommendations at the completion of this project. Results will be made available in July 2014.

 

Bjorn-Griepenburg Rogue Valley Transportation District (RVTD) Community Planning Workshop CPWBjorn Griepenburg is a first year graduate student in Community and Regional Planning from the San Francisco Bay Area. He is interested in the transportation-land use connection and plans to research ways in which cities can better create complete, walkable neighborhoods.