Resilience: Lessons to be learned from safety and acceptable risk

Abstract

It is not unusual to see the concept of resilience housed in binary terms: Your city is either ‘resilient’ or not. In contrast, being ‘safe’ is widely recognized as a statement based on ‘acceptable risk’ where absolute safety is unattainable. So why do we treat resilience and, as an example, the idea of “Resilient Cities” as a distinct endpoint? In this paper, we argue that this mindset is not only incongruent with current understandings of safety and risk but could create a false sense of security for systems that otherwise have been judged ‘resilient’. An alternative is that we can and should consider framing resilience in the same manner as we do to safety. The benefit of doing this is that we can learn from the safety literature and appreciate that, like for safety, there is no such thing as absolute resilience. Instead, we should be striving to constantly identify and reduce the risks to our systems and society.

Keywords

• Risk analysis
• Safety
• Risk assessment
• Resilient
• Resilience
• Urban