Regional and Urban Design Committee

With resiliency seemingly an urgent necessity, urban designers have to ask, can livability, sustainability and resilience be combined? Are they like Russian dolls all part of the same package or will resilient cities  be fortresses that will lose livability elements such as history and charm?

Tornados, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, there hardly seems to be a week without some type of large scale calamity striking communities small and large somewhere on the globe. There is little doubt that nature has increasingly a hard time striking where no people are. With seven billion people populating the globe in ever higher proportion in metropolitan areas, the need for city resiliency seems to be a logical consequence, even for those who still doubt global warming.