Lecture Notes: Disaster Vulnerability and Resilience Session 9 Lecturer: Lawrence J. Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster Introduction: In compiling this research, we examined various types of disasters to which cities are exposed, looking for both differences and commonalities. We looked at everything from terrorist attacks to earthquakes, to wars, even to urban rioting (as something reasonably sudden and destructive happening to a society). We tried to ask what the pattern of response and priority-setting tells us about the society that experiences the disaster. The project began shortly after September 11, 2001, as part of an effort to know what the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT could do in response to the 9/11 attacks. Could we ask better questions about what ought to happen in the aftermath of attacks like Sept. 11th? We asked what other places have done in response to such disasters. We tried to develop a theory of how cities and their citizens react to disasters. The group of contributors tended to be historians, social scientists, and other specialists about particular places who could look broadly at the effects of disasters from a variety of perspectives. Resilient Cities: I. London, 1834 a. Turner painting of London Parliament burning. i. Envisions it as a great aesthetic moment. ii. Remember what this meant: destroyed much of the houses of Westminster, prompted the building of new houses of Parliament and other buildings, including the tower housing Big Ben. 1. Helped pave the way to create something more positive. b. Monet paints scene in 1904, distorted by poor air-quality rather than fire. II. Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 2004 a. Research will hopefully have implications for recovering from present-day disasters, like the recent tsunami in Indonesia. III. Timgad, Algeria: Resilience only as Ruins a. Contrast the modern experience with disasters with ancient experiences. i. It is a reminder that there is a long history of substantial places being deliberately destroyed, like Timgad, or victimized by natural disasters (like Pompeii) where the cities don’t come back. ii. The last 200 years seems to be the first time where almost without exception people choose to rebuild cities (of 50,000 +). 1. Rise of the nation-state system 2. Rise of the insurance industry3. Together, these changes have made it less likely for large cities to exist in ruins or to become sites for tourism/visitation rather than active habitation. iii. Exceptions: 1. Many villages are destroyed. 2. Some cities have lost population in comparison to their surrounding metropolitan regions; economic changes have changed the attractiveness of cities. b. Resilience is about a desire to go on with urban life even in the face of tremendous devastation. IV. Hiroshima, 1945 a. Not much doubt that it would be rebuilt, despite total devastation b. Even immediately afterward, images prove that life continued, habitation continued. i. Many people would find the current image of the city virtually indistinguishable from Japanese cities that were not destroyed in the war. V. U.S. Civil War Destruction a. Three different state capitals destroyed (Georgia, S. Carolina, Virginia) b. Each one was rebuilt. VI. St. Pierre, Martinique a. Mount Pelée erupted, St. Pierre (the Paris of the Antilles) destroyed b. 30,000 inhabitants, 1 survivor (a convict in a cell) i. The survivor escaped with his life and ended up on display in the Barnum and Bailey circus. c. The city has now come back to a town of about 5,000 people with a volcano museum. d. The fact that the city did not exhibit resilience after the event makes this an exception. Range of Issues VII. “Natural” disasters (unintended): a. Fire b. Earthquake c. Flood/Tsunami d. Hurricane/Typhoon, Epidemic disease VIII. Human disasters I – accidental a. Industrial accidents - Bhopal b. Nuclear accidents – Chernobyl IX. Human disasters II – deliberate, place-targeted a. Civil War b. Int’l War c. Int’l Terrorism d. Domestic Terrorism e. Riots/civil disturbancesf. Urban renewal/clearance – such events can be almost as psychologically destructive to people as if the place had been bombed (except you have more warning and it doesn’t result in death) Framework X. Proposed Model of Urban Recovery, proposed by an NSF-sponsored study in the 1970s: a. Four Stages: i. Emergency ii. Restoration iii. Reconstruction 1 iv. Reconstruction 2 b. Time scale is logarithmic: i. For one week period of major rescue operations ii. 10-week period of return to major functionality iii. 100-week period, population returns to previous levels, economics develop to pre-disaster level iv. 500/1000-week period: improvements made. c. Disaster Recovery is claimed to be “orderly and knowable”. d. San Francisco, 1906: i. People engage in “disaster tourism” ii. Day-to-day personal recovery and coping (photo of family cooking in the street). iii. People immediately start looking for good things to come from the event. iv. “The city is certain to arise from its ashes greater and more beautiful than ever” – editor of Harper’s. 1. Vast destruction was there to pave the way for progress. v. Oakland Herald: “Think of the good times coming.” vi. Modeled out along NSF study’s logarithmic scale: fits easily on the scale. XI. Missing Pieces: a. Stories constructed to explain and interpret the event i. What does it mean that this happened to our city? b. Symbolism: the role of the built environment in signaling to people c. Politics of reconstruction Narratives of Resilience XII. Characteristics a. Patterns of how each disaster is interpreted, whose voices are listened to, what stories are being told, whose stories are left out. b. Narratives about optimism and progress were allowed to predominate even though they did not totally reflect the experience of people. XIII. Examples a. Chicago Fire i. Low death-tollii. Immediate focus on recovery iii. Many stories about how this is a “blessing.” iv. Built up twice – once shoddily and rapidly and again in the 1880s with skyscrapers, Chicago School of Architecture. v. Is discussed in terms of capitalism’s creative destruction 1. The nature of capitalism is to tear down and rebuild. b. Oklahoma City terrorist