International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment

The attributes of resilience: A tool in the evaluation and design of earthquake-prone

cities
Penelope Allan Martin Bryant

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Penelope Allan Martin Bryant , (2014),"The attributes of resilience", International Journal of Disaster
Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 5 Iss 2 pp. 109 - 129
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The attributes of resilience

A tool in the evaluation and design of
earthquake-prone cities
Penelope Allan and Martin Bryant
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

The attributes of
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Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to propose the concept of resilience as a way of aligning these disciplines.
Theories of recovery planning and urban design theories have a common interest in providing for the
health and safety of urban communities. However, the requirements of safe refuge and recovery after a
disturbance, such as an earthquake, are sometimes at odds with theories of urbanism.
Design/methodology/approach The paper analyses the data from two case studies: the
earthquake and fire of 1906 in San Francisco and the Chile earthquake of 2010. It uses a set of resilience
attributes already embedded in the discourse of urban theory to evaluate each citys built environment
and the way people have adapted to that built environment to recover following an earthquake.
Findings The findings suggests that resilience attributes, when considered interdependently, can
potentially assist in the design of resilient cities which have an enhanced capacity to recover following
an earthquake.
Originality/value They also suggest that the key to the successful integration of recovery planning
and urban design lies in a shift of thinking that sees resilience as a framework for the design of cities that
not only contributes significantly to the quality of everyday urban life but also can be adapted as
essential life support and an agent of recovery in the event of an earthquake.
Keywords Resilience, Recovery, Earthquakes, Built environment, Disaster mitigation, Urban design
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
The discourse of recovery planning is beginning to embrace systems thinking and the
concept of resilience (Godschalk, 2003; Geis, 2000; Mileti, 1999), prompting a revised
definition of recovery as the holistic regeneration of a community following a disaster
(MCDEM, 2005). Cities are now seen as complex meta-systems (Godschalk, 2003,
p. 136), but its potential as a place to support recovery is rarely discussed. For example,
in the New Zealands Emergency Management policy document, Focus on Recovery, the
definition of the built environment is limited to buildings and lifeline utilities (MCDEM,
2005). The citys open space network is not recognized as a component of the built
environment, but is discussed in a section on the natural environment. The focus in the
document is on the recovery of these environments rather than on their capacity to
support recovery. This view of the built environment is reflected in the literature. In
recent resilience editions of various journals, topics included are non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), technologies, the seismic performance of buildings, hazard
mitigation plans, zoning regulations, disaster reduction planning, post disaster
development planning, community resilience, emergency management and social
impacts and evacuation (Topping, 2010; Karlinsky, 2009). While these subjects illustrate
the breadth of application of resilience and the expansion of traditional ideas of

International Journal of Disaster

Resilience in the Built Environment
Vol. 5 No. 2, 2014
pp. 109-129
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1759-5908
DOI 10.1108/IJDRBE-05-2012-0013

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recovery to embrace systems thinking, they also suggest that recovery planners see the
city as a Modernist construct, a series of discrete and autonomous objects arranged in a
landscape, and the task of the recovery as the repair of buildings and infrastructure and
the regeneration of damaged ecologies.
Contemporary urban theorists, like recovery planners, are also influenced by
systems theory. They define the citys physical environment somewhat differently; not
as a series of discrete objects but as a dynamic interrelationship of buildings,
infrastructure and open space, constantly used and transformed over time. They
suggest that people influence and are influenced by the built environment of the cities
they inhabit (Moudon, 1997). This expanded definition has important implications for
our understanding of the recovery process. It implies that the built environment is
pervasive and dynamic rather than discrete and inert. It suggests that some parts of the
built environment could offer opportunities for support and recovery. It highlights the
importance of relationships, particularly the relationship between people and place. And
it implies that recovery might be an active rather than a passive process. If people and
places exist in a dynamic interrelationship and we understand the nature of that
relationship, it may be possible to determine where and how to intervene to assist
recovery by helping others help themselves.
This notion of communities actively managing their recovery is part of a new wave
of emergency management literature promoting bottom-up recovery. According to this
position, traditional command and control emergency operations are problematic
because a disaster has dispersed impacts, and so it is physically impossible to manage
all of them at once. It suggests that this kind of top-down approach can often pre-empt
or exclude community involvement and can actually make communities more
vulnerable to disaster (Comfort, 1999) and that the most effective recovery processes
co-opt the extensive expertise available from a variety of sources. Communities are part
of this expertise; they usually have an intimate knowledge of their local environment
and its potentially life-saving resources, and they often use this knowledge to manage
their own recovery, particularly in the first few days after a disaster when assistance
may not arrive for hours or days.
This paper examines that dynamic and it does so through the lens of resilience. The
study is a part of a much larger research project, which investigates the relationship
between spatial structure and urban resilience. We are looking at a number of
Pacific-rim earthquake-affected cities, including the recovery after the 1906 earthquake
in San Francisco, USA; the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan; the 2010 earthquake in
Concepcin, Chile; and the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. In each case
study, we began by examining the citys morphological history and the influences that
resulted in its distinctive urban pattern. The data gathered at this stage suggest various
patterns of disturbance and response over time. These are the patterns that helped shape
urban morphology and that are likely to influence community response to disturbance
in the future. Then we looked at the way people responded to the impacts of the
earthquake during the emergency stage of recovery, before the external influences of
city or state began to take effect. This is when communities need to rely on what is on
hand to survive, and when the relationship between morphology and the adaptive
response is most clear. Once we had gathered the data, we analysed it through the lens
of resilience to make connections between morphology and recovery. We then suggested
potential urban interventions or strategies that might influence urban resilience. The

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research documents evidence of community response using these four cities as case
studies and then analyses that evidence using resilience as a framework or lens to arrive
at conclusions, which are intended to act as a guide for urban designers in
earthquake-prone cities.
In this paper, we develop and apply the resilience framework to the recovery process
of two cities following a major earthquake:
(1) San Francisco in 1906.
(2) Concepcin in 2010.
We look at each citys physical environment and the way individuals and communities
used that environment to adapt and recover. We describe how, based on our findings,
each city is more or less resilient. Finally, we suggest that these findings and the shared
theoretical constructs of resilience might help to align the disciplines of recovery
planning and urban design to produce vibrant liveable cities that can adapt equally to
everyday as well as major disturbances. In the following sections, we discuss the
concept of resilience as an abstract construct and as a tool for understanding urban
systems. We show how its attributes have, perhaps unwittingly, influenced the
development of cities for at least the past 50 years and how it can be equally useful as a
tool for evaluating urban resilience and the influence of the physical environment on the
process of recovery.
2. Resilience
2.1 Resilience as a theoretical construct
There has been a profound shift in the way we view the world: from a linear, binary,
reductive and mechanical paradigm that reached its climax in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, to a more nuanced understanding of sociotechnical ecology,
informed by recent advances in chaos, complexity and information theories (Perelman,
2007). Theories relating to change have been proposed in disciplines as wide ranging as
philosophy, ecology, economics and national security, all based on integrative modes of
inquiry and multiple sources of evidence (Holling, 1998). Resilience theory is one of the
manifestations of that paradigm shift, and its appeal as a concept is widely recognised
and growing in popularity. Its chief significance with respect to disaster management
and urbanism lies in the fact that as a concept it shifts the focus away from controlling
impacts or threats towards developing a systems capacity to respond to them. Because
it is a multidisciplinary term, there are many definitions with a degree of commonality
as well as inconsistencies, which reflect each disciplines concern. For example,
engineering often focuses on the speed at which a system returns to equilibrium after
displacement, or elasticity while, on the other hand, psychology refers to resilience as
the developable capacity to rebound from adversity (Luthans et al., 2006),
emphasising the capacity for resilience to be learned.
Many of the working definitions across disciplines are based on ecologist Hollings
paper of 1973, where he defined resilience as the measure of the persistence of systems
and of the ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same
relationships between state variables (Holling, 1973). Brian Walker and his colleagues
at the Resilience Alliance in Stockholm developed the concept still further, referring to it
as the capacity of a system to absorb a disturbance and reorganise while undergoing
change while retaining the same function, structure, identity and feedback (Walker

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et al., 2004). This and subsequent definitions by theorists of socioecological resilience

attempt to address one of the chief criticisms of earlier definitions, namely, that systems
never exist in a state of equilibrium, so the idea of bouncing back or a return to
equilibrium is misleading. More recent definitions focus on multiple states and
associated ideas of learning and adaptation (Carpenter et al., 2001; Gunderson, 2000;
Gallopn, 2006; Fiksel, 2006), and in disaster resilience literature, readiness and
preparedness. There has also been an interest in the measurement of resilience, and a
number of theorists have proposed that it may be useful to work with qualitative
attributes common to all resilient systems (Walker and Salt, 2006; Fiksel, 2003; Allan
and Bryant, 2011). This is the approach taken by this paper. From the point of view of
urbanism, systems theory and Hollings (1973) paper influenced the work of urbanists
Jane Jacobs, Anne Vernez-Moudon and Stanford Anderson, generating new ways of
thinking about the city with concepts like robustness, loose space (Anderson, 1978) and
hard edge soft centre (Moudon, 1989; Ramirez-Lovering, 2008). Finally, a number of
contemporary urbanists have looked at the way particular stressors in the urban
environment encourage an intensity of adaptive behaviours (Ramirez Lovering, 2008;
Dovey and Polakit, 2006) or at how designers might influence an urban systems
trajectory using acupuncture, small, controlled and targeted interventions which
encourage an urban system to respond by reorganising over time in its own way, using
its own resources (Sola-Morales, 1999).
One of the reasons resilience is important to urbanists and why ecological definitions
are so useful is that they focus on the dynamics of resilient systems, explaining how
systems work, giving clues about how we might design to enhance resilience. Adaptive
management, an approach used by ecologists in the management of natural systems
and, more recently, applied to processes of governance in the management of urban
environments (Birkmann et al., 2010), suggests when and how humans might intervene
to manage a complex system (Walker et al., 2004). The associated workbooks for
scientists and practitioners developed by the Resilience Alliance in Stockholm suggest
methodologies for intervention, which are remarkably similar to methodologies of
design.
The ecological resilience model is also useful for generating ideas. It uses a ball (the
system) and basin (the state of the system or variables) analogy to describe the dynamics
of resilience (Walker et al., 2004) (Figure 1). In a resilient system, the ball will move in
response to disturbance but will stay within the basin. The basin of a resilient system is
deep and wide. Its configuration can be manipulated by changing the system variables.
If the city is a system, the physical environment can be seen as one of its variables. The
physical environment can be manipulated to make space or create room to move,
either figuratively or literally. An example in urban theory is the concept of robustness,
where buildings and public space are designed with a loose fit; flexible and ambiguous
enough to allow the same space to accommodate a variety of different uses or adapted
for different purposes over time. Another way to influence resilience is to make sure the
ball (system) does not get too close to a threshold and tip over the edge into another state.
A resilient system has effective feedback mechanisms that notice when a system is close
to a threshold and move it away from that threshold. For example, traffic on a busy
freeway will tend to self-regulate to avoid grid-lock. Both of these approaches affect a
systems adaptability: the capacity of actors in a system to influence the systems

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Figure 1.
Ecological resilience. The
ball and the basin,
showing two basins of
attraction and the position
of the system (the ball) in
relation to them: where l
measures latitude, r
measures resistance and
pr measures
precariousness or
vulnerability

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trajectory (relative to a threshold) and the position of thresholds (Walker and Salt, 2006,
p. 124) and help clarify the role of intervention and design in resilience.
2.2 The resilience attributes
In our research, we have used the resilience attributes as a framework to analyse the case
study data and make recommendations for urban design interventions to encourage
resilience. These attributes are diversity, modularity, tight feedbacks, innovation,
overlap in governance, ecosystem services, social capital and allowing for variability
(Walker and Salt, 2006). These attributes shed light on the dynamics of a city adapting
in the face of disturbance. They also have the capacity to translate abstract ideas about
resilience to specific physical characteristics; indeed, because of the close relationship
between urban design and systems theory, they have influenced theories of the design of
cities for at least the past 50 years.
Since the 1960s, when Jane Jacobs wrote the Death and Life of the American City as
a polemic against the homogenising effects of modernism, there has been widespread
acceptance that urban diversity is an important characteristic of a liveable and
sustainable city. There are many different types of urban diversity. Jacobs describes
social and economic diversity and the conditions that encourage it: multiple land use
functions, short blocks and variety in building age and density (Jacobs, 1993). A
diversity of land use functions can be achieved by designing a range of different spatial
and functional types. Or a space can be designed to have a loose fit less
functionally determined and therefore more ambiguous and open to interpretation
which encourages adaptation (Anderson, 1978) and offers a major source of future
options and [the] capacity to respond to disturbance in different ways (Walker and
Salt, 2006, pp. 145-146).
Variability, or exposure to unpredictable disturbance, creates a more resilient
system; exposing a system to variability allows the evolution of effective and learned
adaptive behaviours. Controlling variability eventually weakens a system. Cities are
already designed to embrace variability to some degree. Engineers design constructed
infrastructure with wide design tolerances to encourage a greater range of function
(Bergen, 2001). Think, for example of streets, which are designed to carry variable
amounts of storm water, depending on the weather. And recently, the introduction of
constructed ecosystems (e.g. swales, rain gardens and wetlands) as add-ons to
conventional infrastructure has widened tolerances still further, enhancing its capacity
to cope with unpredictable conditions. However, the curse of the modernist city is that
most conventional urban infrastructure remains notoriously inflexible; it is designed for
efficiency rather than resilience and the mindset of many infrastructure designers is to
control or reduce disturbance rather than to design to accommodate it.
Modularity is a widely accepted concept in biology. In a modular system, individual
modules are relatively autonomous, clearly delineated but connected to their
surroundings, and separate from other entities with which they nevertheless interact in
some way (Bolker, 2000). Modular systems are therefore safe-to-fail (Lister, 2007, p. 46)
when loosely linked modules fail [] the system as a whole has a chance to
self-organise and therefore a greater capacity to absorb shocks. (Walker and Salt, 2006,
p. 121). These characteristics make modularity equally important in urban as well as
biological systems. In urban systems, modularity is exhibited in a variety of scales: in
the polycentric pattern of large urban agglomerations (Batty, 2001), in the street blocks

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of an urban grid (Moudon, 1989) and in the construction of lightweight prefabricated

modular buildings. Modularity has even inspired the idea of adaptive cities: In the
mid-20th century, London-based architect John Outram envisaged a city filled with
(modular) experimental, impermanent structures which would adapt in a manner
more flexible than any living organism (Sadler, 2005, p. 24).
Innovation and experimentation keep a system nimble and responsive. They
strengthen a systems capacity to respond to a wide range of unpredictable
disturbances, allowing it to stay in the game (Pickett et al., 2004, p. 373). But
experimentation is risky; a system needs to be able to absorb failure as well as capitalise
on success. And success is more likely if the timing as well as the type of experiment
is aligned to a citys adaptive cycle. Cities, like all open systems, constantly cycle
through phases of growth, conservation, release and reorganisation. This is exemplified
in the commonplace transformation of slum to artists enclave to gentrified suburb or the
reclamation of harbour to port facility and declamation to recreational waterfront. As a
system develops, there is a certain amount of creative chaos (Schumpeter, 1950) followed
by a period of steady growth. This creative energy is eventually channelled into
maintaining the status quo. A significant disturbance at any point in the cycle can
release that energy, and the cycle begins again. Because of the nature of system
dynamics, to be successful, different stages in the adaptive cycle require different types
of intervention. In the reorganisation and early growth stages, experimentation is easy,
but competition can be fierce and experiments can feel unsafe or destabilising. In the
conservation stages, experiments are looked on with suspicion and change is difficult. In
these cases, a disturbance large enough to cause a release and reorganisation of the city
system may be required.
A system with tight feedbacks makes continual microscopic adjustments to
unpredictable flows of disturbance, creating the dynamic between stability at one scale
and rapid-fire responsiveness at another, which lies at the heart of resilience. Feedback
can be positive or negative: positive feedback amplifies deviations encouraging growth
and evolution, while negative feedback dampens them down to maintain the status quo.
Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been a growing body of research linking the
evolution of cities to positive feedback mechanisms (Batty, 2001, p. 645). These same
positive feedback signals encourage an increase in traffic in contemporary cities in
response to the construction of new roadways. Urban traffic can also be regulated
through negative feedback; as congestion builds-up, motorists look for new routes or
shift their mode of transport until the congestion is relieved. Feedbacks are tightest
when they are local rather than global. Excessive government control can weaken
community responsiveness and a weak or absent central government can actually
encourage communities to respond and adapt. In Guatemala, for example, poor
communities existing illegally on the urban fringe exhibit high levels of adaptive
behaviour, responding quickly and effectively to changing urban conditions to secure
employment and appropriate housing (Ramirez Lovering, 2009).
This capacity of a community to respond together and effectively to disturbance is a
characteristic of social capital, a slippery term often defined by what it does (civic
engagement, voting in local elections, membership of community organisations,
feelings of loyalty or attachment, levels of trust, etc.) rather than what it is. Although the
concept is generally discussed as a sociocultural rather than a physical phenomenon
(Putnam, 1995), some theorists have suggested that public sidewalk life, with its

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perfectly calibrated mix of public and private activities (Jacobs, 1993) and smaller places
with definite boundaries and/or a clear identity can influence the development of social
capital (Oliver, 2000).
Urban theories recognise the importance of the idea of identity and place, and a very
good way to express this in otherwise globalised cities is through the physical
interpretation of endemic ecosystems. Ecosystems in an urban environment offer
recreation, amenity and visual benefits. They also provide ecosystem services: basic
commodities like water, food, air and energy that regulate the environment, clean air and
water and opportunities for pollination. They encourage a redundancy of supply that
can continue to sustain life when conventional infrastructure fails. And they are often
finely balanced and co-dependent on a citys urban structure. For example, remnant
urban land offers opportunities to grow food and to forage, and threads of the urban
roadway matrix enhance the connectivity potential of remnant or adapted ecosystems.
This discussion about the influence of resilience theory in urban design discourse
highlights the relationship between resilience, people and place. In the following section,
we apply these attributes as a framework to evaluate the case study evidence. We look
for evidence of these attributes in each city and we ask how they have influenced
adaptation and recovery in the aftermath of an earthquake. In the final section, we
discuss the implications of our findings.
3. Evidence of recovery
3.1 San Francisco
San Francisco was a small Spanish mission, a harbour port for traders and a military
outpost before the 1840s gold rush precipitated massive immigration. To regularise the
settlement, a gridded street pattern with a central plaza was laid out beside the Bay. By
1847, the grid was resurveyed and somewhat expediently extended to the West, set out
with small blocks and wide streets with no concession to the steep topography. Market
Street, a wide diagonal that reconnected the Mission and the hinterland to the main port,
severed and rotated the grid. Over the next 50 years, the city expanded and the grid
prevailed. Landowners subdivided again. The wetlands of the Bay were reclaimed and
developed for housing. Parks were established on the less valuable hilltops.
Infrastructure like water supply was sold to the highest bidder. By the time the
1,017-acre Golden Gate Park was established on the edge of the city, San Francisco had
the highest open space per capita of any city in the USA (Figure 2). From a process
driven by crude urban planning, uncontrolled immigration and bullish market forces,
the city developed community solidarity on the sand dunes of a peninsula, framed by the
harbour and the hills, and structured by the grid, the wide streets, the fine-grained
subdivision pattern and the patchwork of local parks and grand parklands. Despite
numerous fires and earthquakes in the nineteenth century, these features persist.
A number of resilience attributes can be read into this socio-spatial condition. The
city plan, with its grid laid relentlessly over the hilly terrain, had encouraged the
development of small, modular neighbourhoods based on topographical catchments.
The topographical variation created a clear identity in each neighbourhood, typically
reinforced by a local neighbourhood hilltop park and characterised by definite
boundaries. In addition to providing an abundance of open space, the grid of streets and
regular network of parks provided a coherence of parkland and built form typology.
They also provided a degree of spatial and functional latency: primed for diverse and

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Figure 2.
Map of San Francisco
1905

unanticipated uses in the future. The regularity of the plan, laid over hilly terrain,
resulted in a city of villages where each neighbourhood was supported by a diverse
network of connected open space.
Not surprisingly, communities were relatively resilient. It has been suggested that
this kind of spatial condition (small communities with clear identity and defined
boundaries) helps foster social capital (Oliver, 2000). There are other reasons for this
resilience. Unleashed from the strictures of the east, there was something of the Wild
West in the way the city developed. Although its citizens wanted all the trappings of
East Coast sophistication (Golden Gate Park was built as the Wests answer to Central
Park in New York), the city was able to innovate without the constraints of East Coast
traditions. Moreover, the regular rumbling of earthquakes and fire (there were four
major fires in the space of 10 years) are likely to have encouraged optimism and courage
in the face of adversity as a learned adaptive behaviour. The repeated exposure to
disturbance (variability) may have developed positive tight feedbacks the community
learned about the environment they were living with and continuously adapted. In the
aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, despite obvious hardship, most were relatively
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military to organise and come to their aid (Plate 1). Thus, the hallmarks of a resilient city
were embedded in the interrelationship between urban structure, landscape and
community and the city earned its right to take the phoenix, rising from the ashes, as its
mascot.
3.1.1 The 1906 earthquake and fire. On 18 April at 5.12 a.m., San Francisco, a city of
approximately 500,000 people, woke to a magnitude 7.7 earthquake that left many
houses uninhabitable and utility services in disarray. The immediate concern was for
security and shelter. Some fled the city, but a large proportion remained, gathered in
parks and open spaces. Ad hoc camps were established, with people encamped or
sleeping out in the open in the various military reservations, parks, and open spaces of
the city (Greely, 1906, p. 88). Shelter was constructed using:

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[] materials taken from lumberyards, houses in the course of construction, advertising

fences, etc. []. Although a large number of tents were shipped into the town, these, in the very
nature of things, arrived after a delay of a week to ten days or more (Phelan, 1906a, p. i).

In the interim, people slept in streets, parks, private gardens or vacant lots. A few
months later, Major General Greely, incharge for the recovery of the city, suggested that
the question of providing temporary shelter for the 200,000 homeless people who
remained in San Francisco was facilitated by [] the considerable numbers of
convenient squares and public grounds (Greely, 1906, p. 114). In fact, San Franciscos
entire urban structure, its wide gridded streets, hilly topography and extensive and
generous network of parks, all contributed in some way to the recovery process.

Plate 1.
Adaptation after the 1906
earthquake in San
Francisco

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The plentiful and evenly dispersed neighbourhood parks provided opportunities for
recovery in place, and supported a diversity of urban activity. At first they became
accessible gathering points for community support and the exchange of information.
Often sited on or near the top of hills, they enhanced visual and physical communication
in tight feedback loops, by providing vantage points as well as facilitating
communication (Plate 2). In this way, communities could make their own decisions
about how and when to respond. Later, many of the parks acted as ad hoc campgrounds
supporting a variety of functions of daily life for the local community. At least one park
was a site for temporary burials. When the army moved in, it was primarily the lack of
services water and sewer that precipitated the erection of medium- to long-term
emergency housing encampments in larger parks such as Golden Gate and the Presidio.
Streets were also important in the recovery process. The redundancy afforded by the
citys wide gridded streets encouraged adaptive responses, which allowed the city to
resume social and commercial activities with a minimum of fuss. For example, because
of broken chimneys, all food of the entire city was cooked over camp fires in the open
streets (Greely, 1906, p. 94). Cooking became a communal activity and street kitchens
were constructed in inventive ways:

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[] at first, pieces of sheet-iron were supported on bricks, but eventually, people moved old
stoves into the street, surrounding them with screens made of window-shutters, bill-boards, or
cloth attached to frames (Keeler, 1906, p. 47).

Plate 2.
San Franciscos hilltop
parks provided a vantage
point allowing local
communities to quickly
respond to the advance of
the fires

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The citys wide streets also encouraged the rapid resumption of commercial activities,
allowing makeshift shopfronts to be erected directly in front of damaged ones (Figure 4).
The gridded alignment of streets also facilitated the installation of temporary
infrastructure (water, sewer and railway) and the development of auxiliary systems to
accommodate shortcomings in the citys ability to deal with the effects of the
earthquake. The grid, also provided alternative access through the city even though
many streets were filled with fallen brick, mortar and iron, and were lined and crossed
with a tangled net-work of electric wires and poles (Morrow, (n.d., p. 1). The city
recovered quickly, in part, because of its inherent resilient characteristics.
One would expect that the dramatic release of energy in a city following a major
disturbance, while chaotic and disruptive, would create unprecedented opportunities for
innovation and experimentation. Conversely, after an earthquake, sweeping changes are
the exception, rather than the norm. Major innovation is difficult to achieve when
communities are seeking stability not radical change. The pressure to build back
quickly prohibits the complex negotiations between stakeholders necessary to
permanently change the physical environment. There was, for example, passionate
debate in the city regarding the viability of adopting Daniel Burnhams proposed new
city beautiful master plan, finished just weeks before the earthquake. Within a matter
of days after the earthquake, a committee was established to:
[] consider and recommend the revision of building laws, revision of street [plans], widening,
extending and grading of streets, creation of parks [] and such other matters as may come
before them relative (t)o the re-habilitation or beautification of the city (Phelan, 1906b, p. 7).

However, several obstacles including the inertia of the government administration

and the self-serving obstruction of property owners intervened (Phelan, 1906b, p. 3) and
the ideas were never realised.
3.2 Concepcin
When La Perouse arrived in the Bay of Concepcin during his exploration of the South
American coastline in 1786, he encountered a coastal outcrop of mountains linked to the
mainland by a low-lying isthmus of marshlands, lagoons, rivers, streams and low hills.
The small coastal port villages of Talcahuana and Port St Vincent nestled into the base
of the hills above the marshlands where the Laws of the Indies precluded settlement.
Upstream, on the Bio Bio River, lay the village of La Mocha and across the river to the
south was Fort St Pierre, established as the fronterra between Native American
settlement and Spanish colonisation. The coastal town of Penco ruined after repeated
tsunami, had relocated to La Mocha which subsequently became Concepcin, and has
subsequently grown to become the second largest city in Chile (Figure 3).
Like much of modern Chile, there is an extreme disparity in living standards in
Concepcin. Chile, an urban country (88 per cent of 16,750,000 people), ranks 40th in the
world in gross domestic product (GDP) and has a 95.7 per cent adult literacy rate. Chile
plummets to 164th, however, on the Gini index of income inequality, ahead of just 18
other ranked countries (UNDP, 2009). In Concepcin, the well-off tend to physically
occupy the high ground, which is in short supply, while the less well-off have settled on
the less valuable marshland and coastal plains.
Twenty-first century Concepcin is far more complex culturally and economically
than the nineteenth century San Francisco, but its resilience characteristics can still be

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Figure 3.
La Perouse Plan of the
Bay of Concepcin 1,779
showing its natural
features: water supply,
hills, forest, river

traced back to the urban structure and its communitys response to its unique
environment. Concepcin is often called the city of lagoons and the city is defined by the
many and diverse landscapes associated with water. The city has sprawled over this
landscape, constrained by its geomorphology and divided by the river, resulting in a
polycentric city where the central city, universities and hospitals are located to the north,
the dormitory suburbs and secondary schools occupy the hills and broad coastal plain to
the south and industrial lands and port activities to the west. Three bridges span the
river and a series of roads and a railway line cross the marshy landscape connecting the
port to the central business district. However, while the citys urban form is polycentric
or modular in form (Kloosterman and Musterd, 2001), its dispersed sub-centres are not
particularly autonomous, which places pressure on the viability of connections between
the centres (Figure 4). In a resilient modular system, the whole must be able to function
despite the failure of one of its parts. This is not the case in Concepcin. The city relies
heavily on the differentiated function of its parts. In this kind of urban condition, there
should be a redundancy of connections between centres. But the swampy, low-lying
terrain prevents multiple connections, and those that exist are extremely vulnerable to
earthquakes. Finally, while the combination of marshy terrain and polycentric
urbanism has resulted in a quantity and diversity of open space, in many locations it is
neither accessible nor secure.
3.2.1 The 2010 earthquake and tsunami. On 27 February, at 3.34 a.m., a category 8.8
earthquake, one of the largest in modern history, struck the coast of Chile. Its epicenter
was 100 km north of Concepcin. The earthquake was followed by up to four tsunami
waves beginning at 3.48 a.m. that hit the coast near the city over the course of the early
morning. A period of extreme civic unrest followed that local police were powerless to

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Figure 4.
Concepcins
polycentric/modular
urban form urban

suppress as the population fought for access to food, water and safe refuge on high
ground. The roots of this problem are embedded in the disparity of income equality; a
malaise that will always affect the resilience of a city, irrespective of its urban structure.
One of Concepcins greatest physical vulnerabilities and arguably the biggest
barrier to long-term recovery is its regional polycentric structure that has limited
connectivity. After the recent earthquake, two of the three bridges connecting the central
business district to the southern part of the city across the Bio Bio River collapsed. This
was particularly devastating during the emergency period, affecting access to medical
treatment essential for saving lives after the earthquake. These kinds of connections,
once broken, are difficult and expensive to repair and their impacts extend well into

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recovery, slowing the process considerably. There is a necessary balance between

connectivity and modularity that makes a modern city resilient. In cities like
Concepcin, where the viability of connections is almost impossible to maintain, it may
be more useful to focus on increasing the capacity of each sub-centre to survive
unassisted for extended periods in the short-term, and in the long-term to encourage an
intra-rather than an inter-urban differentiation of functions.
At first glance, the city appears to have the quantity and diversity of space necessary
to support recovery, but in some locations, it is neither accessible nor secure. For
example, despite the connective capacity of Highway 160, the main highway running
north to south, the urban fabric south of the Bio Bio River is relatively fragmented, and
each centre has its own, idiosyncratic internal structure, which made it difficult to move
quickly through the region.
The method of escape from earthquake damage depended largely on the urban
structure of the affected area. In affluent suburban areas, the wide avenues and large
open spaces around buildings, encouraged recovery in place. Despite building
damage, there was plenty of open space adjacent to residential areas with easy and
legible access to streets connected to main highways. However, in the central city
Concepcin, with its dense centre and relatively little available open space, it was
necessary to evacuate to safer territory.
The regions elevated landscapes were critical for the recovery of coastal
communities in the first few days after the disaster. In the north, the Cordillera de la
Costa rise steeply to the east of the city, at some distance from the coast, but remnant
small hills and slopes rise intermittently above the relatively flat urban fabric. However,
south of the river, the hills are further from the coast and more difficult to access because
of the lagoon and waterway that separates them from vulnerable coastal settlements.
Immediately after the earthquake, in response to the tsunami warnings, communities
from the coastal plains rushed to high ground and safety. While evacuees easily
navigated the permeable street network on the plains, poor connectivity and the small
number of narrow winding roads and the junction between the plains and the hills
created a bottleneck, which seriously restricted the speed and effectiveness of escape.
As discussed, access to high ground is a privilege. Much of it, particularly south of
the river, is privately owned. Many of evacuees from disadvantaged communities of the
coastal plain camped for weeks on high ground, either in privately owned forest or on
the periphery of the affluent suburb of San Pedro La Paz, and in doing so created a
dangerous and volatile siege situation, which required the intervention of the military
for resolution.
On the other hand, Concepcins lowlands to the north of the river are less affected by
tsunami and blessed with an abundance of fresh water and a diversity of open space
with equitable and multiple access lines (Plate 3). Because all services had collapsed,
access to water was critical in the first few days so parks with lagoons, riverbank,
natural springs or streams near the city were quickly established as campsites. Parks
and road verges adapted to new roles that supported the resumption of commerce:
temporary structures were erected serving as supermarkets, hardware stores and
shipping containers adapted as banking facilities.
Perhaps one of the most dramatic and spontaneous adaptive responses to the
earthquake was the way as a survival strategy, communities constructed barricades on
local roads to create smaller, modular neighbourhoods with distinct boundaries (Figure 5).

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Plate 3.
Access to water was
critical in the first few
days following the
earthquake: one of
Concepcins many
lagoons

This adaptive behaviour suggests that under pressure, communities will instinctively
establish the conditions necessary to generate or enhance social capital to ensure
survival. First-hand accounts give evidence of the strong bonds that developed between
members of these constructed communities and the way they adapted space to
facilitate recovery. In a neighbourhood with a local park, for example, the community
elected a leader and gathered twice a day in the park to discuss survival strategies, such
as how to access food, water and medicine. In another neighbourhood, which had no
park, the street and front yards together were transformed into a public square for
support and the exchange of vital information.
Despite the intensity of the earthquake and the degree of damage to infrastructure
and buildings, the citys underlying structure and, thus, its capacity for resilience
persists. It is a different story closer to the coast, where tsunamis have destroyed entire
villages and displaced communities. It is here that a national planning initiative for
reconstruction is underway. The region of Bio Bio, hardest hit by the recent earthquake,
has developed 18 master plans for the complete reconstruction of its devastated
coastline. The new government has co-opted universities and practices in a race to
develop the plans over a period of six months. However, there are enormous and
conflicting pressures. On the one hand, there is a desire by locals to rebuild as quickly as
possible so life can return to normal. On the other hand, the government wants to make
lasting changes to the way land is settled to avert future disasters and avoid more than

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Figure 5.
The re-negotiation of
public and private space
for recovery after the
earthquake in Concepcin

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a token effort to rehabilitate damaged ecosystems. What seems to be a rare urban

design, tabula rasa may, in fact, be the setting for potential conflict between political and
community wills.
In summary, each city recovered in a different way, influenced, in part, by the citys
built environment, and the way it allowed for flexibility of function and encouraged
adaptation and innovation. In San Francisco, its diversity and distribution of connected
open space was important, but because it was built of a peninsula of sand, there was
very little available water. Concepcin had an abundance of water and plenty of high
ground, but people could not access them because of connectivity and equity issues.
4. Implications
When we began this research in 2008, there was a scarcity of information regarding the
role of urban designers in earthquake-prone cities. It was accepted that designers should
be involved in the reconstruction of cities after a major event but there was very little
information about what kind of city they should be reconstructing. There was some
information about the quantity of open space required per capita for effective recovery,
but as urban designers and landscape architects, we were looking for information about
quality as well as quantity, and the default position of a sustainable city (the
overwhelming position after the Christchurch earthquake) seemed to be missing the
point. We had a hunch that there might be a relationship between urban form,
geomorphology and a communitys capacity to recover. Rather than communities
waiting passively for help to arrive after a major event, we were interested in what a
designer could do to encourage communities to help themselves; to manage, at least in a
small way, their own recovery.
It is clear from these case studies that there is, indeed, a relationship between
geomorphology, urban form and recovery. It is also clear that the role of the designer in
the construction of a resilient city cannot simply be a matter of providing enough space.
The qualities that enhance resilience are complex and inter-related and need to be
carefully calibrated, if a city is to be really resilient. But they are not so complicated that
the task is impossible and they do not really need to be seen as an issue of metrics. We
do not need to know about absolutely everything in great detail to make useful
decisions. Some things obviously work and some do not.
We know that resilience attributes are already embedded in urban design theory,
influencing the way contemporary cities are designed and how they evolve. It appears
from our case studies that the same attributes might also influence the way a city
responds and adapts following a major disturbance like an earthquake. By testing this
proposition in the field, we begin to see patterns emerge. It seems that there are
particular relationships between disturbance, urban structure (the configuration and
network of spaces, the amount, form, function and distribution of open space at a range
of scales) and adaptation, which assist the recovery process. Each of these patterns is
site-specific because each city has its own particular urban structure. And the responses
will be different from city to city too, as responses are, by nature, culturally as well as
physically determined.
So although we are seeing patterns, where some things appear to work and some do
not, in the evaluation and design of urban resilience, the attribute tools need to be
applied with a light touch. Its clear there is no universal solution: the attributes
encourage us to see resilience not as an absolute value, but as a set of relationships that

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shift in space, scale and time, subject to each citys idiosyncratic structure and function.
Design interventions need to be calibrated with the range of variables that influence a
particular city to achieve maximum benefit. For example, rather than designing to
achieve diversity, modularity or social capital, it may be more important to see how
manipulations of existing urban form can make a city more or less resilient. In cities that
are polycentric in form but not in function, there is a choice between improving
connectivity and reinforcing autonomy. Both will influence resilience; the outcome will
depend on a multiplicity of factors (economic, social, environmental, economic and
political) that influence decisions in the urban environment. Or a city may not have
much space. The answer is to be strategic, i.e. not to make more because this may not be
appropriate or affordable but to build in flexibility or room to move, either spatially by
designing spaces for a diversity of functions or by looking at the configuration and
distribution of space. Finally, although it may appear that an earthquake event offers
opportunities for experimentation and the chance to build back better, it is not
necessarily the time to implement dramatic change. Meaningful change is often difficult
to implement in the midst of chaos because more than anything, communities are
looking for stability. A more useful approach might be a balance between change
following an earthquake, and smaller incremental changes as part of a citys structural
plan. This implies that the goals of urban design and recovery planning are aligned.
With their focus on redundancies and overlap, the attributes challenge the
fundamental basis of the enlightenment project with its concern for fail-safe
optimisation and efficiency, much of which has been the groundwork for what is often
referred to as good design. In systems theory, resilience gives good design another
dimension that aligns disturbance with spatial solutions. We are not advocating that
cities be designed for an event that may never happen. The point of aligning urbanism
and recovery following a major disturbance is to encourage the design of exciting and
stimulating cities for everyday life in ways that also accommodate disturbance and
encourage adaptation. It is important to recognise that the two approaches are not
mutually exclusive. However, as a mechanism for evaluating cities that are earthquake
prone, the attributes have the potential to broaden and deepen our understanding of how
urban resilience works, how it relates to design and, therefore, how we can design cities
to facilitate recovery.
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Corresponding author
Penelope Allan can be contacted at: penny.allan@vuw.ac.nz

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