Urban Resilience in a Global Context

Front matter

Dorothee Brantz, Avi Sharma (eds.)

URBAN RESILIENCE IN AGLOBAL CONTEXT

Actors, Narratives, and Temporalities

Introduction

Contesting Resilience Negotiating Shared Urban Futures

Ecologies of Resilience

A Historical Perspective on Resilient Urbanism The ‘Sociobiology of Cities’ and ‘Ecosystem Urbs’ in Belgium, 1900-1980

North of the Arctic Circle Ralph Erskine's Mid-20'Century Urban Planning and Design Projects in Kiruna and Svappavaara

Ann Maudsley see min AA AAA a IR

Growing Resilient Cities Urban Community Gardens and Disaster Recovery after the 2010/11 Canterbury/Christchurch Earthquakes

Andreas WES „u... A té dirt die

Before ‘Resilience’

Surviving in Postwar Berlin, 1945-1950

Avi Sharma as 2.2022 ae la Ares nn eine

111) Infrastructures of Resilience

Global Cities, Natural Disasters, Development, and the Intellectual History

of Resilience Thinking, 1960s to 1990s

Sönke Kunkel eu. a en Anika dd iia 129

Building Resilience through Commercial Relations The Formalization of Carwash Sites in Medellin Marcela ÉGpez seen dadas 147

Enhancing Urban Resilience After the 1995 Kobe Earthquake Parks and Open Spaces as a Multi-Functional Resource Flörian:Hendrik:Liedtke:. ii ae Bein Bates 167

Urban Dualism and the Latin American City Diego Silva Ardild sies sue er en an 181

IV) Epilogue

Urban Resilience Has a History - And a Future TiMOthY MOSS:so5 3 Sica A EE waren Gs dee caus es 209

Acknowledgements

This book began as a lively exchange of ideas at the biannual conference of the European Association for Urban History in Rome in September 2018. We want to thank the conference organizers for giving us the opportunity to explore themes related to Global Urban Resilience in such a congenial setting, and with so many interesting partners. Several of the presenters from that conference worked with us on this book, and we are grateful for their creative input over a period of more than 18 months. It was a pleasure to work with the contributors to this volume, who were open to critical input, and generous in sharing their own insights about editorial and conceptual questions. Thanks also to members of the research colloquium at the Center for Metropolitan Studies where we had a chance to discuss drafts of these chapters with our wonderful colleagues. We are grateful to the publishing team at transcript, especially Jakob Horstmann (who initiated the project with us) and Annika Linnemann (who helped us to bring it to print)! We want to extend a very special thank you to Dominik Essmann, who devoted an enormous amount of time and effort to formatting, proof-reading, and all sorts of other essential tasks. We also thank the Technische Universitat Berlin for supporting Open Access Initiatives, which made it possible for us to share the book as widely as possible. Finally, and here we speak for many of the contributors, thanks to our families for their support, even at those times when we spent too many nights and weekends at our desks instead of with them. With family in mind, we dedicate this volume to Anika and Felix.

I)

Introduction

Contesting Resilience Negotiating Shared Urban Futures

In the early 21° century, resilience has become the preferred policy constellation to address futures that are extremely uncertain but that are likely to be extreme. The Bloomberg and Rockefeller Foundations have resilient cities programming, as do the World Bank, Asia Development Bank, and dozens of other mega-organizations. Resilience plays an important role in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which have set global development targets for more than one hundred nations through 2030, and have on-the-ground impacts that will shape lives in all corners of the planet for a generation (Sharma 2015: 592)." As Aditya Bahadur and others have argued, “The vision set out in the SDGs - for people, planet, prosperity and peace - will inevitably fail if shocks and stresses are not addressed [...] A focus on strengthening resilience can protect development gains and ensure people have the resources and capacities to better reduce, prevent, anticipate, absorb and adapt to a range of shocks, stresses, risks and uncertainties” (Bahadur et al. 2015: 2).” Some argue that resilience is simply a trendy term, one that has gained currency in a variety of sectors because it is easy to use and extremely flexible. This may be true. But resilience as a development discourse and an urban practice directly impacts the lives of hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people: It is at the core of funding, development, and aid initiatives worth tens of billions of dollars. This alone - the fact that resilience does and will continue to shape lived realities across the planet - is a reason to think seriously about the concept, discourse, and practice.

1 More than 1.3 million stakeholders participated in the development of the 17 ‘universal principles’ that make up the SDGs.

2 Resilience is acknowledged both explicitly and implicitly in a range of the proposed SDG targets. Target 1.5 represents the core resilience target, as follows: “By 2030 build the resilience of the poor and those in vulnerable situations, and reduce their exposure and vulnerability to climate-related extreme events and other economic, social and environmental shocks and disasters.”

Critical Claims about Resilience Practices

Resilience has been applied to a range of issues and at a variety of scales — from global financial and ecological systems to human development - but cities have become a particular object for resilience approaches (Chandler/Coaffee 2016). There are a host of reasons why this is the case. As population, commercial, religious, and political centers, cities have always served as amplifiers, and when disruptions do occur, they are felt with particular intensity in urban centers. When, for example, a natural disaster impacts a city, the sheer density of the population and built environment regularly contributes to higher mortality rates; when financial crises occur, urban centers are impacted more visibly than other areas because they concentrate financial and other capital institutions (Amin 2014: 308-9). At least since the Second World War, the vulnerability of urban systems has been noted by armed forces — military strategists, militias, terrorist groups — who have recognized that attacking cities can achieve a maximal return on investment (Coaffee et al. 2009: 4; 9-27).

Cities are extremely vulnerable to a range of disruptions, but they are also (allegedly) extremely resilient. In their seminal 2005 publication, urbanists Vale and Campanella note that between the years 1100 and 1800, only 42 cities damaged by natural disasters, military conflicts, or other causes were abandoned, and the rate of rebuilding has, again according to Vale and Campanella, risen since 1800 (Vale/Campanella 2005).* There are a variety of reasons why, historically, cities have not been abandoned: urban development is accompanied by property rights and enormous sunk costs, and rebuilding is typically a common agenda for diverse stakeholders and interest groups, even those who are in other instances bitterly opposed. Cities are also repositories of shared memory and civic pride, and making sure that cities are rebuilt after a disaster - or recover from different kinds of disruption - is a matter of great symbolic significance. Research by Vale and Campanella; Jon Coaffee and others suggests that ‘resilience’ is in the very DNA of the urban.

In recent years cities across the world are developing resilience strategies, often with assistance from well-financed foundations and other civil society actors. In 2013, for example, the Rockefeller Foundation launched the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, which would assist and guide selected cities in their efforts to develop a ‘robust resilience strategy. There are dozens of other foundations, corporations,

3 This may now be changing. In a small but growing number of cases, city and state actors are deploying a strategy known as ‘managed retreat’ rather than rebuilding. If this continues — and given the likely impacts of climate change, one expects that it will — this will represent a fundamental reorientation in the areas of planning, insurance, ecological and environmental preservation, as well as property ownership.

consultancies, NGOs, IGOs, and governmental agencies working at all scales to advance resilience thinking. And the urban occupies a crucial space in planning for more ‘resilient futures.’ Advocates of more resilient cities believe that planning can enhance the capacity of subnational actors to respond to crisis scenarios. From disaster management to community advocates, financial institutions to the builders of urban infrastructures, it appears that everyone wants to build more resilient cities.

As resilience discourses have gained in popularity, though, they have also generated opposition. Some critics argue that resilience is part of a larger neoliberal project that leverages real or perceived crises to justify policy agenda that would otherwise be unpalatable to the public and the international community (Cretney 2014; Diprose 2014; Slater 2014; Kaika 2017). Most obviously, critics are concerned about the way that resilience is used to push non-governmental solutions to challenges that have typically been the responsibility of the state. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for example, it was widely noted that politicians and media outlets praised the resilience of city residents only after state actors failed to contain a slow-moving catastrophe (Kaika 2017). Community activists and critics around the world argue that resilience is part of a larger neoliberal project that pushes responsibility for extreme situations onto small scale actors. Resilience is, in this view, the mask that hides the face of the shrinking state (Derrickson/MacKinnon 2013; Slater 2014).

A growing community of scholars has argued that resilience is itself a product of the crisis-driven cycle of (neoliberal) capitalism (Pelling 2003; Eraydin 2013: 19-20). As deregulation expands on a global scale, the hedges against dangerous land use practices, the protections against financial melt-down, the robustness of disaster relief agencies, the funding of international aid initiatives have all been degraded. We as a species are, ourselves, expanding the threats to which we are subject. Humans are more at risk to extreme weather events because we have changed the climate through our everyday practices; societies are more exposed to military conflict, terrorism, and ordinary violence because military grade weaponry is easily available on the market; we are more likely to see catastrophic damage due to natural disasters because population growth and, more importantly, real estate speculation has seen the continual expansion of human settlement on geologically and ecologically unsuitable lands. We are living in a world that is riskier, and it is riskier because we made it that way (ibid: 19-25). In this view, resilience is a band-aid to self-inflicted wounds (Castree 2010; Cretney 2014; Diprose 2014). The porousness of the term, its vagueness, the variety of ways that it is used — and as we shall see, it is used in more than two dozen ways (Meerow/Newell 2016: 41) — is perfectly suited to provide humanitarian and ecological window-dressing to otherwise loathsome projects. Resilience may be an increasingly ubiquitous policy framework, but it is hardly uncontested.

The disagreements cited above are, to a very large degree, ideological in nature. There are also, though, disciplinary and professional tensions that explain why resilience is a contested concept, and much of this is structured into the very nature of professional practice. Hurricane Katrina is probably the most discussed example of these kinds of structural differences, though it is hardly unique. When, for example, massive rainfalls caused flash flooding and mudslides in Vargas state, Venezuela in 1999, the damage was extraordinary.* Tens of thousands were killed, more than 75.000 lost their homes, food, water, and electricity supply were profoundly disrupted, the capacities of local, state, federal and non-governmental actors were stretched to the breaking point (Schieder 1957: 65; Takahashi et al. 2001: 65; Genatios/Lafuente 2003). The most vulnerable citizens - those with limited transportation, financial, physical, mental, or emotional resources — were the most dramatically impacted. Actors across the political and demographic spectrum called for immediate assistance. Newly elected president Hugo Chavez simultaneously declared martial law (mobilizing the state apparatus) and urged residents to “adopt a family” impacted by the disaster during the approaching Christmas holiday season (Long 1999). Unlike Hurricane Katrina, which occurred in a strongly neoliberal context, La Tragedia played out in a state-socialist one. It too, though, was defined by high levels of engagement by civil society actors. Volunteer police and fire, relief agencies like the Red Cross, and individuals travelled to the impact zone or sent financial or other aid.

Architects, designers, planners, engineers, logistics and development professionals also donated time and resources to relief and rehabilitation. These were people who, whatever their social, political, or other commitments, saw a problem, recognized its profound impact on human lives, and wanted to act. The act of intervening is, to a great extent, a personal choice, but it is also informed by a professional ethos. Practice-oriented disciplines teach that identifying a clear causal chain - of impact, effect, and solution - is the way to achieve meaningful transformations in the lives of those impacted. Simply stated, torrential rainfall was the cause of disruption, the destruction of housing and infrastructure was the effect, and rebuilding shelter and infrastructure was the needed solution. This is not to say that practice-oriented professionals were unaware of the larger socio-political, global economic or ecological factors that shaped the Vargas floods. It is simply to emphasize that their pressing professional imperative was to help people with their immediate problems, and to assist in short and medium-term rebuilding. For architects, designers, engineers, planners, logistics and development professionals,

4 Cities, peri-urban, and rural areas across Vargas were impacted, creating, sadly, many opportunities to explore differential responses to different kinds of human settlements.

the nature of the crisis, its impact, and the way forward to relief, rebuilding, and rehabilitation was more or less clear.‘

Critical geographers, historians, and urbanists typically respond to crises like the Vargas floods rather differently. Many point out that the most affected populations are the poorest ones; that there are race, gender, and class dynamics that shape the way disasters effect individuals; that the financial and material sourcing of aid differs depending on whether the impacted city is in the global north or the global south. In cases like Vargas, they point out that, while the proximate cause of the crisis may have been rainfall, the deregulation of land-use practices, speculative development, under-resourced infrastructure, poor strategic planning, and extreme inequality were all reasons for the way that La Tragedia played out (Hartman/Squires 2006; Castree 2010; Fainstein 2015; Squires 2015). Hundreds of thousands of people, they rightly argue, were affected in different ways by the same event because of socio-political and political-economic unevenness that was historically and sociologically rooted. Highly urbanized and mostly poor districts built on alluvial fans formed by earlier flood events were the hardest-hit areas. In some cases, whole villages and shantytowns were swept into the sea.

In the view of critical scholars, solving the problem is not about restoring the Vargas and other regions impacted by disaster (natural or otherwise) to the way they were before. Indeed, ‘the way things were before’ is a central part of the problem. In this view, a resilience approach reproduces the unevenness of existing social realities and, in doing so, both justifies and further entrenches those inequalities. This example, which could be easily multiplied, shows that even when researchers and practitioners agree on broad goals — for example, rebuilding homes after a natural disaster; limiting reliance on agricultural or financial monocultures — they often disagree on the causal logics of disruption and, by extension, the necessary responses.

This is not a particularly controversial claim, and we the editors have often encountered this tension between planning, practice, and critique in academic settings that bring together researchers and practitioners. In their edited volume on resilient planning, Eraydin and Tasan-Kok argue that this tension between practice-oriented disciplines and critical urbanists is itself a product of neoliberalism. Planning, they argue, has since the 1970s “become increasingly market-oriented and entrepreneurial [...]. All around the world, urban development has become

5 This can be seen in the excellent article by civil engineering experts Nakagawa Takahashi et al., who discuss the uneven economic geographies of rural and urban regions in Vargas, before turning to a plan to increase “conveyance capacity” of the San Julian River. While they clearly recognize the significance of economic and spatial inequality in shaping the impacts of La Tragedia, the solutions — drawing in substantial part on Japanese experience with natural disaster - is essentially technocratic. (Takahashi et al. 2001: 71; 80).

increasingly fragmented [...] with opportunity-led planning practices taking root everywhere in reaction to rapid and complex change” (Eraydın/Tasan-Kok 2013: 4). In their own calls for a shift towards a “resilient planning’ paradigm, Eraydin and Tasan-Kok argue that architects and planners have increasingly been forced to design and plan for the short and medium term, to package and sell plans to stakeholders who are committed to market principles, and this is an important point. The question, then, is whether we can find ways to balance the short-term perspectives based on pressing needs with a longer-term view that focuses on structural and intersectional causes. In our view, disruptions to everyday life - from earthquakes to uneven access to water - must be addressed both in terms of their immediate causes and effects, as well as their longer terms drivers and desired outcomes.

This volume is motivated by a number of different but related assumptions. First, and most obviously, is that crises of various kinds do regularly happen around the world, and that the people affected by those crises should be helped. What that help should look like is, in our view, a contextual question that deserves attention that is both means and ends oriented. Second, we think that there are good reasons to disagree about what resilience means, and how it can and should be implemented. Should the focus of resilience be on long-term planning, the creation of redundancies and silent systems, as some critical scholarship suggests? Or should it aim at the most rapidly possible return to the status quo ante, as was the case with the 19" century Japanese cities detailed by Carola Hein (Hein 2005)? Essays in this volume, particularly Florian Liedtke’s and Andreas Wesener’s respective contributions on the 1995 Kobe and 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, delineate how both things are possible and, indeed, relatively easily so. Resilience policy and practitioners are, indeed, vulnerable to cooptation by neoliberal agendas, and this rightly concerns critics. This does not, however, change the fact that crises occur, people are affected, and those people deserve aid and attention. Christian Parenti has argued, in a slightly different context, that the work of achieving the best possible solution should not be a reason to take the difficult steps of implementing approaches that are better than the ones that are currently in place (Parenti 2013). We believe that eradicating poverty, race and gender discrimination, finding a robust role for the state, enhancing protections for the environment are all desirable long and short-term goals that should make up a common agenda.

There are, of course, alternatives to resilience, including those compellingly made by eco-socialists like Ian Angus, John Bellamy Foster, Ramchandra Guha, Joel Kovel and others (Guha/Martinez-Alier 1997; Kovel 2002; Dawson 2016; Foster/Angus 2016) who propose a systematic transformation of the planetary systems that undergird inequality and exploitation of humans, plants, animals, and the planet itself. These alternatives are very powerful, but they are also focused on a distant horizon. The needs of actually existing people, animals, ecosystems, and the environment also demand that we act with immediacy, and this sometimes means implementing incremental solutions as we pursue transformational ones. In short, ideological, disciplinary, or professional disagreement should not preclude spaces of potentially life-saving action. Finally, it is also worth remembering that resilience is both a well-funded and politically compelling umbrella terminology that brings together stakeholders - vulnerable and powerful - across the world. This should not be ignored, because generating consensus among international actors at different scales is extremely challenging.

Conceptual Foundations of the Book

When we began working on this volume, we thought that we would resolve troubling ideological tensions within resilience discourse, and help to generate a framework that would make resilience both more concrete and more conceptually robust. In this sense, our initial goals fit quite comfortably within the universe of already existing work. Our goals though, have evolved as we struggled to understand the strengths and weaknesses of resilience as discourse, policy, and practice. And working with the authors in this volume, it has become clear to us that we could contribute to a conversation between researchers and practitioners not by doing more definitional or even genealogical work. There is already excellent work that lays out highly differentiated definitions, develops indicators, and proposes concrete strategies for resilience (Müller 2011; Tasan-Kok et al. 2013; Meerow/Newell 2016; Zhang/Li 2018). We think that we can add a new perspective by moving in a very different direction. Resilience is applied to different kinds of disruptions that take place in dramatically different circumstances; it is theorized and practiced in global cities, small towns, and remote villages; it is, in the best cases, changing and evolving to respond to on the ground needs and long-term goals. So why not take seriously the dynamic nature of resilience, instead of trying to constrain an unruly concept with definitions that never quite seem to fit?

The present volume brings together historical and contemporary research on cities from Kobe to Medellin, the Arctic Circle to New Zealand. Contributors include planners, architects, engineers, sociologists, historians, and development experts. The authors write about post-earthquake scenarios, post-conflict recovery, urban policy, social solidarity and informal economies, and in part because of the different objects of inquiry, the different temporal scales, and the different agenda, they use resilience in different ways. None of these individual case studies is supposed to offer a totalizing perspective. Each is supposed to highlight the fractured and context-specific nature of resilience thinking, policy, and practice. Indeed, in our view, resilience should continuously be defined and redefined in negotiations between different actors working at different scales with often diverging agendas working in anticipation of or response to different phenomena and processes. International aid agencies, environmentalists, community rights activists, citizens rich and poor - the different actors who act in actual situations — should negotiate what they mean and want from resilience. By treating the concept’s varied usages as an essential characteristic; opening its definition to different interpretations, case specificity, and everyday usages we see a way to build on the strengths of resilience as a set of practices, while also recognizing ideological risks, political failings, and policy pitfalls.

This approach draws on insights generated nearly a century ago. Linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure argued that words and their meaning are essentially contextual, and they evolve in a negotiation between the people who use those words.° This is precisely how we think resilience should be used in part because this kind of usage would make it possible for researchers and practitioners who work on different cases with more or less different assumptions to contribute to a common project of making resilience better at achieving desired goals like enhancing solidarity and inclusiveness, reducing environmental and ecological impacts and risks and so on. And, in our view, these negotiations must account for the other actors who are impacted by resilience policy and practice, even if they do not speak. This includes the flora and fauna, the atmosphere and biosphere as well as physical infrastructures and technological systems.

Using resilience in its contextual, vernacular, everyday sense creates space for negotiation between different sets of actors, and opens up the possibility for new common understandings to emerge. And this is essential, because ‘resilient responses’ and ‘resilience building should be different in different contexts. Most obviously, resilient responses can and should vary in terms of the systems being addressed: building a resilient ecosystem is, for example, different than (and potentially at odds with) creating resilient financial institutions. But the nature of the disruption is perhaps less important than the sociological, political, cultural, and ecological differences between places and across scales. It matters, for example, whether one is attempting to create resilience in small agricultural communities or in a mega-city; in coastal areas or the mountains; in rich countries or poor ones; in Nordic style social democracies or command economies; in places where the communitarian ethos is strong or society is enclaved. The chapters in this collection illustrate, among other things, how important historical logics, geographical, institutional, and contextual differences can be.

Sönke Kunkel’s chapter on the socio-technology of disaster prevention and mitigation during the cold war, for example, shows how troubling and potentially authoritarian assumptions continue to freight present-day resilience strategies. He alerts us to the way that language, technology, and policy all contribute to path

6 This is not to say that de Saussure argued that individuals determine meaning, but rather to point out that meaning is negotiated in practice.

dependencies which can, nevertheless, be avoided. Another chapter by Ann Maudsley explores architecture and planning in extreme environments, and reminds us that public-private partnerships carry both risks and opportunities. This is not in itself a revelation, but looking at the way that actually built communities in the arctic circle have survived and failed tells us something far more specific than a general rejection of the P-P-P model can. Ann's case shows that partnerships with particular kinds of private partners might be particularly problematic. And unfortunately, these are precisely the partners that are so active today. Marcela Lopez writes about the formalization of car washes in present-day Medellin, and her essay offers a different perspective on P-P-Ps, in this case showing how mutual interests can indeed generate spaces of resilience and protection. She argues that the characteristics of the private partners are extremely important for explaining how and when these can reasonably be expected to yield benefits to the community and the environment, and when these benefits are unlikely to materialize. The anthropologically and historically centered research in this volume shows that one size fits all approaches to resilience lend themselves to co-optation by powerful actors with questionable motives.

Acknowledging the usefulness of a contextual, vernacular, everyday usage of resilience would also generate a methodological flexibility that builds on some of the more desirable logics of the term itself. There is broad agreement in planning and development communities that co-creative approaches are the key to crafting effective resilience strategies — a top-down approach to disruptions of diverse kinds is demonstrably less effective than approaches that engage local actors. Critical urbanists agree with planners that local communities and a range of vulnerable stakeholders should be given a voice in the ways that their communities respond to disaster. Given this space of agreement between advocates and critics, then, it makes sense to build methodological flexibility that privileges co-creativity into the very structure of resilience approaches. The principle of co-creativity would entail a kind of ad hoc methodology which combines the merits of the global best practices approach (advocated by, for example, the RC100) with an extreme sensitivity to specific contexts, local needs and conditions, and community input.

These two perspectives appear to lead in very different directions, and indeed, in practice, they do. The first approach is anchored in globally centralized, top-down, and technocratic strategies which are (despite substantial critique) extremely important. The latter is based on local, bottom-up, and often idiosyncratic tactics that are very much in vogue in some circles. But there is no real reason that planning for, and responding to, crisis should preclude a collaborative approach which brings together these distinct bodies of strategy and tactic. Indeed, the merits of wedding a best-practices approach to one that takes local knowledge, needs, and aspirations seriously is that it overcomes the twin problems of power and parochialism that are so often a part of preparing for and responding to crisis. And despite the widespread tendency to define, classify, codify, and measure, an ad hoc approach that uses available tools and resources — whether they come from the United Nations, a corporate or family foundation, The Red Crescent, the village council, the aldermar's office, the local hardware shop, the central bank or the labor union - is what actually happens in practice anyways.

There are obvious problems with this approach. First, resilience as a global development project that is the target of massive investment needs indicators in order to assess whether certain strategies are achieving their desired goals. Second, an everyday, vernacular approach to resilience is also open to agenda capture by corporate actors. If resilience is not defined in very specific ways that apply to very particular sets of circumstances, then any kind of initiative, policy, or funding stream can be described as resilience enhancing. Third, if resilience is used by different stakeholders in different ways, resilience strategies can collide or even cancel one another out. As already mentioned, the goal of building more resilient ecosystems may be coincident with that of creating more resilient food production, but may well be at odds with the project of building more resilient financial institutions. Fourth, and in very much the same vein, an ad hoc, vernacular, everyday usage of resilience can lead to what is called mal-adaptation. Such a mal-adapted usage might seemingly promote resilience on one level, while actually serving to multiply vulnerabilities on another, which is particularly problematic if it further perpetuates already existing social and environmental inequalities (Dawson 2017).

These are all reasonable objections, but it is worth pointing out that there is a rather substantial literature that is focused on definitions, indicators, metrics, evaluation and so on. This literature is, in our view, important in hedging against those objections catalogued above. We believe that the perspectives presented here add to the richness of this existing literature, and add useful insights about a collaborative approach to resilience that is process-based and respectful of difference. The cases in this book suggest that by learning about resilience in diverse historical and contemporary cases, we can also learn how to better enact resilience as a process negotiated by a huge number of actors who are simultaneously embedded in multiple temporalities that are parts of many and sometimes competing narratives. Instead of defining resilience, we want to open it up to on-the-ground contestation that includes different actors and temporalities representing different narratives of the same phenomenon.