Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events

Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events is an excellent text for introducing students to the notion of resilience and how it differs from traditional conceptualizations of disaster preparedness. An edited text, the variety of authors approach resilience from numerous angles, which indirectly explains why ‘resilience' has been notoriously difficult to define.

Particularly insightful are Comfort's chapter regarding the input and synthesis of information and the resulting “bow-tie architecture” she presents; Demchak's chapter on the Atrium model; and Boin's chapter analyzing resilience and leadership. The collection, synthesis, and subsequent dissemination of information becomes critical in disaster events and serves as the foundation of resilience. All of these (and the remaining) chapters hint at the level of collaboration and partnership that are needed to design truly resilient systems.

The editors conclude the book with a call for future study, which is the trend in texts such as this. However, in this case, the future study that is noted would push the resilience agenda in an extremely positive direction. Studies should continue working toward a definition of resilience, for usage in both scholarly and practitioner arenas. Further, it would be most beneficial to see this text in the hands of practitioners so that the unique perspectives of both academia and technical practice contribute to our burgeoning understanding of resilience.