Resilience

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Resilience describes the capacity of a person or a system to absorb disturbances and reorganise itself while undergoing change. Dealing with precariousness surely asks for our capacity of resilience. Making a socially- and politically-engaged design practice resilient is about finding ways to thrive against the odds of a hyper-competitive and entertainment-oriented market.

“Resilience is a key term in the more nuanced discussion on sustainability, which takes place today in the context of current economic crisis and resource scarcity. In contrast with sustainability, which focuses on sustaining the status quo of a system by controlling the balance between its inputs and outputs, without necessarily addressing the factors of change and disequilibrium, resilience speaks about how systems can adapt and thrive in changing circumstances. Resilience is a dynamic concept, which does not have a stable definition and identity outside the circumstances that produce it. In contrast to sustainability, which tends to focus on maintaining the environmental balance, resilience is adaptive and transformative, inducing change that offers huge potential to rethink assumptions and build new systems.”

See Petrescu, Doina, and Constantin Petcou. 2012. “R-Urban Resilience.” In Atlas: Geography, Architecture and Change in an Interdependent World, edited by Renata Tyszczuk, Joe Smith, and Melissa Butcher, 64–71. London: Artifice.