Absorb and Bounce Back

From Boston, MA to West, TX, this week is another reminder that cities and communities will face events that effect our sense of well-being.  Resilience is easy to understand - - it is the ability of people and communities to absorb and bounce back from crimes and calamity.  Engineering plays a (maybe the) key role in planning, designing, and constructing a stronger and wiser world.

What makes a resilient city?  Engineers will be increasingly looked at as the profession to help address this question.  The City of Dallas is thinking about this exact question.  The Sustainability Forum of the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture's Center for the City recently completed a daylong forum on the resiliency question (Link).  The Dallas Post of the Society of Military Engineers is also completing a daylong seminar on resiliency and "future-proofing" of our critical infrastructure (Link).

Engineering for a world of absorbing and bouncing back will be highly important as we move through this century and beyond.