The 12 Axioms of Urban Resilience

From The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster (edited by Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella):

1. Narratives of Resilience Are a Political Necessity - The ubiquity of urban rebuilding after disaster results from, among other things, a political need to demonstrate resilience.
2. Disasters Reveal the Resilience of Governments - In the aftermath of disaster, the very legitimacy of government is at stake.
3. Narratives of Resilience Are Always Contested - The rhetoric of resilience is never free from politics, self-interest, or contention.
4. Local Resilience Is Linked to National Renewal - A major traumatic event affecting a particular city often projects itself into the national arena.
5. Resilience Is Underwritten by Outsiders - Increasingly, the resilience of cities depends on political and financial influences exercised from well outside the city limits.
6. Urban Rebuilding Symbolizes Human Resilience - Each human lives a life that is centered on the well being of self, family, and friends - all of which can be suddenly and totally shattered by a single cataclysmic event or the more protracted horrors of war.  By contrast, urban reconstruction is a highly visible enterprise that conveys an almost heroic sense of renewal and well-being.
7. Remembrance Drives Resilience - Urban resilience, at least in its American form, is inextricably linked to the process of memorializaton.
8. Resilience Benefits from Inertia fo Prior Investment - In most cases, even substantial devastation of urban areas has not led to visionary new city plans aimed at correcting long-endured deficience or limiting the risk of future destruction in the event of a recurrence.
9. Resilience Exploits the Power of Place - The immutability of policy-making organizations and the resilience of land planning are also linked to the great attachment many people have to particular places, even after such places have been substantially destroyed.
10. Resilience Casts Opportunism as Opportunity - There is a fine line between capializing on an unexpected traumatic disruption to the fabric of a city as an opportunity to pursue some much-needed upgrading of infrastructure and facilities and the more dubious practice of using devastation as a cover for more opportunistic agendas yielding less obvious public benefits.
11. Resilience, Like Disaster, Is Site-Specific - All disasters, not only earthquakes, have epicenters.  Those who are victimized by traumatic episodes experience resilience differently, based on their distance from the epicenter.
12. Resilience Entails More than Rebuilding - The process of rebuilding is a necesary but, by itself, insufficient condition for enabling recovery and resilience.