Month May 2013

This post originally appeared at Neighborhood Effects, a Mercatus Center blog about state and local policy and economic freedom. At The Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger writes about a new program from the Rockefeller Foundation called 100 Resilient Cities, focused on equipping cities with a new employee called a Chief Resiliency Officer. The program states its goals as follows: Building resilience is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events – both natural and manmade – and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger from these shocks and stresses. [. . .] There are some core characteristics that all resilient systems share and demonstrate, both in good times and in times of stress: Spare capacity, which ensures that there is a back-up or alternative available when a vital component of a system fails. Flexibility, the ability to change, evolve, and adapt in the face of disaster. Limited or “safe” failure, which prevents failures from rippling across systems. Rapid rebound, the capacity to re-establish function and avoid long-term disruptions. Constant learning, with robust feedback loops that sense and allow new solutions as conditions change. In his book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Nassim Taleb defines antifragile as something that not only recovers from shocks, but becomes stronger after recovery, in line with the stated objectives of 100 Resilient Cities. Following its Great Fire of 1871, Chicago demonstrated antifragility. It rebounded rapidly from a disaster that killed 300 people and left one-third of city residents homeless, many without insurance after the fire bankrupted local insurers or the blaze destroyed their paperwork. Despite this great loss, residents of Chicago quickly rebuilt their city using private funding and private charity that was small relative to the amount of damage, but without any government funding. In rebuilding, Chicago developed safer building techniques both through entrepreneurship and with new insurance requirements and  new municipal […]