Author: Peter Rogers
ISBN No: 978-0-7546-7658-4
Review date: 06/12/2025
No of pages: 211
Publisher: Ashgate
Publisher URL:
http://www.ashgate.com
Year of publication: 25/02/2013
Brief:
Resilience and the City
From Sydney comes an ambitious book about how and why cities are resilient.
Dr Peter Rogers uses resilience as an umbrella term, that takes in psychology (how we adapt to risk), engineering (materials that can take bomb blast, fire and flood) and business (how the smarter company anticipates or prevents disruptions). He ranges over time, space and place, using examples from across history and as recently as Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans flood, and the 2005 bombs in London. He covers a lot of ground: risk management, business continuity planning, quality assurance and quality standards such as ISO are tools in the box: “These tools enhance the capacity of the organisation to adapt under stress, thus reaching the goal of being resilient.” Put another way, it’s ‘bounce-back ability’. Dr Rogers, a criminology lecturer, is offering theory, quoting from the likes of Hegel and Foucault, rather than telling managers how to go about being resilient. He’s arguing that the concept of resilience is becoming more important, ‘a means used to tease out the features and characteristics of a given social order (or disorder)’. As he says at the end, it’s about asking better questions. Arguably risk, or simply change, are as useful as catch-all ways of posing questions. Rogers quotes from Jon Coaffee’s works on terrorism, risk and cities, which I would direct readers to first, if only because they are more UK-based.
Resilience and the City: by Peter Rogers. Published 2012 by Ashgate, hardback, 211 pages, ISBN 978-0-7546-7658-4. Website price £49.50; visit www.ashgate.com.
After the turbulent events of the first few years of the 21st century, the growth of new security and disaster measures have led to significant changes to urban design and the management of urban space. This book blends the genealogical method of Foucault with the theory of rhythms by Lefebvre to examine these changes. The spatial history of urban disaster is linked to the rhythms of everyday urban experience to offer a revised understanding of the regulation of order and disorder in the city.
In doing so, the book highlights issues of ‘hardening’ space, the drift from civil defence to civil protection to civil contingencies and resilience; this assessment realigns the potential impact of tightening security practices and resilient ways of thinking, doing and acting on societal security. This also links to growing concerns about quality of life over the use and potential abuse of security and disaster legislation for managing social unrest. Examples studied include the increased exclusion of minorities (such as young people) from democracy and public life; security oriented interventions in the ethnic minority communities, the use of automated technologies in policing civil and minor offences (e.g. digital plate recognition and speeding) and the interplay of diverse social groups in more commercially aligned and increasingly ‘securitised’ public spaces of the ‘entrepreneurial’ city.
This book highlights many significant problems with the direction of British democracy and suggests there may be both positive and negative results from becoming more resilient. While providing a critical appraisal of the realignment of neoliberal democracy at large, it also links discussion on ‘gentrification’, ‘revanchism’ and ‘urban security’ to a forward looking agenda for further research.
Contents: Introduction; Part I Theory, Genealogy and History: The struggle for theory: interplay, poiesis and change; The struggle for history: applying theory to change; The struggle for the city: disaster, war and disorder over time. Part II The History of the Present: The struggle for the city: democracy, regeneration and urban order; The struggle for security: ordering the resilient city; The struggle for resilience: returning to interplay and urbanism; Conclusion; References; Index.
About the Author: Dr Peter Rogers is Lecturer in Sociology of Law and Criminology at Macquarie University, Sydney
