Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects: Building Resilient Regions

1. Introduction

Introduction margaret weir, nancy pindus, howard wial, and harold wolman Urban and regional policy debates are often long on rhetoric but short on evidence about policy impacts. To redress that imbalance, the Brookings Institution, the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy and the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, and the Urban Institute held the fourth in a series of annual conferences entitled “Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects” at the George Washington University in Washington , D.C., on May 20–21, 2010. They were joined by the Building Resilient Regions Network, an interdisciplinary research network sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and housed at the University of California–Berkeley. The conference, whose participants included members of the network as well as practitioners from the federal government and nonprofit organizations concerned with urban policy, examined the question of how to build resilient regions. The conference sought to engage authors and discussants in a cross-disciplinary dialogue focused on the central theme of regional resilience. The chapters in this volume are revised versions of those commissioned papers. Our examination of regional resilience includes one conceptual chapter devoted to defining resilience and five chapters that address resilience with respect to a particular policy challenge that many metropolitan areas and local communities face. Each chapter, however, uses a different definition of resilience . The chapters cover the following challenges: 1 1 The editors would like to thank Kate Foster and Todd Swanstrom for helpful comments on this introduction. —Defining regional resilience, addressed by “In Search of Regional Resilience ,” by Kathryn Foster. —Home mortgage foreclosures, addressed by “Resilience in the Face of Foreclosures : How National Actors Shape Local Responses,” by Todd Swanstrom. —Immigration, addressed by “Struggling over Strangers or Receiving Them with Resilience: The Metropolitics of Immigrant Integration,” by Manuel Pastor and John Mollenkopf. —Public transportation, addressed by “Bringing Equity to Transit-Oriented Development: Stations, Systems, and Regional Resilience,” by Rolf Pendall, Juliet Gainsborough, Kate Lowe, and Mai Nguyen. —Regional economic development, addressed by “Economic Shocks and Regional Economic Resilience,” by Edward Hill, Travis St. Clair, Howard Wial, Harold Wolman, Patricia Atkins, Pamela Blumenthal, Sarah Ficenec, and Alec Friedhoff. —Poverty, addressed by “Building a Resilient Social Safety Net,” by Sarah Reckhow and Margaret Weir. The goals of this volume are to introduce scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to the concept of regional resilience and to inform them about the state of knowledge on the effectiveness of regional characteristics and public policies in promoting or impeding the resilience of metropolitan areas. Authors were asked to explain the challenge that their chosen policy area poses for regions, define regional resilience with respect to that challenge, present the findings of their own research (qualitative and/or quantitative) on the nature of the challenge for metropolitan areas, and draw policy implications from their research. Summary of Chapters Kathryn Foster’s chapter, “In Search of Regional Resilience,” serves as a useful introduction and background for the other chapters in this volume. Foster begins by noting the range of definitions of resilience that have been used by different disciplines and observes that there is a basic conceptual divide between resilience as an outcome (is there a recovery from some stress?) and resilience as a capacity (does a person or place have the conditions and attributes that make it more likely to recover from stress?). In setting forth her definition of regional resilience, she incorporates both concepts, defining regional resilience as “the ability of a region to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from a disturbance .” Elaborating, she notes that a region has a pre-stress capacity for resilience and that when it is confronted by a stress, it responds with a “resilience performance.” The actual relationship between pre-stress capacity and resilience 2 Margaret Weir, Nancy Pindus, Howard Wial, and Harold Wolman performance is an empirical question: does pre-stress capacity contribute to resilience performance? Foster then turns to a conceptual elaboration of each of the three critical terms of the relationship. Capacity relates to a range of resources, characteristics, and attributes that regions possess and are at least hypothetically related to their ability to respond to stress. Stress consists of a negative disturbance and can be either acute or chronic. Stresses may vary in terms of both their duration and magnitude. Regional resilience refers to the actual performance of the region in response to stress: to what extent does the...