Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects: Building Resilient Regions

2. In Search of Regional Resilience

In Search of Regional Resilience kathryn a. foster Athought experiment: Imagine you are walking down the street one fine spring afternoon. Another stroller happens by and you nod pleasantly, whereupon the stroller hauls off and punches you in the gut. As you lay sprawled on the ground getting your bearings, you wonder, “How resilient am I?” We might conclude there is evidence of total resilience—define it as bounceback from a stress—if you hop up, dust yourself off, smile at the strangeness of the world, and head on your way, never to suffer a lingering side effect, such as forever weakened stomach muscles or perpetual fear of spring walks and spring walkers. Shy of that outcome, however, your degree of resilience likely depends on a number of factors. How hard were you hit? Was it a glancing, ultimately benign blow or a particularly intense one? Where did the blow fall? Did it hit the strongest, thickest part of your midsection or did it zero in on an especially sensitive or vulnerable spot? Factors one or two levels removed from the immediate stress may also play a role in your post-blow resilience. How experienced are you in receiving and recovering from hits to the stomach? How have you fared in the past recovering from physical and mental stresses? Jaunty walk on a spring day aside, how generally stressed are you these days? What is the state of your health and well-being? How strong is your support network from friends, family, and the broader community to assist you in a time of duress? How accessible and affordable is the nearest hospital, health clinic, or mental health facility for addressing your symptoms, both immediate and lingering, of the gut punch? And what of spiraling effects? Did the time it took for you to regain your post-punch bearings cause you to miss your bus connection and hence your appointment for a job interview? Did that further cause you to miss out on a 24 2 good employment opportunity after months of unemployment such that you turn morose and bitter, lash out at those in your orbit, suffer your partner leaving you, and plunge into a deep, miserable existence? And, if so, how resilient are you to that? Given the many conditions and factors that may affect outcomes—“for want of a nail, the war was lost”—defining and measuring resilience in the face of a challenge itself require a strong stomach. As the thought experiment attests, determining resilience is tricky enough for a single individual case. For a complex region facing a daily barrage of stresses, multiple influences, hundreds of thousands of actors and changing conditions, assessing regional resilience and identifying and isolating factors affecting it are conceptually and methodologically tough. I have worked with others in the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Building Resilient Regions and with a team of colleagues at the University at Buffalo Regional Institute to investigate the potential for a generalized regional resilience index. The goal is to develop for broad use an online measurement tool enabling regional leaders to gauge their region’s resilience to specific challenges , where resilience encompasses not only post-stress recovery but also prestress readiness. By measuring resilience capacities and performance for a range of metropolitan regions, scholars and practitioners may compare regions by their resilience and gain insight on why one region may have fared better than another in the face of a stress. Perhaps more important, users will learn which factors associated with resilience are less well developed in their regions and, thus, which policy and program choices might best improve levels of resilience capacity. While this method by definition, using a large number of observations, lacks the nuance and depth of single-stress case studies—the approach taken in most contributions to this volume—it offers the breadth and potential of comparative analysis for multiple regions and stresses. As this chapter reveals, even the seemingly simple parts of the resilience index exercise complicate quickly and measurement challenges abound. Conceptual and methodological reconnaissance has prompted the resilience index team to focus initially on measuring resilience capacity, emphasizing the factors that prime a region for strong response in anticipation of future unknown disturbances . As methods enable and realities allow—the latter demanding a sufficient number of regions experiencing similar types of stress at roughly similar time periods—the team will pursue a generalized index measure for resilience performance. To illuminate these practical conclusions, the chapter steps sequentially through defining...