Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events

Preface

ix Preface This project has its origins in two small international workshops organized around the intriguing topic of resilience. The University of Pittsburgh hosted the first workshop, Managing Extreme Events: Transatlantic Perspectives, held on March 3–4, 2006, sponsored by the European Union Center of Excellence and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, with financial support from the Swedish Emergency Management Agency. The second workshop was held in Leiden in June 2007, with support from the Department of Public Administration , Leiden University, the Dutch National Science Foundation, and the Swedish Emergency Management Agency. The discussions and papers presented in Pittsburgh and Leiden inspired the participants to rewrite their papers and bring them together in this volume. We incurred our debts along the way and want to take a moment to acknowledge some key players who were instrumental in the process of putting together this volume. We thank all participants in both workshops for creating an exciting atmosphere , delivering sharp comments, and being such nice colleagues. We are particularly indebted to our long-standing friend Todd R. LaPorte, who provided us with a lengthy set of comments after the Leiden workshop. Being an editor could not be easier or more fun than it is with such a wonderful group of colleagues. All this was possible because of the generous funding of the Swedish Emergency Management Agency, the Dutch National Science Foundation, the Department of Public Administration at Leiden University, the European Union Center of Excellence (EUCE), and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) at the University of Pittsburgh. We thank Alberta Sbragia, the director of EUCE; Timothy S. Thompson, the associate director of EUCE; Carolyn Ban, the dean of GSPIA; and Thomas x Preface Haase, Joyce Valiquette, and Sue Sawyers, who assisted with the arrangements for the Pittsburgh workshop. We also thank Wieteke Zaalberg and Maaike Schaap for their assistance during the Leiden workshop. Finally, we are grateful for the support of the editors at the University of Pittsburgh Press, Peter Kracht and Joshua Shanholtzer. We also wish to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped to improve this manuscript. ...