Full Description
We live in a time where environmental pressures, social inequities and political derision are the backdrop of everyday life, and where resilience has become a routine prescription for coping with the conditions of modern existence. Drawing an analogy to Harvey Molotch's urban growth machine, this book explores different narratives of resilience and their policy and practice manifestations for cities, citizens and communities. It expands on the metaphor of the machine to show how resilience can be better understood as an assemblage.
Bringing together authors from multiple disciplines and different parts of the world, the book unmasks the often invisible effects of resilience strategies by examining ways in which neoliberal mentalities are fed through the rhetoric of resilience practices, policies and development projects. The contributing essays provide provocative accounts of several areas of inquiry, including biopolitics and smart bodies, resilient cities and communities, urban planning and disaster management, justice and vulnerability, and resistance to resilience. Holding out hope for critical potentials in 'resilience,' The Resilience Machine proposes to move beyond mechanisms of adaptation and into imagining what resilient life could look like in a more just, equitable and democratic world.
The Resilience Machine is a current, vital addition to resilience, community and urban scholarship.
Contents
Introduction Chapter 1. Anatomy of the Resilience Machine Chapter 2. Securing the Imagination: The Politics of the Resilient Self Chapter 3. Designing 'Smart' Bodies: Molecular Manipulation as a Resilience-Building Strategy Chapter 4. Organising Community Resilience Chapter 5. Rejecting and Recreating Resilience After Disaster Chapter 6. The Resonance and Possibilities of Community Resilience Chapter 7. Adaptation Machines, or the Biopolitics of Adaptation Chapter 8. The Resilient City: Where Do We Go from Here? Chapter 9. Towards a Critical Political Geography of Resilience Machines in Urban Planning Chapter 10. Resilience and Justice: Planning for New York City Chapter 11. Seeking the Good (Enough) City Chapter 12. Dismantling the Resilience Machine as a Restoration Engine
