Author: Jon Coaffee
ISBN No: 9780300228670
Review date: 24/04/2024
No of pages: 288
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publisher URL:
https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300228670
Year of publication: 27/01/2020
Brief:
price
£20, hardback
How to build resilience in an uncertain world, indeed?! It’s become in recent years one of the most pressing questions for the world, and not the least achievement of this book is to review recent writings. We’ve come from risk management in the last decades of the 20th century to resilience now; an appreciation that we can’t prevent natural disasters – floods, bush fires, hurricanes and the like – let alone more profound threats such as climate change; but we can seek to understand the risks, and plan to ‘bounce back’.
Coaffee at the end of his book describes resilience as a ‘continuous journey’ and ‘a travelling concept’. At the risk of stating the obvious, as his title suggests, he is arguing for the future-proofing of society, by being adaptable. He quotes the famous thought by Charles Darwin, that it’s not so much the survival of the fittest (whatever that means, and in the 20th century it was much abused politically) but of the most adaptable. But, as Coaffee adds, to adapt also requires us to collaborate, and improvise.
Coaffee does not shy away from the truth that all this is highly political. As he sets out, who is resilience for, and where – because to carry out resilience in one place (flood defences) might only cause a flood somewhere else. Is resilience in practice only going to be for the well-off countries, or well-off parts of coastal cities?
For an academic geographer, Coaffee has a welcome sense of history – reaching forward into the 22nd century, intriguingly quoting a novelist’s imagining of how New York might become like Venice – and back, to show how it’s still early days or rather decades for the study of resilience. Resilience, he argues, is, should be or will be the ‘new normal’.
On a personal note, this is a leap forward in terms of Coaffee’s work, which already was impressive. If your idea of geography was solely from school lessons about ox-bow lakes and Dutch polders, park that – Coaffee is a past speaker at security expos at London Olympia, about the urban impact of adding counter-terrorism security features (bollards, barriers, the securitisation or fortification of buildings and public spaces generally). He’s taken that study a stage further here, taking terrorism as only one threat to cities.
Who then is this book for? Anyone who would hope to live well into the 21st century without getting their feet wet? Someone in the corporate world, or corporate security world, besides the relatively few in the specialist field of resilience, and business continuity? Any and all of those, and you would hope policy-makers and the widest range of concerned citizens; who want to do more than be concerned about their planet, without being blinded into belief that technology, or someone who knows best in authority, will pull us out of any troubles. Even assuming that technology can blunt the worst effects of man’s harm to the land, seas and air, people have to be informed to know how, where and when to apply the tech (and what if any tech, because numerous examples from the past show that well-meaning people can make a natural world problem worse, just as ignorant people can).
If mankind is to meet the long-term challenge of rising sea levels, and (ironically) water shortages and desertification with more than crossed fingers, Coaffee’s book is potentially profoundly helpful; and hopefully the first of more.
About the author: Jon Coaffee is Professor in Urban Geography at Warwick University. Past books include Sustaining and Securing the Olympic City (2011).
