3.4 Pillars, Drivers & Indicators

Resilience can be broken down into a handful of pillars which are essential qualities for resilience to be achieved in a city. We can then break these qualities down into drivers which aid in supporting these pillars. For each driver, we are able to imagine it’s qualitative or quantitative impact, both positively in the event of its successful implementation or the weakness it causes by improper implementation or absence. These can also be referred to as characteristics of the city, for example: if Stockholm was to have social conflict, poor governance, inadequate infrastructure, or high poverty rates, we would not call it resilient.

These drivers can be used to explain an example of resilience in action such as New York after the 9/11 attacks. The city showed an ability to quickly adapt and bounce back. This was partly down to the prosperity witnessed in the city. However, it was also due to a collective identity and effective governance. These high performing drivers meant that citizens were willing to help each-other more, uniting around a common goal of getting the city back on its feet. Plans for such eventualities meant that complex urban systems and critical infrastructure was promptly back to normality, and civil order was maintained.

Indicators are segments of a driver which give us data that ‘indicates’ whether resilience promoting actions are performing as intended, or not. This is particularly important in instances where there is no way to gather hard information on the subject, as is the case with much of resilience. There is no standardised set of indicators for measuring resilience, so I will develop my own from an analysis of pre-determined indicators in the example frameworks and an analysis of the actions Stockholm intended to take. This long-list will then be refined into a final set of indicators and split into drivers and pillars. I will then need to set a base-line to score each one on its implementation and success. These 3 layers of resilience – pillars, drivers, and indicators – combine to make a better understanding of resilience.

“In order to get a grip on it, one must be able to relate resilience to other properties that one has some means of ascertaining, through observation.” 23