Disaster Resilience: Where It All Comes Together
This chapter discusses disaster resilience. Recent major disasters and serious disruptions have put increased emphasis on how quickly an area can recover following a large-scale shock and have meant that disaster risk reduction or disaster resilience has grown in prominence. When we look at how to interpret the great transition from risk towards resilience in the early twenty-first century, then we can look to disasters for many explanations. Whether in terms of the relatively simple characterisation that sees risk viewed differently as the modern passes into the postmodern era, or how we get to grips with reframing disaster as a complex human-induced process rather than something that is ‘natural’ or divine, disasters illuminate many reasons why we need to invest in resilience as an urgent futureproofing strategy. Responses to disasters can also teach us lessons about a darker and more unethical side of resilience that needs to be surfaced.