In July 2007 the county of Gloucester experienced its worst floods on record with major economic and personal loss in consequence. The cost to the insurance industry was also high, insurance costs to home owners rose sharply and in several cases insurance cover was refused for the future. Now we can ask questions of the sanity of Building Developers and buyers who were attracted by the idea of using water meadows as a building site, there are generally reasons for names! However it was not just the new developments that were affected but also older buildings as illustrated. Of course those older buildings had been modernised so thy also suffered.
Now some people went back to the architecture of earlier times. Then houses were built with stone flagged floors and no damp proof course, the walls were made of stone and un-plastered. There were hooks in the oak beams of the ground floor rooms. When a flood came along the householder would us the hooks to raise their furniture above flood levels so that it was not damaged. With no plaster and no impermeable membrane under the floor the water drained away relatively quickly and while the clean up was no fun the damage was not permanent.
Now people are looking to do the same, with the addition of taking the electrical supply up to the top of the house and then dropping cables down to sockets above flood height. In earlier days they didn't try and prevent all floods, although they did build up the banks of the river and create drainage ditches to reduce the number and impact. They did recognise that some failures were inevitable, so they focused on speedy detection and fast recovery. In other words they adopted a strategy of resilience rather than one of robustness.
This is one of the key strategic shifts in a complexity informed era. Early detection of weak signals, fast recovery and consequently an enhanced ability to exploit the new spaces that emerge. Not only do we reduce real risk and cost if we architect for resilience, we also increase are capacity to move forwards while others struggle to recover and/or hold commissions of enquiry to determine blame and fault.
Of course nothing could preserve the good citizens of Gloucester on the 18th April 2009 when the Welsh came to visit, but that was another story.
Comments (5)
Dave
In Australia we have had like problems - back around 1993 I attended the NSW Local Government Flood Mitigation Conference as a Local Government Alderperson/Councillor
There I learnt what the Oz engineers called flood-proofing or what you describe as a strategy of resilience when robustness was not feasible in the short term at least
It was a paradigm shift in understanding for me - and helped when I found myself shifting furniture upstairs during one of our floods
Posted by KerrieAnne Christian | May 5, 2010 1:44 PM
Posted on May 5, 2010 13:44
A few weeks back I saw a TV production about the Dutch reclamation of land from the sea and the Sea gates used (similar to that at the mouth of the river in London) to avoid floodding during heavey sea storms. Apparently it was found that in other parts the use of sea gates were not practical and they the flooded sections of reclamed land to allow the sea to further food these areas during storms leading to a greater degree of storm resiliency for the rest of the land. Seems to me there may be something to learn from this
Regards
Richard
Posted by Richard | May 6, 2010 8:42 PM
Posted on May 6, 2010 20:42
Dave,
Interesting story. It sounds like one of the key differences is that resilience requires memory. Robustness does not, especially if one thinks a safety factor of 4 is better than 2. Resilience also requires time and permission to explore that knowledge, while robustness would say start it now, don’t delay. If we consider how to exploit the new spaces that emerge, it seems to me that the larger the space one considers, the more options there might be. Search time grows exponentially, unless an innovative approach is found. In this context, fast recovery seems to lean to robustness, not resilience. Wouldn't parallel efforts allow for more innovation than faster ones?
regards, tony
Posted by tony joyce | May 7, 2010 6:08 PM
Posted on May 7, 2010 18:08
I'm not sure on the memory point. Resilience is like complexity based in multiple pasts (per Cynefin) building knowledge. Robustness tends to assume that you can design a future. Its the ecology v engineering argument again. A resilient strategy would entail safe-fail experimentation (parallel processes). I suppose that like many things this may be a question of how one defines langauge
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May 8, 2010 11:42 AM
Posted on May 8, 2010 11:42
Hi Dave,
Very interesting post. I remember a previous post where you dismissed panarchy theory. I am not sure if you were referring to the political theory, referred to in the wikipedia entry, or the resilience framework created by ecologist Buzz Holling (see http://www.resalliance.org/1.php).
Have you explored Holling's work? As far as I know, he is the the originator of resilience thinking. It would be interesting to see how his model of the apadtive cycle could be combined with your thoughts concerning the difference between natural and social complexity.
best,
Pete
Posted by Peter Sims | May 11, 2010 12:54 PM
Posted on May 11, 2010 12:54