The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster
Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, Editors
Oxford University Press, Oxford

Inspired by the events of September 11 but about much more,
The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster investigates
urban disasters throughout history and around the world, in an effort to
determine how and why cities almost inevitably recover and thrive in their wake.   

According to editors Lawrence Vale (MIT professor and author of Architecture, Power, and National Identity
and Reclaiming Public Housing) and Thomas Campanella (DCRP assistant professor and author of Republic
of Shade and Cities from the Sky), city resilience in the face of disasters from volcano eruptions, to starvation,
biological warfare, and displacement from urban renewal, is almost universal.   Even totally devastated cities
often survive as sites of tourism, education, remembrance, or myth.  Warsaw rebuilt itself after annihilation in
World War II; Mexico City survived and transformed itself after a 1985 earthquake; Washington, D.C. remained
its nation’s capitol even after many of its monuments were burned.  What makes cities able to bounce back
from catastrophe so forcefully and symbolically?  Who decides how they recover, and whom the recovery
benefits most?

The Resilient City presents a cogent theory of urban resilience and recovery using evidence from 14 essays
representing various types of disasters.  Each event varies in the scale of its destruction, the loss of life, and the
cause (natural (such as earthquakes), natural with human intervention (forest fires), human (terrorism), or
sociopolitical/economic (collapse of a local economy)).  And each city responds to trouble differently, a complex
mix of politics, propaganda, and culture.  Among the editors’ key conclusions are the ideas that cities’ narratives
of resilience are highly contested political necessities that ultimately have the power to spark national renewal
and symbolize a greater resilience – that of the human spirit.

Named to Planetizen's 2005 Top 10 Booklist: http://www.planetizen.com/books/2005