Strong Towns in the Age of Resilience

Growth is an old paradigm. In most cases today, we need stability. Stability is an inherent feature of complex adaptive systems. The trend of reducing risk and maximizing efficiency has resulted to the fragility of our current systems, and now our struggle is to make better use of what we have already developed, making them capable of responding to difficulty by adapting to local conditions in order to harmonize the whole.

In complex systems, whether buildings, cities, or other environments, perfection is not possible with so many competing objectives. Instead, what we can strive for is a degree of stability and wholeness through an incremental process of adaptation that responds from the bottom up.

“…innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic and smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.” ~ Strong Towns: A Bottom Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity by Charles Marohn

One way we can strengthen the ability to bounce back from shocks of volatility is through developing more distributed renewable energy networks or microgrids. These systems can help us reduce reliance on centralized power grids that are vulnerable to disruptions. This decentralized approach adapts our communities in a way that minimizes dependencies on external systems. New forms of network connectivity can further help us communicate and cooperate more effectively during moments of disaster. By incorporating these ideas into our planning and development, we can create more resilient communities that are better able to withstand shocks and stresses.

The future will always remain unpredictable. By maintaining our existing infrastructure, our buildings and network systems can learn to adapt by making small incremental changes over time instead of attempting to complete our structures and systems to a complete state that attempts to resolve all future issues.