Remembering Disasters: the Resilience Approach

The aim of this paper is to show how the paradigm of disaster resilience may help reorienting urban planning policies in order to mitigate various types of risks, thanks to carefully thought action on heritage and conservation practices. Resilience is defined as the "capacity of a social system to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances." It relies greatly on risk perception and the memory of catastrophes. States, regions, municipalities, have been giving territorial materiality to collective memory for centuries, but this trend has considerably increased in the second half of the 20th century. This is particularly true regarding the memory of disasters: for example, important traces of catastrophes such as urban ruins have been preserved, because they were supposed to maintain some awareness and hence foster urban resilience - Berlin's Gedachtniskirche is a well-known example of this policy. Yet, in spite of preserved traces of catastrophes and various warnings and heritage policies, there are countless examples of risk mismanagement and urban tragedies. Using resilience as a guiding concept might change the results of these failed risk mitigation policies and irrelevant disaster memory processes. Indeed, the concept of resilience deals with the complexity of temporal and spatial scales, and with partly emotional and qualitative processes, so that this approach fits the issues of urban memory management. Resilience might help underlining the complexity and the subtlety of remembrance messages, and lead to alternative paths better adapted to the diversity of risks, places and actors. However, when it is given territorial materiality, memory is almost always symbolically and politically framed and interpreted; Vale and Campanella had already outlined this political aspect of remembrance and resilience as a discourse. Resilience and the territorialization of memory are not ideologically neutral, but urban risk mitigation may come at that price.