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URBAN
RESILIENCE
Planning for Risk, Crisis and Uncertainty

JON COAFFEE
& PETER LEE

planning • environment • cities

 Series Editors: Yvonne Rydin and Andrew Thornley

The context in which planning operates has changed dramatically

in recent years. Economic processes have become increasingly
globalised and economic fortunes have fluctuated. Administrations
in various countries have not only changed, but old ideologies
have been swept away and new ones have tentatively emerged.
A new environmental agenda has prioritised the goal of sustainable
development, requiring continued action at international, national
and local levels.

Cities are today faced with new pressures for economic

competitiveness, greater accountability and participation, improved
quality of life for citizens, and global environmental responsibilities.
These pressures are often contradictory and create difficult dilemmas
for policy makers, especially in the context of fiscal austerity.

In these changing circumstances, planners, from many backgrounds,

in many different organisations, have come to re-evaluate their work.
They have to engage with actors in government, the private sector
and non-governmental organisations in discussions over the role of
planning in relation to the environment and cities. The intention of
the Planning, Environment, Cities series is to explore the changing
nature of planning and contribute to the debate about its future.

This series is primarily aimed at students and practitioners of

planning and such related professions as estate management,
housing and architecture as well as those in politics, public and
social administration, geography and urban studies. It comprises
both general texts and books designed to make a more particular
contribution, in both cases characterised by: an international
approach; extensive use of case studies; and emphasis on
contemporary relevance and the application of theory to advance
planning practice.
Series Editors: Yvonne Rydin and Andrew Thornley

Published
Philip Allmendinger
Planning Theory (2nd edn)
Chris Couch
Urban Planning: An Introduction
Ruth Fincher and Kurt Iveson
Planning and Diversity in the City: Redistribution, Recognition and Encounter
Cliff Hague, Euan Hague and Carrie Breitbach
Regional and Local Economic Development
Patsy Healey
Collaborative Planning (2nd edn)
Patsy Healey
Making Better Places: The Planning Project in the 21st Century
Simon Joss
Sustainable Cities: Governing for Urban Innovation
Ted Kitchen
Skills for Planning Practice
Ali Madanipour
Urban Design, Space and Society
Peter Newman and Andrew Thornley
Planning World Cities (2nd edn)
Michael Oxley
Economics, Planning and Housing
Yvonne Rydin
Urban and Environmental Planning in the UK (2nd edn)
Dory Reeves
Management Skills for Effective Planners
Mark Tewdwr-Jones
Spatial Planning and Governance: Understanding UK Planning
Geoff Vigar, Patsy Healey, Angela Hull and Simin Davoudi
Planning, Governance and Spatial Strategy in Britain: An Institutionalist Analysis
Iain White
Environmental Planning in Context
Jon Coaffee and Peter Lee
Urban Resilience: Planning for Risk, Crisis and Uncertainty
Forthcoming
Luca Bertolini: Planning the Mobile Metropolis
Ed Ferrari: GIS and Planning for the Built Environment
Other titles planned include
Comparative Planning
Planning History
International Planning

Planning, Environment, Cities

Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–71703–5 hardback
Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–69346–9 paperback
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published. To place a standing order please contact your
bookseller or, in the case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title
of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd,
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS, UK
Urban Resilience
Planning for Risk, Crisis and
Uncertainty

Jon Coaffee

and

Peter Lee
© Jon Coaffee and Peter Lee 2016
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE
Palgrave in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of 4 Crinan Street,
London, N1 9XW.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
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the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-137-28882-0 ISBN 978-1-137-28884-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-28884-4
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
For Maggie (JC) and the remarkably
resilient Margaret Shaw (PL)
Contents

List of Figures, Tables and Boxes x

Acknowledgements xii

Part I: Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and

Urban Living 1
1. Why Does Urban Resilience Matter? 3
The emerging requirement for urban resilience 5
Approaching the study of urban resilience 12
Structure of the book 14

2. The Origins, Evolution and Critiques of Resilience 17

The dominance of the socio-ecological equilibrium
model 20
Towards an evolutionary approach 25
Resilience for whom, and by whom? A critique of
contemporary resilience 32
The transition towards evolutionary resilience 41

Part II: Processes of Urban Resilience 45

3. The Resilience Turn in Planning Policy and Practice 47
The resilience turn in urban policy 51
Emerging styles of urban resilience 54
Towards holistic urban resilience 66

4. Urban Resilience as Adaptive or Maladaptive? 71

Learning from the fracture-critical past 72
Maladaptive planning 74
Learning from planning and design weaknesses 82
Key lessons in planning for resilience 94

5. Assessing City Resilience 97

Assessing cities’ preparedness for disaster 101
Assessing urban and city resilience 105

vii
viii Contents

Understanding the assessment of urban resilience:

Reflections on methods and techniques 117
How do we better assess urban resilience? 128

Part III: Urban Resilience in Practice 133

6. Adaptive Resilience to Climate Change and Extreme
Weather Events 135
Framing climate change adaptation 138
Recovering from and mitigating climate change 141
Planning for long-term climate change adaptation 150
Climate resilience and transformative planning 157
Towards a transformative urban resilience agenda for
climate change 161

7. Security-driven Urban Resilience 164

Planning and design for counter terrorism:
A historical context 167
The mainstreaming of security features into the
planning process 173
Planning security-driven urban resilience measures:
From circumvention to co-option? 186

8. Coping with Large-scale Disasters 191

Anticipating shock: The planning and resilience
context for Japan 193
The triple disaster of March 2011 197
Post-disaster reconstruction and resilience planning 203
Learning from Tohoku: Recovery, redundancy and
rebuilding communities 213

9. Preparing for ‘Slow-burn’ Shock Events 219

Slow-burn events and self-restoring equilibrium
dynamics 221
Panarchy and regional housing markets 225
Evolutionary resilience in slow-burn events and the
role of agents 231
Understanding slow-burn events and their
implications for developing urban and regional
resilience 240
 Contents ix

10. Anticipating the Future: Planning the Resilient City of

Tomorrow 245
Planning for risk, crisis and uncertainty 249
Urban resilience as a new planning paradigm 260
The future of urban resilience 262
Postscript: Post-2015 dialogues and implications for
planning practice 271

Bibliography 276
Index 301
List of Figures, Tables and
Boxes

Figures

2.1 The adaptive cycle of a resilient system 22

2.2 A panarchy of nested systems 24
2.3 The integrated resilience cycle 30
3.1 The advance of urban resilience practice 60
5.1 Social impact factors and resilience of wards in
Birmingham 114
6.1 The four delta scenarios 152
6.2 Adaptive Delta Management and the planning cycle 153
6.3 The planner’s role in flood risk management 156
7.1 A hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM) barrier at the
Emirates Stadium in North London (2007) 177
7.2 A spectrum of visible security features 178
7.3 The initial design for the new US Embassy at
Nine Elms, London 180
8.1 No. 18 Kyotokumaru, Kesennuma City, Miyagi
Prefecture, Japan, March 2013 202
8.2 Existing sea wall defence at Kesenumma, March 2013 205
8.3 Implementation of extension and heightening of the
sea defences in Tohoku prefecture 206
8.4 Reconstruction patterns and planning approaches in
Tohoku region following the earthquake 208
8.5 Plan for a tsunami-resistant/resilient city 209
8.6 Ishinomaki City Port ‘Disaster Area Relocation Zone’ 210
8.7 Disaster resilience housing within the ‘tsunami
inundation’ zone near Ishinomaki City, Miyagi
Prefecture and government signs declaring the area a
tsunami inundation area or Disaster Relocation Zone 212
9.1 Boarded up shops and housing in Granby, Liverpool
L8, April 1999 227
9.2 Panarchy in regional housing markets: Low demand
within cascading regional and national housing systems 231

x
 List of Figures, Tables and Boxes xi

9.3 Regional resilience and the role of agents in dealing

with sudden and slow-burn events 243
10.1 Alternative scenarios for balancing sustainability
and risk management 247
10.2 Integrating planning into the resilience cycle 270

Tables

3.1 Aims and foci of equilibrist and evolutionary urban

resilience for planning practice 68
4.1 Overview of weaknesses and resilient responses 92
5.1 Rockefeller Foundation/Arup City Resilience Index
framework 105
5.2 Community resilience domains and indicators 108
5.3 Experian/BBC economic resilience indicators 111
5.4 CLES local economic resilience framework 115
7.1 The eight key principles of the SSPM 183
7.2 Emergent (and indicative) stakeholder perceptions of
designing counter-terrorism features 187

Boxes

2.1 The guiding governance principles of UK resilience 37

6.1 What is different about climate-resilient development? 159
Acknowledgements

The idea of this book began in 2011, in the wake of the devas-
tating earthquake and associated tsunami that hit Japan’s eastern
seaboard on 11 March. At this time, in our roles as Director and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies
(CURS) at the University of Birmingham, we were preparing to host
the 2011 UK/Ireland (International) Planning Research Conference
entitled Planning Resilient Communities in Challenging Times,
reflecting the growing importance of urban resilience as it began
to be adopted by the academic and practising planning community.
Ideas of urban resilience had become increasingly important in
our own work. These were facilitated through dialogue within plan-
ning communities about the appropriateness of resilience thinking
as a way of framing the responses to the challenging times we con-
tinue to face which expose communities to a range of risks, hazards
and perceived threats. These include climate change such as: climate
change and associated environmental issues; financial constraints,
access to credit and economic uncertainty; political and security
disorders; and the effects of social polarisation and migration upon
community cohesion, all of which have direct implications for urban
and regional planning, not least in ensuring spatial and social justice
within the implementation of urban resilience strategies.
In undertaking such work we have engaged with communities of
planning and planning-related professionals from across Europe,
North America and South East Asia as they have attempted to wres-
tle with the intractable nature of urban risk, the increased complex-
ity of urban and regional systems, and most notably ‘change’ in the
role and function of planning and how the planning profession is
expected to play a greater and more pivotal role in ensuring urban
resilience.
The empirical research which supplied the data and evidence pre-
sented in this book emerges from a range of innovative transdisci-
plinary work that has sought to investigate how resilience principles
have affected the design, construction, maintenance, management
and utilisation of the built environment and how such manifes-
tations have interfaced with planning practice. Our research has

xii
 Acknowledgements xiii

been undertaken in liaison with an array of built environment pro-

fessionals; planners, urban designers, architects, surveyors, civil
engineers; those engaged in post-disaster reconstruction work; a
range of emergency responders, community and voluntary groups;
and a number of local, regional and national policy-making com-
munities, who were increasingly embracing the resilience agenda in
their everyday work. Our empirical results have fed into emerging
UK planning and planning-related policy, as well as professional
training and education courses for planners, and have sought to
encourage new ways of thinking and acting. Funding for such work
has come from a variety of sources – the UK Research Councils
and European Commission, and a number of local government and
planning authorities in the UK. We would like to especially acknowl-
edge funding from the following sources: the Arts and Humanities
Research Council – AHRC: Resilient, mutual self-help in cities of
growing diversity (AH/J50028X); the Engineering and Physical Sci-
ences Research Council – EPSRC: Resilience through innovation
(EP/I016163/1); the Economic and Social Research Council – ESRC:
The everyday resilience of the city (RES-228-25-0034); EPSRC/
ESRC/AHRC: Resilient design (RE-DESIGN) for counter terrorism
(EP/F008635/); ESRC/JSPS (Japanese Society for the Promotion of
Science): Planning responses to ‘shock’ and ‘slow-burn’ events: the
role of redundancy in regional resilience (ES/J013838/1); European
Commission-funded projects as part of the Seventh Framework
Programme focused upon urban resilience: HARMONISE (Holis-
tic Approaches to Resilience – grant agreement number 312013)
and DESURBS (Designing Safer Urban Spaces – grant agreement
number 261652); and funding from the Department of Communi-
ties and Local Government, Liverpool City Council and the North
East Assembly which funded and assisted research and consultancy
on housing markets that forms the basis of Chapter 9.
The research that has gone into this book, although largely car-
ried out by ourselves, has been helped along the way by a host of
academic colleagues and a great number of planning policy makers
and practitioners, as well as support from family and friends. In
particular, we would like to acknowledge the assistance and sup-
port of a host of research colleagues across the globe – Rob Row-
lands and Jonathan Clarke (Resilient Cities Laboratory, University
of Warwick), Lee Bosher and Ksenia Chmutina (Loughborough
University), Paul O’Hare (Manchester Metropolitan University),
William Hynes (Future Analytics Consultancy, Dublin), Pete Fussey
(University of Essex), Richard Browne and Ifor Jones (Birmingham
xiv Acknowledgements

City Council), Mike Turner and Elad Persov (Bezalel Academy of

Art and Design, Jerusalem), Michio Ubaura (Tohoku University),
Hiroshi Suzuki (Fukushima Action Research, Institute for Global
Environmental Strategies, Kanagawa), Osamu Sohda and colleagues
(Waseda University, Tokyo).
Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their
useful suggestions, Planning, Environment, Cities series editors
Yvonne Rydin (University College London, UK) and Andy Thorn-
ley (London School of Economics and Political Science, UK) and
Stephen Wenham, senior commissioning editor at Palgrave, for their
advice and support.

Jon Coaffee
Peter Lee
January 2016
Part I

Towards a Framework
for Resilient Planning
and Urban Living
Chapter 1

Why Does Urban Resilience

Matter?

This century, more than any other, is the century of the city, where
rapid urbanisation and greater global connectedness present unprec-
edented urban challenges. Such increased urbanisation also con-
centrates risk in cities making them increasingly vulnerable to an
array of shocks and stresses. Under such circumstances, city manag-
ers are increasingly having to plan for risk, crisis and uncertainty:
they have to enhance urban resilience. In this endeavour, urban
and regional planning has a central role to play in defining urban
resilience, addressing underlying risk factors and building resilience
to reduce the exposure and vulnerability of people and assets to a
range of current and future hazards and threats. Urban resilience
provides an operational framework for reducing the multiple risks
faced by cities and communities, ensuring there are appropriate lev-
els of resources and capacities to mitigate, prepare for, respond to
and recover from a range of shocks and stresses. As Harriet Tregon-
ing, the head of the US Office of Housing and Urban Development’s
Office of Economic Resilience, and President Obama’s ‘Chief Resil-
ience Officer’, highlighted:

While not geared toward any single shock or stress, resilience is

part of a recognition that the future is going to be considerably
different than the past. Resilience favors diversity. It favors more
choices. It favors innovation. It favors social connectedness and
cohesion. It must focus on the most vulnerable geography and the
most vulnerable people, because how people fare in the event of a
shock of some kind is extremely different based on whether they
have the resources to bounce back. (cited in Mazur, 2015)

Increasingly, the ideas and principles of resilience carry tremendous

influence in modifying and, in some cases, significantly changing
international urban and regional planning agendas, whether this is

3
4 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

dealing with the unique needs and characteristics of places, looking

at the short-, medium- and long-term issues, advancing knowledge,
objectives and actions or recognising the wide range of stakehold-
ers (who should be) involved in resilient planning. As Porter and
Davoudi (2012, p.329) have noted, the emergence of resilience dis-
course has unsettled traditional planning methods and approaches:

The concepts and metaphors that resilience thinking brings to

planning exert significant power. In this sense there is the poten-
tial for it to reframe planning in ways that break down sterile
analysis and rigidly conservative interventions, so that we can see
them afresh.

In recent years urban crisis and disaster of many forms have focused
attention on how urban resilience might be enhanced. In Design-
ing to Avoid Disaster, Thomas Fisher (2013) notably highlighted
how recent catastrophic events, such as New Orleans’ flooding, the
Fukushima nuclear plant’s devastation by tsunami, the Wall Street
investment bank failures and the collapse of housing markets, all
stem from what he termed fracture-critical design. He noted in the
book’s preface, that:

[I]f we, as architects, planners, engineers, and citizens are to pre-

dict and prepare for the next disaster, we need to recognize this
error in our thinking and to understand how design thinking pro-
vides us with a way to anticipate unintended failures and increase
the resiliency of the world in which we live. (p.ix, emphasis added)

Fisher evoked the idea of a more resilient future as a counterpoint to

the path dependencies and cultural assumptions that have contrib-
uted to the high impact of a series of disruptive events worldwide. In
doing so he described why there is the need for alternative develop-
ment pathways and new planning cultures – based on the properties
of resilience – by which global society can plan its way out of its
fracture-critical present through a series of interlinked interventions
and innovations focused upon urban design and governance. It is
these types of innovative and transformative ‘resilient’ interven-
tions, and their implications for planning policy and practice at the
urban and regional scale, that are the key concern of this book.
This book thus serves as a guide to, as well as a critique of, early
attempts to improve urban resilience approaches. As the majority of
the infrastructure that will serve cities for the next 100 years is yet
to be built, and with rapidly rising rates of urbanisation especially
 Why Does Urban Resilience Matter? 5

in the developing world (it is predicted for example, that by 2050,

75% of an expanded global population will be urban (UN Habitat,
2011)), planning to deliver urban resilience in the context of increas-
ing complexity will become ever more pertinent to the way in which
we view cities and think about their creation and adaptation (see for
example Rodin, 2015).

The emerging requirement for urban resilience

In the last 20 years, resilience has not only become a highly pop-
ular policy metaphor but also an increasingly politicised concept,
incorporating a vast range of contemporary risks, underpinned by
an orthodoxy that has pre-eminently focused upon managerial and
technical aspects of ‘crisis’ response and environmental manage-
ment. After the devastating events of 11 September 2001 in New
York and Washington DC (henceforth 9/11) and with the release
of the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
report in 2007 highlighting unequivocal evidence of a warming cli-
mate, resilience has increasingly become a central organising met-
aphor within the urban and regional policy-making process and,
more broadly, in the expanding institutional framework of national
security and emergency preparedness (Coaffee, 2006). As policies
which incorporate principles of resilience have evolved and been
adopted internationally, the ideas underpinning resilience have
additionally begun to infiltrate a host of further, more loosely con-
nected, social and economic policies, which impact at the urban and
regional scale. This growth in both the scope and importance of
resilience has been strengthened by the political prioritisation of the
safety and security of organisations, communities and individuals,
and the need to enhance preparedness against an array of perceived
hazards and threats, including terrorism, earthquakes, disease pan-
demic, global warming-related flooding, economic crisis and social
breakdown. These priorities have been focused predominantly on
cities as a result of continued and rapid urbanisation and because of
the particular vulnerability of cities as densely populated political,
economic and cultural centres.

Urban resilience and change

Urban resilience is ultimately about change. From the perspective
of urban and regional planning practice, and in relation to the roles
and responsibilities of planning-related professionals, attaining
6 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

urban resilience requires an enhancement of planning and design

techniques and the development of new repertoires of ‘doing’ plan-
ning in order to make cities and their associated critical infrastruc-
ture and communities more resistant and adaptable to a complex
combination of endogenous and exogenous shocks and stresses.
This can be exemplified by the pre- and post-event planning in rela-
tion to Hurricane Sandy that hit New York City in 2012.
While the discourse of urban resilience had been readily applied
to cities in the name of ensuring safety and security, and enhanc-
ing emergency preparedness in the years that followed 9/11, it took
another disaster, once again centred on New York, in 2012, to illu-
minate on the global stage the power of and requirement for urban
resilience. As Scott (2013, p.103) narrated in a special issue of Plan-
ning Theory and Practice which focused on flood risk and enhanc-
ing urban resilience:

The flooding of parts of New York in the aftermath of Hurricane

Sandy in October 2012 provided dramatic images of a global city
and world financial centre struggling to cope with a natural dis-
aster. At times, many neighbourhoods, particularly in Manhattan,
seemed to struggle to function. This moved beyond those directly
affected by flooding in their homes and businesses, to the wider
city as critical infrastructure was damaged, including electricity
sub-stations leading to hospital evacuations following power-cuts,
and the closure of public transport networks along with petrol/
gasoline shortages disrupting the mobility of New York citizens.
While the initial debate in the aftermath of such flooding events
often centres on the immediate recovery efforts, increasingly flood
risk (and the potential for increased risk from climate change
impacts) raises more fundamental questions concerning how cit-
ies and communities should prepare or transform in order to cope
with increased exposure to flooding events. (emphasis added)

Hurricane Sandy was a wake-up call for New Yorkers, forcing them
to confront the realities of extreme weather brought about by cli-
mate change: ‘it provided violent and tangible evidence, if ever it
were needed, that extreme weather is here, sea levels are on the rise
and that cities must adapt more urgently than ever before’ (Wain-
wright, 2015). In the wake of Hurricane Sandy new logics of risk
management emerged, centred on the discourse of resilience, which
saw $50 billion of funding invested in resilience initiatives. As a
result, New York is emerging as an exemplar for urban resilience
 Why Does Urban Resilience Matter? 7

through a host of innovative and good practice initiatives. In 2013,

in the post-Sandy recovery period, a ‘Building Resiliency Task Force’
was set up by New York’s Mayor’s Office to identify measures to
protect the city against similar events. Subsequently, the Task Force
proposed improvements to the state’s building codes and encourage
‘Better Planning’ to ensure that developments are located in suit-
able locations (Urban Green Council, 2013). As some scenarios sug-
gest that storm surges of a similar magnitude to Hurricane Sandy
(broadly concomitant with a 1-in-100-year event) could occur every
three to 20 years and the period between very large catastrophic
events could halve over the next 100 years (Aerts et al., 2013), urban
and regional planning is becoming increasingly precautionary. This
pressing need for future-looking risk mitigation and adaptive strate-
gies inspired the creation of the New York State 2100 Commission
and the enactment of long-term planning proposals for the state
based upon preparedness, adaption and, most critically, building
resilience (NYS, 2013). Moreover, the Commission report outlined
a number of ‘challenges’ for the state emphasising: the need to:
‘rebuild smarter’ and consider the appropriateness of land uses in
relation to risks and vulnerabilities; increase the use of green infra-
structure including permeable surfacing and the re-establishment of
soft shorelines; ensure there is ‘integrated planning’; increase ‘insti-
tutional coordination’ including the establishment of a state-level
‘risk officer’ to put in place a framework for risk management; and,
finally, ensure that there are sufficient ‘incentives’ for building resil-
ience and education programmes (ibid.).
New York has also seen other important planning initiatives,
stimulated by the desire to avoid further significant impacts from
extreme weather events, such as Rebuild by Design, which aimed to
promote urban resilience through innovative planning. Here, after
an international design competition that attracted a vast range of
novel entries, a number of ideas have been taken forward towards
potential implementation, notably BIG Architecture’s Dryline
(Rebuild by Design, 2014). Inspired by the Highline (a public park
built on a historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on
Manhattan’s West Side), the Dryline aims to convert the ten miles of
Manhattan’s hard shoreline, with its bridges and infrastructure, into
a continuous network of landscape buffers and ‘protective park’.
The design incorporates a system of levees, dams and flood walls
which improves mitigation to flood events, integrated within a lin-
ear public park that finds imaginative uses for the resultant spaces,
giving social and environmental benefits.
8 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

At a very different scale of operation, the Transition Towns move-

ment (or simply Transitions movement), which originated in the
UK, has spread its principles – of decarbonising and relocalising the
economy through community-led change – internationally (Bailey
et al., 2010). This provides another example of how ideas underpin-
ning resilience have been applied in practice at an urban scale. The
movement’s manifesto, set out in The Transition Handbook: From
Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Hopkins, 2008), articulates a
journey that can be taken to prepare for the collective impacts of
peak oil and climate change using resilience ideas. Resilience within
the Transitions movement is seen as ‘the capacity of a system to
absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as
to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and
feedbacks’ (ibid., p.54), which translates as being ‘more prepared
for a leaner future, more self-reliant, and prioritizing the local over
the imported’ (p.55). The movement envisions a resilient system as
one that is diverse (making its constituent elements and connec-
tions interchangeable) and with built-in redundancy, modularisation
(so parts of the system can reorganise in the event of a shock, thus
making the system less vulnerable to disruptions in wider networks),
and with tight feedback loops (so that one part of the system can
respond to changes in another part). In this vision, increasingly local-
ised systems are seen as the most resilient and better able to respond
in a self-organised way to disruption, allowing the community to
be increasingly responsible for its own environment. In later work,
notably The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More
Resilient in Uncertain Times (Hopkins, 2011), the Transitions move-
ment provided a more nuanced view of the importance of community
resilience, highlighting a number of key factors that help determine
its strength: self-determination and local democratic structures; skill
diversity within a community; and the ability to agree and implement
a collective vision for change. As argued in The Transitions Compan-
ion, resilience is about more than ‘sustaining’ current models and
practices. Rather, it is transformational, focused upon change and
rethinking prior assumptions about infrastructure and systems that
should lead to a more sustainable and resilient, low-carbon economy.

Planning for urban resilience

Within the context of change and adaptation, illustrated by the
examples above, this book examines the emergence and chang-
ing role and remits of urban resilience policies and explores how
 Why Does Urban Resilience Matter? 9

planning and planning-related professions are increasingly being

asked to contribute to this agenda. From a geographical and politi-
cal perspective we also chart how urban resilience has emerged in
the academic and policy literatures and how urban and regional
planners, together with other built environment professionals, have
sought to embed principles of resilience into city planning and man-
agement regimes. This will illustrate new proactive ways of think-
ing about the role of local planning and the state, and highlight the
emergence of a range of risks that must be anticipated and mitigated
(or eliminated) with forward-looking adaptive strategies necessitat-
ing changes in the role and function of urban and regional planning.
Planning for urban resilience is an international agenda. Emerg-
ing urban trends amplify the pressure upon cities to keep citizens
safe, healthy, prosperous, well informed and supplied with essen-
tial services, and have recently led to an array of global govern-
ance collaborations and private sector attempts to develop strategic
evaluation frameworks to assess the urban resilience of cities and
regions. Notably, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk
Reduction’s (UNISDR’s) How To Make Cities More Resilient cam-
paign launched in 2012 (UNISDR, 2012a) and the World Bank’s
guidance Building Urban Resilience in East Asia (Jha and Brecht,
2012) both aim to increase the resilience of cities to disasters and
climate change impacts by utilising a risk-based approach to steer
planning decision making. Furthermore, in 2013 the philanthropic
Rockefeller Foundation launched, to much fanfare, its 100 Resilient
Cities (100RC) campaign ‘dedicated to helping cities around the
world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic
challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century’ (Rockefel-
ler Foundation, 2013). This initiative builds on the experience of
the Rockefeller Foundation’s Asian Cities Climate Change Resil-
ience Network (ACCCRN), a pioneering effort launched in 2008
to enable Asian cities to build their resilience to climate change,
and which defines urban resilience as ‘the capacity of individuals,
communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to
survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses
and acute shocks they experience’ (ibid.). Key within the 100RC
campaign is the two to three year funded appointment of a so-called
Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) in each city who works directly with
the city’s Chief Executive to pursue collaborations across govern-
ment, private, and nonprofit sectors. As Michael Berkowitz, CEO of
the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100RC initiative has noted, an effec-
tive CRO is a person able to ‘work across the sectors and siloes to
10 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

coordinate, to connect the dots, to advocate, to keep the resilience

issues and resilience perspective in all the decisions that the city is
making’ (emphasis added) (cited in Clancy, 2014).
The Rockefeller Foundation has also worked closely with pri-
vate sector organisations such as Arup in developing a city resil-
ience toolkit that ‘gives cities a tool to understand their resilience;
to shape urban planning, practice and investment’ (Arup, 2014; see
also Siemens, 2013). These new collaborations point to the way in
which the development of new resilience frameworks for under-
standing and responding to urban risk, crisis and uncertainty are
arguably being shaped and moulded by global institutions for com-
mercial gain and in the interests of business opportunity. Collec-
tively, these emerging approaches also highlight how an overarching
and strategic view of urban resilience needs to consider not only
the material built environment but also governance and decision-
making processes which underpin possible interventions: where
they materialise, how they are enacted, whose resilience is being
enhanced and, importantly, whose isn’t.

Situating urban resilience for planners

This book is specifically situated at the interface of emergent policy
and practice literatures as well as the popular and academic litera-
ture on the general nature of resilience. Academic interest in urban
resilience has grown significantly in recent years and has provided
a range of, often critical, perspectives on the emergence and impact
of resilience as a socio-political buzzword and operational concept
(Walsh, 2013). While there is a general lack of empirically grounded
research on urban resilience – which some have argued has resulted
in ‘a poor understanding of how to operationalize the metaphor
of resilience in the particular context of cities [and] weakened the
potential of the concept of urban resilience’ (Chelleri et al., 2015,
p.1) – evidence from academic referencing databases has shown a
steep upward trajectory of the academic use of the term since 2005
in urban and regional planning and the associated discipline of
urban geography (Serre and Barroca, 2013). This growing literature
has illuminated the possibilities of resilience as well as its poten-
tial shortcomings. The myriad uses of ‘resilience thinking’ (Walker
and Salt, 2006) in global policy networks increasingly highlight
resilience as the pre-eminent approach to govern an increasingly
complex world where the new ‘doctrine of resilience’ is inher-
ently bound up with living with threat, insecurity and vulnerability
 Why Does Urban Resilience Matter? 11

(Chandler, 2014; Evans and Reid, 2014). This is underlined by Zolli

and Healy (2014) who highlighted how, in an increasingly turbu-
lent world, resilience has emerged to focus on ‘the ability of people,
communities and systems to maintain core purpose and integrity
amid unforeseen shocks and surprises’ (frontispiece).
Within the urban and regional planning literature, this book
draws from, complements and extends a number of key texts pub-
lished in the mid–late 2000s that have been influential in driving
forward initial interest in city-based resilience. In The Resilient City:
How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, Vale and Campanella
(2005) took a largely historical perspective on urban disaster recov-
ery, evoking the metaphor of resilience as an inherent ‘spirit’ of cit-
ies to renew themselves in the post-disaster phase. Through a series
of urban case study chapters their contribution sought to learn
from the past in drawing out how, and why, narratives of resilience
emerge and how they are enacted by planners and other built envi-
ronment professionals. Similarly, Hazards and the Built Environ-
ment: Attaining Built-in Resilience (Bosher, 2008) highlighted the
wide-ranging and transdisciplinary nature of the emerging resilience
debate with regard to how disaster risks are reduced in the built
environment and through the network of professionals and com-
munities that are required to play a part in the resilience endeavour.
It also drew attention to the gap between the actions of planning
professionals and those tasked with disaster risk reduction, argu-
ing that a more integrated approach is essential in the new age of
resilience. Another contribution around this time was The Everyday
Resilience of the City (Coaffee et al., 2008b) that tracked the rise
of the discourse of resilience, highlighting how it was being infused
into a range of policy practices affecting urban areas and subse-
quently provoking a range of critical academic debates surrounding
urban resilience. This was the first such volume to explicitly connect
the policy, practices and politics of resilience to cities, providing a
systematic interrogation of the consequences of the resilience dis-
course on urban professionals (including planners) and local com-
munities, and illuminating the role and power of agency in ‘resilient’
urban systems through the interactions of the state, citizens and
the market. The Everyday Resilience of the City raised important
questions about whether resilience-related policies are a legitimate
attempt to empower citizens and other local actors, or simply a fur-
ther retrenchment of the state and an attempt to alter the social
contract between government and citizens, and it prefaced recent
approaches to measuring and assessing resilience noted above.
12 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

Approaching the study of urban resilience

Drawing on theories of urban resilience that have emerged from

these contributions, this book will chart the emergence and progres-
sion of different ‘styles’ of resilient planning practice over the last
decade which may be viewed as increasingly anticipatory, localising
and responsibilising. Such practices are not without critique and as
such the early chapters of this book will engage with the ongoing
academic and policy debates regarding the pros and cons of using
the discourses of urban resilience in public policy.
Empirically, this book draws from research undertaken by the
authors investigating the changing dimensions of a range of urban
resilience policies that seek to unpack the role of planning and plan-
ners in the growing assemblages of resilience policy and practice at
urban and regional scales. Our research in this area has engaged
with how the planning profession is expected to play an ever more
crucial role in ensuring urban resilience now and in the future, and
has highlighted the intractable nature of urban risk, the increased
complexity of urban and regional systems and most notably the
changing role and function of spatial planning. The data and evi-
dence presented in this book illustrate how resilience principles
have affected the design, construction, maintenance, management
and utilisation of the built environment and how new governance
formations have emerged to advance urban resilience and interface
with planning practice. As the book progresses we further high-
light a set of important questions that have emerged for urban and
regional planners tasked with implementing resilience thinking such
as: Why do we need urban resilience? How is resilience operational-
ised? Who undertakes resilience and for whose benefit? Resilience is
increasingly being focused not upon state institutions but upon citi-
zen and community responses. Specifically, in relation to urban and
regional planning and when places and communities are increas-
ingly vulnerable, we are therefore interested in the role and remit of
resilience planning in challenging times. But do communities have
the skills to make effective decisions affecting their resilience and
will all voices be heard equally? Moreover, in the context of auster-
ity, how is planning reconciling the challenge of finding solutions
and spatial strategies that will deliver ‘more for less’ while balancing
future needs and resources? How does planning ensure spatial and
social justice within the implementation of resilience strategies? How
is the wider epistemic urban and regional planning community –
‘a network of professionals with recognised expertise and
 Why Does Urban Resilience Matter? 13

competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to

policy relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area’ (Haas,
1992, p.3) – adopting urban resilience as a concept and approach?
And, how does this affect the changing roles and responsibilities of
urban and regional planning?
The ways in which ideas of resilience are creating new planning
imaginaries, repertoires of action and collaborative relationships is
a central theme of this book. In our view, what resilience is becomes
less important than what it does (Coaffee and Fussey, 2015) and
in particular the manifold and localised ways in which resilience
becomes interpreted and translated into planning practice. Spe-
cifically, we argue that changing practices of urban resilience have
emerged as both a function of time and in relation to a range of
changing socio-political and economic pressures that have rearticu-
lated the meaning and operational function of urban resilience as it
has evolved. Emerging in the 2000s, predominantly as a policy con-
nected to countering the threat of international terrorism through
securitisation and as a reaction to fears of intractable climate change,
urban resilience has now further expanded as a policy metaphor
for embedding ‘foresight’, robustness, inclusivity, cost effectiveness
and adaptability into a variety of place-making and planning activi-
ties. Until recently, urban and regional planning, both conceptually
and in practice, has tended to conceive of such challenges as short-
term issues, based on predefined technologies and siloed governance
structures and approaches. The strategies adopted have tended, on
the whole, to be reactive to particular ‘locked in’ approaches, tech-
nologies and predicted scenarios based on the simple extrapolation
of current trends. Emerging ideas in urban resilience have served
to increasingly question these pre-existing assumptions about the
extent and nature of urban and regional planning, suggesting how
a range of adaptive pathways can emerge to give multiple possi-
ble trajectories/scenarios for urban futures (Pike et al., 2010; White
and O’Hare, 2014). While the word resilience originates from the
Latin resilire – ‘to leap back’ – and with ‘bouncing back’ to a steady
state having been seen as a core resilience function, more nuanced
understandings are increasingly forward looking and focused upon
a new, and increasingly unpredictable, normality. For example,
Edwards in his acclaimed Resilient Nation report (2009) contended
that an understanding of resilience based upon ‘bouncing back’ is
restrictive, while Shaw (2012a) has also suggested that we need to
consider a more proactive approach, viewing (urban) resilience as
‘leaping forward’.
14 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

Further relevant debate explored throughout the book concerns

the extent to which urban resilience practice represents transforma-
tive or radical change, comprises a superficial rebranding of exist-
ing practices (such as risk management, disaster risk reduction or
sustainability) or operates in the service of enduring processes such
as neo-liberalisation and post-politics. We also reflect upon: the use-
fulness of urban resilience as the central organising concept used
for depicting urban systems’ response to contemporary and future
disruptive events, and the form future urban resiliency practices will
take and how these will interface with and impact upon the planning
profession in years to come. Our analysis relates to both material
and participatory aspects of planning and ways in which planning
has the power to engage with local communities and enhance com-
munity resilience. Throughout the book we engage with the human
side of urban resilience and ‘the ability of communities to with-
stand external shocks to their social infrastructure’ (Adger, 2000,
p.347). Interwoven throughout the broader narratives of planning
and resilience we will articulate how local communities can learn
to better prepare for a range of disruptive challenges affecting their
locality through the ‘adaptive potential’ of individuals and commu-
nities. This will assist the balancing of resiliency policy, reorienting
it away from analysis of deterministic legislative and technologi-
cal processes, and increasingly grounding it in the more meaning-
ful experience of the world by citizens which is often absent from
debates in the urban resilience literature (Coaffee et al., 2008b).

Structure of the book

The book is structured into three main parts which contextualises

the broader field of urban resilience and highlights the key urban
and regional planning processes at play and the domains in which it
can play a useful role, now and in the future.
Part I – Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban
Living – locates the field of study and highlights the multiple and
varied ways in which resilience is defined and interpreted and why it
matters to planners. It will illuminate the emergence of resilience as
an important consideration in planning for and managing a range
of urban risks, and situates urban resilience in relation to its cognate
disciplines, ranging from ecology and engineering to disaster man-
agement, economics and planning, that have been used to develop
and theorise the concept (see, for example, Holling, 1973; Rutter,
 Why Does Urban Resilience Matter? 15

1985; Thoits, 1995; Adger, 2000; Simmie and Martin, 2010). We

further connect these ideas to a range of related ideas such as
robustness, adaptability and redundancy, recognised as a key prop-
erties and means of improving the resilience of urban systems, while
unpacking competing policy discourses such as sustainability and
sustainable development which are often used interchangeably with
urban resilience. More conceptually, we will also note the tradi-
tional dominance of the socio-ecological systems (SES) model of
resilience which remained relatively uncontested until the 2000s
when new approaches to urban resilience emerged and which have
become increasingly important to our understanding of the socio-
political complexity of contemporary planning policy and practice
(Bosher, 2008; Coaffee et al., 2008b). The adoption of the discourse
of urban resilience is not, however, without critique and as such this
part of the book will highlight the multiple viewpoints regarding the
usefulness of resilience concepts and those perspectives that can be
used to understand the politics of resilience across different spatial
and temporal scales.
Part II of the book – Processes of Urban Resilience – will sur-
vey the ‘state of play’ in urban resilience scholarship and highlight
the emerging nature of resilient planning across different national
contexts. Here we focus upon the reasons that urban resilience is
required by critically engaging with the existing literature around
two main and interlocking areas of interest: the way in which
physical or material alterations brought about by changes to urban
design and land-use planning can enhance resilience, and how new
governance and management solutions are seeking to better pre-
pare for, and cope with, a range of disruptive challenges. We further
highlight the inherent weaknesses within the governance and man-
agement of many urban areas that make resilience necessary, while
arguing that urban resilience is most effective when it involves a
mutual and accountable network of civic institutions, agencies and
individual citizens working in partnership towards common goals
within a common strategy. Relatedly, we will also unpack the range
of national and international approaches to measuring and moni-
toring city resilience and highlight how an overarching and strategic
view of city-based resilience can assist in changing the nature and
function of urban and regional planning. Here we also reflect on the
extent to which existing urban resilience assessment tools demon-
strate a scalable methodology and practical (and increasingly pro-
fessionalised) tool for risk assessment which can be used to focus
city-level investment decisions.
16 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

To date, the majority of work in the burgeoning field of urban

resilience has not been grounded within the everyday practices of
planners, despite the term’s increased acceptance and importance;
there remains ‘an apparent gap between the advocacy of … resilience
in the scientific literature and its take-up as a policy discourse on the
one hand, and the demonstrated capacity to govern for resilience in
practice on the other’ (Wilkinson 2012, p. 319). The ways in which
planning policy and practice might close this so-called ‘implementa-
tion gap’ in urban resilience (Coaffee and Clarke, 2015) will be high-
lighted in Part III – Urban Resilience in Practice. Here, Chapters 6 to
9 present a series of thematic vignettes associated with the different
ways in which resilience has been deployed in urban and regional
planning practice. These empirical chapters, drawing on a range of
international experiences, first unpack the two main ways, to date, in
which the practices of urban resilience have been deployed by urban
and regional planners (climate change adaptation and security)
before, secondly, drawing on ongoing debates in the literature about
the usefulness of urban resilience with regard to reducing the effects
of large-scale disasters (sudden shock events), notably the triple dis-
aster that hit Japan in 2011, and less dramatic events which unfold
over longer time periods (so-called slow-burn events), exemplified by
the ongoing housing crisis and associated credit crunch.
To conclude the book, we draw together the ideas developed in
the previous chapters and highlight how urban resilience can be
advanced and enhanced, and provide suggestions for the future
research, policy and practice trajectories in urban resilience. This
includes the adoption of international agreements signed in 2015 on
sustainable development, disaster risk reduction and climate change
adaptation. We also address the question of how we can combine
multiple resilience perspectives in an effective whole-systems resil-
iency strategy and highlight how urban resilience can be embedded
as a set of principles for envisioning future local place-making activ-
ities. This involves, for example, increased emphasis on responding
to, or anticipating, major challenges with a long-term view (Con-
nell, 2009), rethinking risk assessment and mitigation strategies,
giving increased focus to facilitating adaptive human behaviours
and developing individual and institutional coping strategies, and
providing the appropriate training to professionals working in
the built environment. We represent this myriad of urban resilience
issues in a thematic framework through which existing and future
urban resilience interventions can be viewed.
Chapter 2

The Origins, Evolution and

Critiques of Resilience

Resilience is everywhere today, rapidly becoming a principal fram-

ing device for political discourse: ‘It falls easily from the mouths of
politicians, a variety of state departments are funding research into
it, urban planners are now obliged to take it into consideration,
and academics are falling over themselves to conduct research on it’
(Neocleous, 2013, p.3, emphasis added). The term has entered into
the lexicon of policy communities, the media and academia to not
only assess and understand the resistance to shock events of people,
households and communities, but also to describe the properties
and ability of interconnected and complex ecological, technical (e.g.
engineering), social and economic systems to adapt and change in
the midst of failure. As the UK’s Leverhulme Trust noted in 2010 in
its call for research:

This is the century in which the human race will have to respond
to major challenges resulting from environmental change, from
the need to attain sustainable and equitable social structures,
from contrasting demographies, from conflicting cultural models
and from enhanced global economic uncertainty. Linking these
challenges are notions of risk assessment and of the required
changes which must lead to adaptive human behaviour. Options
are needed for mitigation and for the development of individual
and institutional coping strategies. Central to these strategies is
the concept of resilience. (emphasis added)

With such a diverse range of applications and flexibility in its

terminology and use, it is necessary to reflect on the etymology of
resilience and whether overuse of the term in so many different con-
texts is in danger of undermining its meaning and value, and to con-
sider how it might be best applied in practice. For example, while
resilience has undoubtedly become a relevant concept for politicians
17
18 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

and policy makers alike, the way in which it is used is often subject
specific. Nevertheless, it offers a new vocabulary to make sense of
a range of disruptive challenges (Buckle et al., 2000). As Vernon
(2013) highlighted:

Resilience is a wonderful metaphor. It somehow conveys in a

single word the qualities of bending without breaking, of heal-
ing after an injury, of tensile rather than brittle strength. […]
Resilient people pick themselves up after being knocked down,
draw on their reserves of ideas and strength to deal with difficult
challenges, or hunker down until the gale has blown itself away.
Resilient economies bounce back, and resilient ecosystems restore
themselves after the fire or the flood has passed.

Resilience has become an all-encompassing metaphor which can

be applied in a variety of national and international contexts – a
translation term that allows ‘connections to be made between dif-
ferent stands of research with common terminology and consist-
ent threads of analysis, without needing to make assumptions that
the phenomena under investigation are the product of similar pro-
cesses that apply regardless of cultural context’ (Gold and Revill,
2000, p.6; Coaffee, 2006). However, for others, resilience has in the
last few years become a ‘catch all’ phrase used to vaguely express
a wide range of responses (social, economic, security-related, psy-
chological, ecological, governmental, etc.) to threats of many kinds
and pinning down the actual operational meaning of resilience has
proved difficult and led to confusion, especially over terminology.
For some this might indicate it is meaningless or unhelpful jargon
(see, for example, Hussain, 2013).
Other commentators have argued that there increasingly is a
broad-brush, yet normalised, notion of resilience that pervades eve-
ryday life (Coaffee et al., 2008b). This state of affairs poses critical
questions regarding the relationship between broader ‘resilience pol-
icy’ for dealing with disruptive challenges (such as flooding), emer-
gent social policies directed at the civic realm (such as community
empowerment – now often badged as community resilience) and the
qualities of individuals, households and communities to withstand
shock and slow-burn events (such as the global economic recession).
Some also view ambiguity over resilience terminology and its use
as a positive feature. For politicians it allows ideological flexibility,
offering new ways to make sense of a range of complex disrup-
tive challenges across multiple scales of action (Coaffee, 2013a).
 The Origins, Evolution and Critiques of Resilience 19

For research purposes resilience can be seen as a ‘boundary object’

(Brand and Jax, 2007) or a ‘bridging concept’ between the natural
and social sciences (Davoudi, 2012) that can now be applied in a
variety of specific national and international contexts. As Beilin and
Wilkinson (2015, p.1213) note, ‘the difficulties and the challenges
for resilience are absolutely in the “particular”, the “local” and the
implementation of resilience as a process’ (see also Anderson, 2015).
Some of the confusion over the vagueness of resilience concepts
and discourse comes from its association with sustainable devel-
opment or sustainability, with many proclaiming that resilience is
replacing sustainability as the central organising concept of the age
as a result of increased volatility that requires a different framing and
response (Vale, 2014; Zolli and Healy, 2013). In essence, where sus-
tainability often assumes a present and future of equilibrium, resil-
ience is based upon a change paradigm, which makes it particularly
helpful for managing a complex and uncertain future: ‘where sus-
tainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks
for ways to manage in an imbalanced world’ (Zolli, 2012). We can
also compare the two concepts in terms of their transference into an
ever-increasing array of policy discourse. As with resilience, when
sustainable development (and sustainability) emerged with the pub-
lishing of Our Common Future by the UN, authored by Gro Har-
lem Brundtland (1987), it was clearly understood as a central policy
metaphor for dealing with environmental change, yet then became
overused in an array of policy discourses, losing its initial meaning
as it did so. As the late, great Sir Peter Hall (2002, p.412) noted in
Cities of Tomorrow, regarding the surge in popularity surrounding
the ‘holy grail’ of sustainable urban development in the early 1990s:

The problem was that although everyone was in favour of it,

nobody knew exactly what it meant […] though they could all
quote by heart the definition of sustainability from the Brundt-
land Report of 1987 […] it was not at all clear how this mapped
onto actual everyday decisions in everyday urban contexts. The
general objectives were easily enough understood […] but the
difficult part was the next step: to translate these objectives into
actual contexts. Consequently and quite predictably, everyone
defined them to suit themselves.

Will ‘resilience’ become the new ‘sustainability’ due to its overex-

posure in the policy realm? In order to unpack the operationalisa-
tion and usefulness of resilience in the contemporary world, in this
20 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

chapter we acknowledge the ways in which different disciplines have

approached the concept of resilience and its theorisation. We do this
in three main sections. We first draw attention to, and critique, so-
called equilibrium models of socio-ecological systems (SES) resilience
that have dominated resilience discourse since the early 1970s and
have focused upon bouncing back to a pre-defined state in response
to stress or perturbation. Second, we highlight more evolutionary
approaches that have emerged within the resilience literature and
which, by contrast, focus upon a bounce forward and ‘new normal’
model of resilience, seeking to construct an approach more applica-
ble to increasingly complex and non-linear systems. As the chapter
progresses we connect these two approaches to resilience to a range
of related concepts, such as robustness, resourcefulness, adaptability
and redundancy which are recognised as key properties and means
of improving systemic resilience. The third section provides a cri-
tique of contemporary resilience policy through three key, and inter-
related, lenses – anticipation, localisation and responsibilisation – all
framed through an overarching assessment of resilience as having
been captured by neoliberalism and associated governmentalising
agendas by which governments seek, through a range of organised
governing practices, to shape an uncritical citizenry best suited to
deliver its policy priorities.

The dominance of the socio-ecological equilibrium

model

Resilience (from the Latin resilire) literally means ‘to leap back’. It is
a metaphor that has been discussed at length in the academic litera-
ture with various disciplines and sub-disciplines laying claim to its
etymological evolution and applying it within different experimen-
tal, and largely theoretical, contexts (Coaffee, 2013a). While ecolo-
gists, psychologists, disaster managers, geographers, economists and
social scientists have all contributed to the academic discussion of
resilience with the idea subsequently creeping into a range of policy
debates over the last decade (for a review see Coaffee et al., 2008b;
Walker and Cooper 2011) and more recently urban and regional
planning practice (see Chapter 3), the resilience literature has, until
recently, been overwhelmingly dominated and influenced by eco-
logical and engineering approaches.
The use and application of the term resilience is broadly acknowl-
edged to have emerged from C. S. ‘Buzz’ Holling’s 1970s studies of
 The Origins, Evolution and Critiques of Resilience 21

systems ecology and his subsequent work with the Resilience Alli-
ance (a research network comprised of scientists and practitioners
from many disciplines who collaborate to explore the dynamics
of socio-ecological systems). Holling’s ideas, best portrayed in the
classic 1973 paper Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,
represented a paradigm shift in thinking, demonstrating a more
dynamic process which he termed the adaptive cycle, differentiated
from earlier understandings of ecological systems which assumed a
stable basis. The adaptive cycle focused attention upon processes of
destruction and reorganisation, which were often marginalised in
classical ecosystem studies in favour of growth and conservation.
Including these processes sought to give a more complete view of
system dynamics.
The adaptive cycle was essentially an equilibrium model in which
system resources go through periods of production, consumption
and conservation and in which resilience is the ability of a system to
either bounce back to a steady state or to absorb shock events and
persist under stress. Here resilience was defined as a system’s ability
to ‘absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same rela-
tionships between populations or state variables’ (Holling, 1973,
p.14). In essence, Holling’s model proposed that external shocks,
such as forest fires, created new opportunities for resource exploita-
tion and that the ability of species and systems to persist was based
on an ability to adapt while still maintaining core functions in the
face of this inevitable cycle of change.
The adaptive cycle of a resilient system was represented by four
phases of system development, involving exploitation, conservation,
release and reorganisation of resources.The exploitation–conservation
phase represents a slow accumulation of system resources ready for
a period of release–reorganisation. The phases of the adaptive cycle
are depicted against two axes which represented the system potential
and connectedness (see Figure 2.1). The connectedness and potential
of the system increase during the exploitation–conservation phase
as connections embed and augment system potential for resource
production and release. Walker and Cooper (2011, p.147) provide a
summary of this process, linking it to classical ecological study:
Where classical systems ecology focused only on the phases
of rapid successional growth (r) followed by the conservation
phase of stable equilibrium (K), the Resilience Alliance argues
that these phases are inevitably followed by collapse (Ω), and
then a spontaneous reorganization that leads to a new growth
phase (α).
22 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

Figure 2.1
The adaptive cycle of a resilient system

Passive Reorganization Conservation

Capital

r
Ω

Active Growth Release

Weak Connectedness Strong

In Holling’s (1996, p.33) words, such a dynamic adaptive cycle

measures ecological resilience – the magnitude of change a system
can absorb before it ‘flips’ and changes structure to another ‘stability
domain’. Ecological resilience in this definition focuses upon change
and unpredictability but with a view to return to equilibrium.
A related definition – that of engineering resilience which Holling
(1996) coined in comparison to ecological resilience – concentrates
on stability and an equilibrium steady state where, specifically,
resistance to disturbance and speed of return to normality is meas-
ured. Here, while ecological resilience was seen as the magnitude
of disturbance that could be absorbed before a system changed its
structure, engineering resilience is seen as the capacity of a system to
move back as quickly as possible following a disturbance to its orig-
inal equilibrium state. Such engineering resilience, although used
extensively to measure the performance and resilience in technical
systems, is seen by some as only a partial measure of overall system
resilience (Walker et al., 2004).
More contemporary approaches to resilience have borrowed
heavily from Holling (1973) and Gunderson and Holling’s (2002)
adaptive–equilibrium models of resilience. For example, Zolli and
Healy (2013) suggest that understanding of the adaptive cycle can
be helpful in many other settings, such as how businesses can exploit
 The Origins, Evolution and Critiques of Resilience 23

new markets, while Fisher (2012) has suggested that designers can uti-
lise an understanding of this model to improve resilience in the built
environment. Walker and Cooper (2011) have also suggested that an
understanding of the adaptive cycle was used by neoliberal econo-
mists to promote how an unregulated financial system would be self-
governing. For example, Rose (2007) defined economic resilience in
equilibrist terms as ‘the ability of an entity or system to maintain func-
tion (e.g. continue producing) when shocked’ (p.384; see also Chapter
9 of this book). More generally, Beilin and Wilkinson (2015, p.1206)
have also emphasised how engineering resilience is often measured
though techno-rational approaches to risk assessment and manage-
ment that seeks to control the future and create the stability required
to retain normal functioning. Others have also highlighted how engi-
neered resilience, largely focusing on returning to a (imagined) stable
state, has been prominent in disaster management literature and still
dominates desired programme outcomes (Folke, 2006).
Increasingly, such equilibrist approaches associated with the so-
called social–ecological systems (SES) have been critiqued as their
influence has spread, particularly into the area of climate change
adaptation. In general, such SES approaches are viewed as inherently
conservative, and as noted above, have a core aim of system stability.
They also tend to focus upon endogenous (internal) stresses with lit-
tle attention given to exogenous (external) factors that might disturb
or shock the system. More broadly, the development of SES based
on equilibrium ideas is perhaps not best suited to modelling systems
involving complex social dynamics which are less easy to concep-
tualise with theoretical models (Davoudi, 2012; Alexander, 2013).
For many, SES resilience approaches fail to account for political and
power relations within a complex social system which affects those
whose needs are being met (resilience for whom?) and how distri-
butional resource issues are mediated by political action. In essence,
as Brown (2013, p.109) highlighted, an SES approach to resilience
‘promotes a scientific and technical approach akin to “imposed
rationality” that is alien to the practice of ordinary people […]
is depoliticized and does not take account of the institutions within
which practices and management are embedded’ (see also Cannon
and Müller-Mahn, 2010). Early contributions in relation to urban
and regional planning also problematised the use of the term and
critically asked ‘resilience of what to what?’ (Beilin and Wilkinson,
2015, p.1206; see also Carpenter et al., 2001) and, more broadly,
questioned whether it is relevant to use resilience thinking at all
within the social sciences (see also Chapter 3).
24 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

In an attempt to introduce greater social resonance and complex-

ity into understandings of ecological resilience, the SES approach
was ‘updated’, in particular through Gunderson and Holling’s
(2002) Panarchy which was premised upon a hierarchy of adaptive
cycles and named after the Greek god Pan – ‘the epitome of unpre-
dictable change’ (Holling, 2001, p.396). This approach attempted
to reconcile some of the limitations and contradictions of the earlier
theories by providing a conceptual framework to account for the
dual, and seemingly contradictory, characteristics of all complex sys-
tems: stability and change. The panarchy model outlines phases that
are neither fixed nor sequential, rather operating as multiple, nested
adaptive cycles that function and interact independently (Davoudi,
2012; see also Chapter 9). Panarchy also recognises that internal
functions can introduce change, as in social systems, in effect work-
ing from the bottom up as well as the top down (Figure 2.2).
The panarchy framework places great emphasis on the inter-
connectedness of system levels, between the smallest and the larg-
est, and the fastest and slowest. In this framework, the large, slow
cycles set the conditions in which the smaller, faster cycles oper-
ate, although the smaller, faster cycles can impact upon the larger,
slower cycles. Here there are many possible points of interconnect-
edness between these adjacent levels, with two of particular note.
First, revolt, which occurs when fast, small events overwhelm large,
slow ones, for example when a small local power cut causes cascad-
ing impacts through a range of interdependent infrastructure sys-
tems causing wider scales of disruption. Second, remember, which
facilitates a return to stability by drawing on the potential that has

Figure 2.2
A panarchy of nested systems

large & slow

Largest System – e.g. global climate.
Different responses to climate change
interacts and drives with other global
r
be

system and political economy.

em
m
re

Middle System – e.g. national international

intervention and/or polices. Effected by the
largest system and affects the smaller scale
systems.
olt

Smallest system – e.g. local and

rev

regional areas undergoing disruption

due to climate change such as flooding,
community conflict, etc. Localised systems
where small changes in the larger system can small & fast
have significant and fast acting impacts.
 The Origins, Evolution and Critiques of Resilience 25

been accumulated and stored in a larger, slower cycle. For example,

after a widespread power cut, it could refer to the processes and
resources such as knowledge, experience and memories of coping
with prior events that help to guide the system back to its normal
operating state. Sometimes, though, this return is to a different path
than the former state and is referred to as a hysteresis effect – refer-
ring to how a system responds to a loss of resilience, or more specifi-
cally, the return path taken following some disturbance or change
due to cumulative effects which serve to increase resilience again
(Ludwig, Walker and Holling, 1997).
However, such a model, despite its acknowledgement of complex-
ity and social systems, is still, for many, too divorced from reality
of non-linear complex adaptive systems to be applied appropriately
in a range of socio-economic and political policy spheres, failing to
take into account the unevenness of space, inequality, power, or the
agency of actors within social systems. Therefore, while the term
resilience has its roots in physical science (physics and engineering)
and natural science (ecology, biology and biosciences) it is increas-
ingly seen as a ‘political, cultural, and social construction’ (White
and O’Hare, 2014, p.943) that is not amenable to wholesale trans-
fer from the natural to the social sciences. As Cote and Nightin-
gale (2012, p.475) have contended, resilience in SES has ‘evolved
through the application of ecological concepts to society assuming
that social and ecological system dynamics are essentially similar’,
further arguing that resilience ideas have grown in ‘remarkable iso-
lation from critical social science literature’ (cited in Brown, 2013).
It is to this critical social science literature that we now turn in
exploring emerging ‘evolutionary’ approaches to resilience.

Towards an evolutionary approach

The thinking and practices of resilience are increasingly contested,

leading a number of researchers to argue for a more evolutionary
approach to be adopted to consider the nature of constantly chang-
ing non-equilibrium systems (see Carpenter et al., 2005). As Majoor
(2015, p. 257) noted, ‘here the existence of an equilibrium or state
of normality has been replaced by the insight that the world is inher-
ently complex, uncertain and unpredictable’. Thus more nuanced
ideas of resilience have moved away from unquestioned equilibrium
approaches and have sought to embrace adaptation and change
as a means to ensure that a systems functioning continues (Prior
26 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

and Hagmann, 2013). Edwards, in Resilient Nation (2009, p.17),

contends that an understanding of resilience based upon ‘bouncing
back’ is ‘too narrow, too short term and too reactive’, while Shaw
(2012a) suggests that we need to consider a more proactive con-
ception of ‘leaping forward’. Here, in contrast to equilibrist models
that seek a recovery to a (pre-existing or new) stable state, resil-
ience is considered as an ongoing process that seeks to understand
and adapt to the complexities of constant change (Coaffee, 2013a).
Work, particularly in evolutionary economics (Simmie and Martin,
2010) and urban planning, has adopted and modified important
aspects of the adaptive cycle and panarchy models to broaden the
description of resilience beyond bounce-back approaches (Folke
et al., 2010) and to incorporate ‘the dynamic interplay between
persistence, adaptability and transformability across multiple scales
and timeframes’ (Davoudi, 2012, p.310).
The widening of the resilience metaphor and application within
a broader policy arena is logical as it is in correspondence with the
complexity and interrelated nature of truly ‘global’ or ‘globally sig-
nificant’ events that combined exogenous and endogenous forces,
such as climate change/environmental disasters, and how these
influence anthropogenic systems at a variety of spatial scales. Events
during the early part of the twenty-first century such as Hurricane
Katrina in 2005, the global economic recession and credit crunch
between 2008 and 2013, and the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake
demonstrate a need for responses which are multi-agency (verti-
cal and horizontal integration) and multi-scalar (global–national–
regional–local) where the initial shock poses a threat to integrated
‘systems’ and often illuminates more persistent stresses at a local
and regional scale.
On the one hand so-called evolutionary resilience approaches
have advanced as a reaction to the acknowledged limitations of
equilibrium models, often creating a binary opposition to highlight
difference. On the other hand we do not want to fall into the trap
of dismissing the attributes associated with equilibrium models as,
in many ways, these have been appropriated and expanded upon by
more recent theories, ideas and practices. Therefore we would argue
that at present we are witnessing a transitionary period between
equilibrist and evolutionary approaches based on the advancement
of a number of key attributes: preparedness and persistence; adapt-
ability, responsiveness and resourcefulness; redundancy and diver-
sity; and cycles and feedback. Below we expand on these attributes
in more detail.
 The Origins, Evolution and Critiques of Resilience 27

Preparedness and persistence

Preparedness is increasingly utilised in resilience approaches to
anticipate potential shocks and stresses and to allow ample prepara-
tion for such events. Such ‘anticipatory planning’ is also frequently
used to reduce future uncertainties and often takes the form of
enhancing core capabilities amongst key ‘responders’. For example,
the London Resilience Partnership’s 2013 strategy document high-
lighted a number of ‘core’ functional capabilities that underpin their
preparatory resilience work and which help them identify vulner-
abilities and accumulate knowledge:

r
Risk assessment – assessing the hazards and threats to London,

and understanding what impacts these could have – this then
drives what capabilities need to be developed;
r
Training and exercising – all plans and procedures need to be
exercised, to make sure they work in practice, and those who
have a role in responding to an incident trained to be able to
fulfil that role;
r
Coordination and information sharing – identifying and
agreeing the principles by which coordination of multi-agency
response and recovery to an incident occurs;
r
Communicating with the public – making sure people who
live, work and visit London are aware of the risks and how
they can prepare, and that in the event of an emergency they
are given accurate, timely information. (London Resilience
Partnership, 2013, p.8)

Linked to a better understanding of risk and vulnerability is the

related concept of persistence – the ability to withstand a given level
of stress (Davoudi, 2012) – that is often connected to infrastructural
and human systems. Persistence in this context can be related to
classical engineering models of resilience and viewed in terms of the
‘robustness’ of a system. This type of definition is particularly com-
mon in the sub-field of critical infrastructure resilience. As a recent
US study noted:

The robustness component of resilience is the ability to maintain

critical operations and functions in the face of crisis. It is directly
related to the ability of the system to absorb the impacts of a
hazard and to avoid or decrease the importance of the event that
could be generated by this hazard. Robustness can be seen as the
28 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

protection and preparation of a system facing a specific danger.

(Argonne National Laboratory, 2010, p.6, emphasis added)

While robustness in most instances can be seen as a short-term

protective measure, the physical and technical ability of a system to
persist in light of a stress or challenge in the longer term, or within a
dynamic social context, can be influenced by what Davoudi (2012)
referred to as ‘institutional rigidities’ which can stifle adaptability
and innovation both in the short and long term. (In their panarchy
model, Gunderson and Holling (2002) outlined the idea of a ‘rigid-
ity trap’ where particular adaptive cycles decline due to maladapta-
tion as a result of a high degree of connectedness within institutions
that are often seen as lacking diversity and are inflexible to change.)
Thus in evolutionary resilience great emphasis is placed upon the
institutionalism and governance of resilience and in particular ways
in which organisational flexibility and learning can be fostered
alongside public ‘awareness raising’ campaigns that encourage indi-
viduals to be resilient by taking appropriate risk mitigation meas-
ures and preparing for an emergency (Coaffee and Clarke, 2015).

Adaptability, responsiveness and resourcefulness

Adaptability is a key concept in evolutionary resilience which ‘cap-
tures the capacity of a system to learn, combine experience and
knowledge, [and] adjust its responses to changing external drivers
and internal processes’ (Folke et al., 2010, p.18). Adaptability (often
seen through the lens of adaptive capacity, see Chapter 4) is fre-
quently perceived as a function of the type and quality of networked
linkages and multi-scale cooperation. Pike et al. (2010), for exam-
ple, argue that more flexible linkages can enhance system respon-
siveness and allow multiple evolutionary trajectories to emerge,
thus fostering greater system resilience. In contrast, tight linkages
can be seen to enforce path dependency. Where such adaptability is
arguably most required is at the local level where adaptive capacity
and resources are demanded most in relation to local government’s
resilience needs:

In disasters, local governments are the first line of response, some-

times with wide-ranging responsibilities but insufficient capaci-
ties to deal with them. They are equally on the front line when
it comes to anticipating, managing and reducing disaster risk,
setting up or acting on early warning systems and establishing
 The Origins, Evolution and Critiques of Resilience 29

specific disaster/crisis management structures. In many cases, a

review of mandates, responsibilities and resource allocations is
needed to increase the capacity of local governments to respond
to these challenges. (UNISDR, 2012b, p.7)

In order to mobilise adaptability an additional key component of

evolutionary resilience is required – resourcefulness – which is seen
as the network of actors across multiple scales that are expected
to play a role in better coordinating and mobilising assets and cre-
ating an enhanced capacity to act in the face of risk, crisis and
uncertainty. In the emerging resilience literature this has perhaps
two distinct meanings. First, and from a more technical perspective,
it refers to efficiency and the ability to get back to normal func-
tioning (rapidity) and operationally the ability to skilfully prepare
for, respond to, and manage a crisis or disruption as it unfolds.
Here, resourcefulness comprises the steps taken prior to an event
to prepare for possible threats and the application of the training
and planning once an event unfolds. Second, resourcefulness can be
seen as an alternative to resilience, which, for an increasing array of
critical resilience scholars, is seen as lacking social justice. MacKin-
non and Derickson (2013, p.263), for example, see resourceful-
ness as ‘one in which communities have the capacity to engage in
genuinely deliberative democratic dialogue to develop contestable
alternative agendas and work in ways that meaningfully challenge
existing power relations’.

Redundancy and diversity

A critical difference between equilibrist and evolutionary resilience
approaches is the assumptions concerning the role that redundancy
plays in the ability of communities to absorb shocks and how this
underpins resilient systems. Redundancy is recognised as a key prop-
erty and means of improving the resilience of systems and relates to
alternative sources, sub-systems, roles or strategies that provide a
back-up function for each other and increase the resilience of the
whole system. Redundancy has also been defined as ‘the extent to
which elements, systems, or other units of analysis exist that are
substitutable, i.e., capable of satisfying functional requirements
in the event of disruption, degradation, or loss of functionality’
(Bruneau et al., 2003, p.737). In natural and engineering systems
redundancy provides the capacity and ability to absorb and still
persist. By contrast, redundancy in social systems is characterised
30 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

as inefficiency and arises from the pursuit of efficiency within urban

economic systems.
Redundancy can, however, be an essential resource in the resilience
process, necessary for adaptive capacity. In resilience language this
is about reducing path dependencies and optimising paths through
utilisation of resources to enhance alternative path development. In
technical systems, with the drive for optimisation, having a Plan B
was seen as wasteful. In more evolutionary resilience approaches,
having a diversity of options as ‘back up’ is seen as a vital asset that
fosters adaptability, innovation and self-organisation.

Cycles and feedback

Resilience is increasingly being understood as a never-ending journey –
a cyclical process involving a number of overlapping stages, with
distinct emphasise and policy priorities (Coaffee, 2013a). This reso-
nates with SES emphasis on adaptive cycles and feedback loops but
grounds it within more contemporary approaches to complex adap-
tive systems. As such, resilience has become an increasingly central
organising metaphor within the policy-making process across all
aspects of a ‘resilience cycle’ of mitigation, preparedness, response
and recovery (see Figure 2.3) – a cycle that encourages the continual

Figure 2.3
The integrated resilience cycle

Recovery:
Responsiveness & Mitigation:
Resourcefulness Robustness &
Redundancy

INTEGRATED
RESILIENCE CYCLE

Response:
Responsiveness & Preparedness:
Resourcefulness Robustness &
Redundancy
 The Origins, Evolution and Critiques of Resilience 31

reappraisal of plans and strategies. The different aspects of the cycle

pay attention to different attributes of evolutionary resilience (noted
in the sections above). In many ways the resilience cycle draws heav-
ily on the traditional emergency or risk management cycle of preven-
tion, preparedness, response and recovery, but places much greater
stress upon the preparedness phase of the cycle.
The mitigation part of the resilience cycle is focused upon
strengthening the capabilities in order to better cope with future
disruptive challenges, often with a focus upon robustness and
redundancy. Mitigation involves taking sustained actions to reduce
or eliminate long-term risk to people and infrastructure from a
range of stresses and their effects. Mitigation is the initial phase of
the resilience cycle and should be considered before an incident or
emergency occurs. Mitigation should also be integrated with each
of the other phases of the resilience cycle to facilitate a long-range
approach. Typical mitigation techniques will be used to protect peo-
ple and structures; reduce the costs of response and recovery; and
undertake risk assessment.
Preparedness is mainly focused around anticipating events and
creating a response capability often connecting to principles of
robustness and redundancy. This phase involves enhancing the
ability to anticipate disruptive changes and to put in place a man-
agement regime to respond effectively to, and recover from, local
disruptive changes. While it is not possible to mitigate for every
hazardous incident or threat, good preparatory activity can help to
reduce the impact of incidents by taking certain actions before an
event occurs. Preparedness activities are integrated into response
and recovery operations and tend to include a range of stakehold-
ers and multiple interlocking scales – local, regional, and national
agencies, organisations and citizens. Preparedness activities are typi-
cally operationalised at the local level and might include tools to:
analyse probable threats and risk assessment; develop resilience
plans that address identified hazards, risks and response measures;
design response management structures and train staff in key areas
of response operations; conduct scenario planning and exercising;
designate facilities for emergency use; and set up appropriate warn-
ing systems.
The response phase of the resilience cycle involves action taken
during, and immediately after, an incident or event occurs, focus-
ing on minimising damage and disruption and allowing a system
to re-establish functionality as rapidly as possible. Response often
focuses upon responsiveness and resourcefulness and typically
32 Towards a Framework for Resilient Planning and Urban Living

involves conducting operations to reduce the impact from a hazard

or threat to acceptable levels (or eliminate it entirely). In the case of
a disaster situation this might involve evacuating potential victims,
providing care to those in need and restoring critical public services
and infrastructure. At this stage of the cycle many measures focus
upon the collation of critical information required, including infor-
mation about: lifesaving needs, such as evacuation and search and
rescue; the status of critical infrastructure, such as transportation,
utilities, communication systems, the status of critical facilities, and
the potential for cascading events (events that occur as a direct or
indirect result of an initial event). In other words, response involves
putting preparedness plans into action and typically involves con-
ducting a situation assessment to determine the most appropriate
response activities.
The recovery phase of the resilience cycle seeks to utilise the
attributes of responsiveness and resourcefulness and involves short-
term or long-term phases of rebuilding and restoration so that
individuals, businesses and governments can function and protect
against future disruptive challenges. The ultimate goal of the recov-
ery phase is to return the systems and activities to normal, or a ‘new
normality’, based on a better appreciation of risk. Recovery begins
right after an event with, for example, damage assessment. Some
recovery activities may be concurrent with response efforts. Long-
term recovery includes restoring economic activity and rebuilding
community facilities and housing, and putting in place mitigation
measures to ensure against future challenges.

Resilience for whom, and by whom? A critique of

contemporary resilience

The shift in resilience approaches focused upon moving equilib-

rium ideas towards an alternative evolutionary and transformative
doctrine required in an age of increased volatility and uncertainty
is not without critique. Much of this critique concerns the alleged
tarnishing of resilience ideas through continued processes of control
enacted through neoliberalism and a post-political, or depoliticis-
ing, landscape characterised by: the disciplining role of consensus
towards an uncontestable moral (rather than political) ordering
(Mouffe, 2005; Hay, 2007; Swyngedouw, 2009); the rise in experts
as a substitute for proper political debate (Zizek, 2008; Fischer,
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Et quand il dit qu'il aimerait mieux
Être lépreux que de tomber en péché mortel (tant il m'aime), c'est
vrai.
Lui je sais que c'est vrai.
Ce n'est pas vrai seulement qu'il le dit. C'est vrai que c'est vrai. Il ne
dit pas ça pour que ça fasse bien.
Il ne dit pas ça parce qu'il a vu ça dans les livres ni parce qu'on lui a
dit de le dire. Il dit ça parce que ça est.
Il m'aime à ce point. Il m'aime ainsi. Librement. La preuve que j'en
ai dans la même race
C'est que le sire de Joinville (que j'aime tant tout de même) qui est
un autre baron français,
Qui aimerait mieux au contraire avoir commis trente péchés mortels
que de devenir lépreux,
(Trente, le malheureux, comme il ne sait pas ce qu'il dit)
Ne se gêne pas non plus pour dire ce qu'il pense
C'est-à-dire pour dire le contraire
En présence même d'un si grand roi
Et d'un si grand saint
Que pourtant il connaissait pour tel,
C'est-à-dire pour contrarier un si grand roi et un si grand saint. La
liberté de parole
De celui qui ne veut pas risquer le coup
D'être lépreux plutôt que de tomber en péché mortel
Me garantit la liberté de parole de celui qui aime mieux être lépreux
Que de tomber en péché mortel.
Si l'un dit ce qu'il pense, l'autre aussi dit ce qu'il pense.
L'un prouve l'autre.
Ils n'ont pas peur de contrarier même le roi, même le saint.
Mais aussi quand ils parlent, on sait qu'ils parlent comme ils sont.
Et qu'ils pensent ce qu'ils disent. Et qu'ils disent ce qu'ils pensent.
C'est tout un.
Que ne ferait-on pas pour être aimé par de tels hommes.
La servitude est un air que l'on respire dans une prison
Et dans une chambre de malade. Mais la liberté
Est ce grand air que l'on respire dans une belle vallée
Et encore plus à flanc de coteau et encore plus sur un large plateau
bien aéré.
Or il y a un certain goût de l'air pur et du grand air
Qui fait les hommes forts, un certain goût de santé,
D'une pleine santé, virile, qui fait paraître tout autre air
Enfermé, malade, confiné.
Celui-là seul qui vit au grand air
A la peau assez cuite et l'œil assez profond et le sang de sa race.
Ainsi celui-là seul qui vit à la grande liberté
A la peau assez cuite et l'âme assez profonde et le sang de ma
grâce.
Que ne ferait-on pas pour être aimé par de tels hommes.
Comme ils sont francs entre eux, ainsi ils sont francs avec moi.
Comme ils se disent la vérité entre eux, ainsi ils me disent la vérité à
moi.
Et comme le baron n'a point peur de contrarier le roi et le saint
même,
(Qu'il aime tant, qu'il estime à son prix, pour qui il se ferait tuer),
Ainsi je l'avoue ils n'ont quelquefois pas peur de me contrarier.
Moi le roi, moi le saint. Mais quand ils m'aiment, ils m'aiment.
Ils m'estiment mon prix. Ils se feraient tuer pour moi.
J'en ai pour garant même leur âpre liberté.
Leur liberté de parole, leur liberté d'acte. Ces hommes libres
Savent donner à l'amour un certain goût âpre, un certain goût
propre et cette liberté
Est le plus beau reflet qu'il y ait dans le monde car elle me rappelle,
car elle me renvoie
Car c'est un reflet de ma propre Liberté
Qui est le secret même et le mystère
Et le centre et le cœur et le germe de ma Création.
Comme j'ai créé l'homme à mon image et à ma ressemblance,
Ainsi j'ai créé la liberté de l'homme à l'image et à la ressemblance
De ma propre, de mon originelle liberté. Aussi quand saint Louis
tombe à genoux
Sur les dalles de la Sainte-Chapelle, sur les dalles de Notre-Dame
C'est un homme qui tombe à genoux, ce n'est pas une chiffe, ce
n'est pas une loque
Un tremblant esclave d'Orient
C'est un homme et c'est un Français et quand saint Louis m'aime
C'est un homme qui m'aime et quand saint Louis se donne
C'est un homme qui se donne. Et quand saint Louis me donne son
cœur
Il me donne un cœur d'homme et un cœur de Français. Et quand il
m'estime mon prix
C'est-à-dire quand il m'estime Dieu,
C'est une tête d'homme qui m'estime, une saine tête de Français.
(Et Joinville même, Joinville qu'il ne faut point oublier.
Quand il m'aime (car il m'aime aussi),
Quand il m'estime (car il m'estime aussi),
Quand il se donne (car il se donne aussi) et quand il me donne son
cœur,
Il sait ce qu'il est, qui il est,
Il sait ce qu'il vaut, il sait ce qu'il pèse, il sait ce qu'il donne, il sait ce
qu'il apporte
Et je le sais aussi.
Quand Joinville même, et je ne dis pas seulement saint Louis,
Quand Joinville tombe à genoux sur la dalle
Dans la cathédrale de Reims
Ou dans la simple chapelle de son château de Joinville,
Ce n'est pas un esclave d'Orient qui s'écroule,
Dans la peur et dans quelque lâche et dans quelque sale
tremblement
Aux genoux et aux pieds de quelque potentat
D'Orient. C'est un homme libre et un baron français,
Joinville sire de Joinville,
Qui donne, qui apporte et qui fait tomber à genoux
Librement et pour ainsi dire et en un certain sens gratuitement
Et un homme libre et un baron français,
Joinville sire de Joinville de la comté de Champagne,
Jean, sire de Joinville, sénéchal de Champagne.

Il ne faut pas oublier non plus Joinville, dit Dieu.

Il osait reprendre même le roi.
Il me reprenait bien un peu moi-même
Avec son histoire de la lèpre et des péchés mortels.
Mais je leur en passe tant, je leur passe tout ce qu'ils veulent.

Il ne faut pas oublier Joinville, dit Dieu. C'étaient de nobles hommes.

Si l'on oubliait les pécheurs, il n'en resterait pas beaucoup.
Peu de saints, beaucoup de pécheurs, comme partout.
Mais il faut ce grand cortège de pécheurs
Pour accompagner ces quelques saints. Il faut penser aussi au sire
de Joinville.
Quelques saints marchent en tête. Et le grand cortège des pécheurs
suit derrière. Ainsi est faite ma chrétienté.
C'est ainsi qu'on obtient les grandes processions.
Quelques pasteurs marchent devant. Et le grand troupeau suit
derrière. Ainsi est fait le cortège de ma chrétienté.

Comme leur liberté a été créée à l'image et à la ressemblance de ma

liberté, dit Dieu,
Comme leur liberté est le reflet de ma liberté,
Ainsi j'aime à trouver en eux comme une certaine gratuité
Qui soit comme un reflet de la gratuité de ma grâce,

Qui soit comme créée à l'image et à la ressemblance de la gratuité

de ma grâce.

J'aime qu'en un sens ils prient non seulement librement mais comme
gratuitement.
J'aime qu'ils tombent à genoux non seulement librement mais
comme gratuitement.
J'aime qu'ils se donnent et qu'ils donnent leur cœur et qu'ils se
remettent et qu'ils supportent et qu'ils estiment non seulement
librement mais comme gratuitement.
J'aime qu'ils aiment enfin, dit Dieu, non seulement librement mais
comme gratuitement.
Or pour cela, dit Dieu, avec mes Français je suis bien servi.
C'est un peuple qui est venu au monde la main ouverte et le cœur
libéral.
Il donne, il sait donner. Il est naturellement gratuit.
Quand il donne, il ne vend pas, celui-là, et il ne prête pas à la petite
semaine.
Il donne pour rien. Autrement est-ce donner.
Il aime pour rien. Autrement est-ce aimer.
Il ne me propose point toujours des marchés généralement honteux.
Peuple libre, peuple gratuit, et non plus seulement peuple jardinier.
Peuple gratuit, peuple gracieux.
Peuple de barons français, peuple qui lève la tête, peuple qui sais
parler aux grands
Et par conséquent à moi le Très-Grand. Ceux qui baissent toujours la
tête
On ne voit pas qu'ils baissent aussi la tête
A l'Offertoire et à l'Élévation du Corps de mon Fils.
Mais ces Français qui lèvent toujours la tête,
Qui ont toujours la tête droite
Et haute,
Quand dans une église cent cinquante ou deux cents rangées de
Français à genoux
Baissent la tête ensemble en même temps trois fois aux trois coups
de la sonnette
Pour l'offrande et l'offertoire
Et pour la consécration et pour l'élévation du corps de mon fils,
Ça se voit, qu'ils baissent la tête et tout le monde comprend
Que ça en vaut la peine,
Que c'est un instant solennel et le plus grand mystère et le plus
grand instant qu'il y ait dans le monde.

C'est un peuple, dit Dieu, qui a la gratuité dans le sang. Il donne et

ne retient pas.
Il donne et ne reprend pas.
Sa main gauche ne retient pas ce que donne sa main droite.
Sa main gauche ne reprend pas ce que donne sa main droite.
Sa main gauche ignore littéralement ce que fait sa main droite.
Et ainsi c'est le peuple qui se conforme le plus littéralement
Aux paroles de mon fils. Et qui le plus littéralement réalise
Les paroles de mon fils.
Peuple naturellement libéral, dit Dieu, peuple aux mains libérales
Il ne sait pas marchander. Il ne marchande pas sur une prière.
Il ne marchande pas sur un vœu. Quand il donne, il donne. Quand il
demande, il demande.
Il ne fait pas traîner ce qu'il donne dans ce qu'il demande et ce qu'il
demande dans ce qu'il donne.
Il n'embarbouille pas tout ça l'un dans l'autre.
Il n'emmêle pas. Il ne demande pas pour donner, il ne donne pas
pour demander, il ne donne pas pour recevoir. Il sait très bien
Que tout ce qu'on m'apporte n'est rien auprès,
En comparaison, au prix de ce que je donne.
Aussi ces Français ne me proposent-ils jamais un échange, un
marché. Ils savent très bien
Que ma grâce est gratuite, qu'il n'est que de me plaire, que je fais
ce que je veux
Et ils y répondent par une sorte de prière gratuite et même
Par des sortes de vœux gratuits. Ils savent très bien
Qu'ils ne m'apportent aucuns mérites et que ce que je fais,
Je le fais pour les mérites et par les mérites de mon fils et des
saints.

A une gratuité de ma grâce ils répondent par une certaine gratuité

de la prière.
Et par une certaine gratuité du vœu même.

Ils me répondent comme je demande. Or s'il en est ainsi du menu

peuple et d'un baron français
Que sera-ce d'un saint Louis, baron lui-même et roi des barons.
Dans leur histoire de la lèpre et du péché mortel voici comme je
calcule, dit Dieu.
Quand Joinville aime mieux avoir commis trente péchés mortels que
d'être lépreux
Et quand saint Louis aime mieux être lépreux que de tomber en un
seul péché mortel,
Je n'en retiens pas, dit Dieu, que saint Louis m'aime ordinairement
Et que Joinville m'aime trente fois moins qu'ordinairement.
Que saint Louis m'aime suivant la mesure, à la mesure,
Et que Joinville m'aime trente fois moins que la mesure.
Je compte au contraire, dit Dieu. Voici comme je calcule. Voici ce
que je retiens.
J'en retiens au contraire que Joinville m'aime ordinairement
Honnêtement, comme un pauvre homme peut m'aimer,
Doit m'aimer.
Et que saint Louis au contraire m'aime trente fois plus
qu'ordinairement,
Trente fois plus qu'honnêtement.
Que Joinville m'aime à la mesure,
Et que saint Louis m'aime trente fois plus qu'à la mesure.
(Et si je l'ai mis dans mon ciel, celui-là, au moins je sais pourquoi).

Voilà comme je compte, dit Dieu. Et alors mon compte est bon. Car
cette lèpre dont il s'agissait,
Cette lèpre dont ils parlaient et d'être lépreux
Ce n'était pas une lèpre d'imagination et une lèpre d'invention et une
lèpre d'exercice.
Ce n'était pas une lèpre qu'ils avaient vue dans les livres ou dont ils
avaient entendu parler
Plus ou moins vaguement
Ce n'était pas une lèpre pour en parler ni une lèpre pour faire peur
en conversation et en figures,
Mais c'était la réelle lèpre et ils parlaient de l'avoir, eux-mêmes,
réellement,
Qu'ils connaissaient bien, qu'ils avaient vue vingt fois
En France et en Terre-Sainte,
Cette dégoûtante maladie farineuse, cette sale gale, cette mauvaise
teigne,
Cette répugnante maladie de croûtes qui fait d'un homme
L'horreur et la honte de l'homme,
Cet ulcère, cette pourriture sèche, enfin cette définitive lèpre
Qui ronge la peau et la face et le bras et la main,
Et la cuisse et la jambe et le pied
Et le ventre et la peau et les os et les nerfs et les veines,
Cette sèche moisissure blanche qui gagne de proche en proche
Et qui mord comme avec des dents de souris,
Et qui fait d'un homme le rebut et la fuite de l'homme,
Et qui détruit un corps comme une granuleuse moisissure
Et qui pousse sur le corps ces affreuses blanches lèvres,
Ces affreuses lèvres sèches de plaies
Et qui avance toujours et jamais ne recule
Et qui gagne toujours et qui jamais ne perd
Et qui va jusqu'au bout,
Et qui fait d'un homme un cadavre qui marche,
C'est de cette lèpre-là qu'ils parlaient, de nulle autre.
C'est de cette lèpre-là qu'ils pensaient, de nulle autre.
D'une lèpre réelle, nullement d'une lèpre d'exercice.
C'est cette lèpre-là qu'il aimait mieux avoir, nulle autre.
Eh bien moi je trouve que c'est trente fois saisissant
Et que c'est m'aimer trente fois et que c'est trente fois de l'amour.

Ah sans doute si Joinville avec les yeux de l'âme avait vu

Ce que c'est que cette lèpre de l'âme
Que nous ne nommons pas en vain le péché mortel,
Si avec les yeux de l'âme il avait vu
Cette pourriture sèche de l'âme infiniment plus mauvaise,
Infiniment plus laide, infiniment plus pernicieuse,
Infiniment plus maligne, infiniment plus odieuse
Lui-même il eût tout de suite compris combien son propos était
absurde.
Et que la question ne se pose même pas. Mais tous ne voient pas
avec les yeux de l'âme.
Je comprends cela, dit Dieu, tous ne sont pas des saints, ainsi est
ma chrétienté.
Il y a aussi les pécheurs, il en faut, c'est ainsi.
C'était un bon chrétien, tout de même, ensemble, c'était un pécheur,
il en faut dans la chrétienté.
C'était un bon Français, Jean, sire de Joinville, un baron de saint
Louis. Au moins il disait ce qu'il pense.
Ces gens-là font le gros de l'armée. Il faut aussi des troupes. Il ne
suffit pas d'avoir des chefs qui marchent en tête.
Ces gens-là partent fort honnêtement en croisade, au moins une fois
sur les deux, et font très honnêtement la croisade.
Ils se battent très bien et se font tuer très proprement et gagnent le
royaume du ciel
Tout comme un autre.
(Je veux dire comme un autre gagnerait le royaume du ciel.
Ou je veux dire comme eux-mêmes ils gagneraient un autre
royaume,
Un royaume de la terre.) C'est ce qu'il y a de plus remarquable en
eux.
Ils s'en vont les uns comme les autres, en troupe, les uns derrière
les autres.
Sans se presser, sans s'étonner, sans faire des grands gestes,
Très honnêtement, fort ordinairement,
Sans faire un éclat et ils finissent tout de même
Par conquérir le royaume du ciel.
Ou encore ils gagnent le royaume du ciel comme on gagne un
royaume de la terre,
Ils attaquent le royaume du ciel comme on attaque un royaume de
la terre,
A main forte et cela ne réussit déjà pas si mal. Violenti rapiunt.
Ils vous font d'ailleurs tout cela fort honnêtement, très
communément, comme allant de soi.
Comme si ce fût la chose la plus naturelle du monde.
Seulement ces malheureux ne veulent pas avoir la lèpre. Ils trouvent
sans doute que ce n'est pas propre. Ils aimeraient mieux autre
chose.
Les malheureux, les sots, s'ils voyaient la lèpre de l'âme
Et s'ils voyaient la saleté ou la propreté de l'âme.
Mais voilà, ils se disent: Je n'ai qu'un corps (les sots, ils oublient le
principal,
Ils oublient non pas seulement l'âme, mais le corps de leur éternité,
Le corps de la résurrection des corps),
Je n'ai qu'un corps, pensent-ils (ne pensant qu'à leur corps terrestre)
Si cette sale lèpre me prend, je suis perdu
(Ils veulent dire que leur corps temporel est temporellement perdu).
C'est une maladie qui prend toujours et qui ne rend jamais.
C'est une pourriture sèche qui fait avancer toujours et toujours
Les bords des lèvres de ses affreuses plaies.
Si je suis pris, je suis perdu.
Ça commence par un point, ça finit par tout le corps.
Ça ne pardonne pas, quand c'est commencé c'est fini.
C'est une maladie impossible à défaire.
Elle défait tout, ce qui est parti ne revient jamais plus. Elle rompt
tout.
Ce corps que j'ai (et qu'ils aiment tant) tomberait en poussière et en
lambeaux
Et en cette sale farine granuleuse et ne me reviendrait jamais plus.
C'est une gangrène irrévocable et qui ne retourne jamais en arrière.
Or ils y tiennent à leur corps. On dirait qu'ils croient qu'ils n'ont que
ça.
Ils savent pourtant bien qu'ils ont une âme. La vie est l'union de
l'âme et du corps,
La mort est leur séparation. Mais leur corps leur paraît
Solide et bon vivant.
Ils ont l'impression que la lèpre anéantira tout leur corps et qu'elle
les tiendra jusqu'au bout (ils ne considèrent point qu'au bout de
ce bout
Commence le véritable commencement)
Et alors ils aimeraient mieux avoir autre chose que la lèpre.
Je pense qu'ils aimeraient mieux attraper
Une maladie qui leur plairait. C'est toujours le même système.
Ils veulent bien affronter les plus terribles épreuves
Et m'offrir les plus redoutables exercices,
Pourvu que ce soient eux qui les aient préalablement
Choisis. Là-dessus les Pharisiens s'écrient et font des éclats
Et poussent des cris et font des mines et ces exécrables Pharisiens
Surtout prient disant: Seigneur nous vous rendons grâces
De ce que vous ne nous avez point fait semblables à cet homme
Qui a peur d'attraper la lèpre. Or moi je dis au contraire, dit Dieu,
C'est moi qui dis: Ce n'est pas rien que d'attraper la lèpre.
Je sais ce que c'est que la lèpre. C'est moi qui l'ai faite.
Je la connais. Je dis: Ce n'est pas rien que d'attraper la lèpre.
Et je n'ai jamais dit que les épreuves et les exercices de leur vie,
Et les maladies et les misères de leur vie,
Et les détresses de leur vie ce n'était rien.
J'ai toujours dit au contraire et j'ai toujours pensé
Et j'ai toujours pesé que ce n'était pas rien.
Et il faut bien croire qu'en effet ce n'était pas rien
Puisque mon fils a fait tant de miracles sur les malades
Et puisque j'ai donné au roi de France
De toucher les écrouelles.

Les Pharisiens poussent des cris sur celui qui ne veut pas attraper la
lèpre.
Et ils sont scandalisés, ces vertueux.
Mais moi qui ne suis pas vertueux,
Dit Dieu,
Je ne pousse pas des cris et je ne suis pas scandalisé.

Je ne compte pas, je n'en retiens pas que ce Joinville est trente fois
au dessous de l'ordinaire.
Mais j'en retiens, mais je compte au contraire
Que c'est ce saint Louis qui est peu ordinaire, trente fois peu
ordinaire, trente fois extraordinaire, trente fois au dessus de
 l'ordinaire.

Je ne compte pas, je n'en retiens pas

Que Joinville est trente fois lâche.
Mais au contraire j'en retiens et je compte
Que c'est ce saint Louis qui est trente fois brave,
Trente fois brave au dessus de l'ordinaire et plus que la mesure.

Je ne compte pas, je n'en retiens pas

Que Joinville est trente fois plus bas.
Mais au contraire j'en retiens et je compte
Que c'est ce saint Louis qui est trente fois haut,
Trente fois haut au dessus de l'ordinaire et plus que la mesure.

Je ne compte pas, je n'en retiens pas

Que Joinville est trente fois petit.
Mais je sais seulement qu'il est homme.
Et au contraire j'en retiens et je compte,
Voici comme je compte,
Et c'est ainsi.
J'en retiens et je compte que c'est ce saint Louis, roi de France,
Qui est trente fois grand, trente fois au dessus de l'ordinaire et plus
que la mesure

Et qui est trente fois près de mon cœur et trente fois le frère de mon
fils.

Les Pharisiens crient le haro sur celui qui ne veut pas attraper la
lèpre.
Mais le saint ne crie pas le haro et il n'est pas scandalisé.
Il connaît trop la nature de l'homme et l'infirmité de l'homme et il est
seulement profondément peiné.
Les Pharisiens crient le haro sur cet homme qui ne veut pas attraper
la lèpre.
Voyez au contraire comme le Saint lui parle doucement.
Fermement mais doucement.
Et cette fermeté est d'autant plus sûre et me donne d'autant plus de
certitude et plus d'assurance et plus de garantie qu'elle est plus
douce.
Les cœurs des pécheurs ne se prennent point par effraction.

Ils ne sont pas assez purs. Le seul royaume du ciel se prend par
effraction.

Les Pharisiens courent sus à l'homme qui ne veut pas attraper la

lèpre.
Voyez comme au contraire le Saint le reprend doucement.
Le Saint est envahi d'une peine affreuse à cette parole du pécheur.
Mais il absorbe, il dévore sa peine et la souffre lui-même pour lui-
même en lui-même.
Et voyez comme il reprend doucement le pécheur.

Or moi, dit Dieu, je suis du côté des saints et nullement du côté des
Pharisiens.
Aussi j'absorbe et je dévore ma peine et je la souffre moi-même en
moi-même pour moi-même,
Et voyez comme je parle doucement au pécheur
Et comme je reprends doucement le pécheur.
Et quand les frères s'en furent partis,
(Il attend que les deux frères qu'il avait appelés,
Qu'il avait fait venir s'en soient partis. Il attend qu'ils soient seuls. Il
ne veut pas
Faire un semblant d'affront à un baron français),
il m'appela tout seul, et me fit seoir à ses pieds et me dit:
«Comment me dîtes-vous hier ce?»
Et je lui dis que encore lui disais-je.

Et je, qui onques ne lui mentis;

Et je lui dis que encore lui disais-je; en vérité, dit Dieu,
Cette franchise de Joinville, qui ose répéter cela au roi,
Est précisément ce qui me garantit la franchise de saint Louis.
Cette franchise de péché de Joinville et de cette certaine impiété
Est justement ce qui me couvre, ce qui me garantit,
Ce qui pour ainsi dire me contrebalance
La franchise de sainteté de saint Louis. Et ce qui me la vérifie.
Entendez-moi, dit Dieu, c'est la liberté de Joinville
Qui me couvre, qui me garantit la liberté de saint Louis.
C'est la gratuité de Joinville
Qui me couvre, qui me garantit la gratuité, la grâce de saint Louis.
Entendez-moi c'est le péché de Joinville, ce bon chrétien,
Qui me couvre, qui me garantit la sainteté même de saint Louis.

Je, qui onques ne lui mentis, c'est parce que Joinville ne mentit
jamais à saint Louis,
Même au risque de lui déplaire, même au risque de le contrarier et
de lui faire une grande peine,
Que je suis sûr aussi et que je suis garanti
Que saint Louis ne me ment jamais,
Que son amour, que sa sainteté ne me ment pas,
Que ce n'est point un amour, une sainteté de convention,
De complaisance, imaginaire,
Mais que c'est un amour, une sainteté réelle,
Franche, terrienne,
Terreuse, une sainteté de race et de belle race,
Libre, gratuite.

Et il me dit: «Vous dîtes comme vif étourdi;

(Rien de plus, comme vif étourdi, comme vif étourneau);

car vous devez savoir que nulle si laide lèpre n'est comme d'être en
péché mortel, pour ce que l'âme qui est en péché mortel est
semblable au diable; par quoi nulle si laide lèpre ne peut être.

«Et bien est vrai que quand l'homme meurt, il est guéri de la lèpre
du corps; mais quand l'homme qui a fait le péché mortel meurt,
il ne sait pas ni n'est certain que il ait eu en sa vie telle
repentance que Dieu lui ait pardonné: par quoi grand peur doit
avoir que cette lèpre lui dure tant comme Dieu sera en paradis.
Si vous prie, fit-il, tant comme je puis, que vous mettiez votre
cœur à ce, pour l'amour de Dieu et de moi, que vous aimassiez
mieux que tout méchef avînt au corps, de lèpre et de toute
maladie, que ce que le péché mortel vînt à l'âme de vous.

Quelle douceur, mon enfant, quelle fermeté dans la douceur, quelle

douceur dans la fermeté.
L'une et l'autre ensemble liées indissolubles, l'une poussant l'autre,
l'une faisant valoir l'autre, l'une soutenant l'autre, l'une
nourrissant l'autre.
La douceur toute armée de fermeté, la fermeté toute armée de
douceur.
L'une enfermée dans l'autre, l'autre enfermée dans l'une, comme un
double noyau dans un double fruit
De fermeté.
Une douceur d'autant mieux garantie par la fermeté, une fermeté
d'autant mieux garantie par la douceur.
L'une portant l'autre.
Car il n'est point de véritable douceur que fondée sur la fermeté,
Vêtue de fermeté.
Et il n'est point de véritable fermeté que vêtue de douceur.

Quelle douceur, quelle tendresse. Celui qui aime

Entre en la sujétion de celui qui est aimé.
Voilà comme il parle, lui le roi de France.
Il est vrai que c'est à un baron français.
Quel soin de ne point offenser.
De ne meurtrir aucunement, de ne point léser.
De ne point blesser.
De ne laisser aucune trace,
Aucun souvenir de blessure et de meurtrissure.
Quelle attention, quelle dilection.
Quel soin de ne pas donner même une apparence de tort.
Quel soin de ne pas commettre la moindre offense.
Lui le roi, parlant pour Dieu et pour lui-même
Pour Dieu et pour le roi de France il parle humblement.
Il parle comme un tremblant solliciteur.
C'est qu'il tremble en effet et c'est qu'il sollicite.
Il tremble que son fidèle Joinville ne fasse pas son salut.
Et il demande à Joinville, il sollicite que le fidèle Joinville
Fasse son salut. Veuille bien faire son salut. Quelle sollicitation. Il a
soin de le prendre à part. Il attend que les deux frères soient
partis.
Quelle douceur, quel père parlerait plus doucement à son fils.
Comment me dîtes-vous hier ce?
Et je lui dis que encore lui disais-je.
Et il me dit: Vous dîtes comme hastis musars; (comme hâtif musard,
comme hâtif étourdi, comme hâtif étourneau);
Il feint presque de plaisanter, de commencer sur un ton assez
plaisant, justement comme un qui a peur,
Précisément comme celui qui va entrer dans le propos le plus grave,
Qui va causer, qui va traiter de l'intérêt le plus grave);
(ainsi commencent les joutes les plus redoutables);
Et le sérieux profond arrive tout aussitôt après,
Entre incontinent dans le corps même et dans le texte de cette
plaisante,
De cette redoutable entrée. Vous dîtes comme hâtis musars;
car vous devez savoir que nulle si laide lèpre
n'est comme d'être en péché mortel,
pour ce que l'âme qui est en péché mortel est semblable au diable:
par quoi nulle si laide lèpre ne peut être.

Et les paroles qui suivent ne sont point indignes, mon enfant, des
plus belles paroles des Évangiles,
Des plus grandes paroles de Jésus dans les Évangiles. Car en
imitation de Jésus
Il a été donné à des saints de prononcer des paroles non indignes
De Jésus, des paroles de Jésus,
Comme en imitation et en l'honneur de Jésus
Il a été donné à des martyrs de subir une mort
Non indigne de la mort de Jésus. Ainsi ces paroles qui viennent
Ne sont point indignes de la prédication de Jésus même.
Et bien est vrai que quand l'homme meurt, il est guéri de la lèpre du
corps;
(comme c'est la même voix que dans les Évangiles, mon enfant, la
même profondeur,
La même résonance de la même voix dans la même profondeur)
(c'est qu'aussi c'est la même sainteté. Jésus et les autres saints. La
même commune éternelle sainteté,
La même communion des saints);
mais quand l'homme qui a fait le péché mortel meurt,
il ne sait pas ni n'est certain que il ait eu en sa vie telle repentance
que Dieu lui ait pardonné:
par quoi grand peur doit avoir que cette lèpre lui dure
tant comme Dieu sera en paradis. Mais les paroles qui viennent, mon
enfant,
Ne sont pas indignes du cœur des Évangiles,
Des trois paraboles de l'Espérance.
Elles sont le reflet, elles sont le report, elles sont le rappel
Dans la même résonance et dans la même ligne
Des trois paraboles de l'Espérance. Un homme avait deux fils. Un roi
avait un baron.
Un roi avait un fidèle. Un roi avait un fils. Un roi avait un féal. Et
comme les trois paraboles de l'espérance
Sont le cœur peut-être et sans doute et le couronnement des
Évangiles,
Ainsi ces paroles de saint Louis qui viennent sont le cœur peut-être
et sans doute et le couronnement
Non seulement de saint Louis et de la sainteté de saint Louis.
Mais de toute sainteté peut-être après les Évangiles,
De toute sainteté issue des Évangiles. Car elle est le reflet, et le
report, et le rappel
De cette unique parabole de l'enfant qui était perdu. Comme il
s'abaisse, le roi de France.
Quelle chrétienne humiliation, quelle humiliation de saint. Celui qui
aime
Entre dans la dépendance de celui qui est aimé. Quelle noble
humilité. Il ne commande pas, il demande.
Il attend, il espère, il reprend doucement. Il prie. Quelle humilité
toute vêtue de noblesse.
Si vous prie, fit-il, tant comme je puis, que vous mettiez votre cœur
à ce,
pour l'amour de Dieu et de moi,
que vous aimassiez mieux que tout méchef avînt au corps,
de lèpre et de toute maladie,
que ce que le péché mortel vînt à l'âme de vous.

Quelle instance, quelle humble instance, quelle noble instance,

quelle tendre instance.
Voilà comme le saint parle au pécheur,
Pour son salut. Jésus même
N'a jamais été plus tendre au pécheur. C'est que le saint par lui-
même sait
Ce que c'est que d'être homme et ce qu'est la faiblesse humaine
Et l'infirmité de l'homme
Et ce que c'est pour l'homme que la tentation
De sa propre faiblesse. Car l'esprit est prompt, mais la chair est
faible.
Et moi, dit Dieu, qui suis du côté des saints et nullement du côté des
Pharisiens,
Moi qui suis tout au bout du côté des saints
Moi aussi je sais quelle est la faiblesse et l'infirmité de l'homme (c'est
moi qui l'ai fait),
Et je parle à Joinville comme saint Louis.

Comment serais-je moins tendre que saint Louis. Comme lui je

tremble
Pour leur salut. Comme lui je sollicite, hélas,
Pour leur salut. Les Pharisiens veulent que les autres soient parfaits.
Et ils exigent et ils réclament. Et ils ne parlent que de cela. Mais moi
je ne suis pas si exigeant.
Parce que je sais ce que c'est que la perfection, je ne leur en
demande pas tant.
Parce que je suis parfait et il n'y a que moi qui est parfait.
Je suis le Tout-Parfait. Aussi je suis moins difficile.
Moins exigeant. Je suis le Saint des saints.
Je sais ce que c'est. Je sais ce qu'il en coûte.
Je sais ce que ça coûte, je sais ce que ça vaut. Les Pharisiens
veulent toujours de la perfection
Pour les autres. Chez les autres.
Mais le saint qui veut de la perfection pour lui-même
En lui-même
Et qui cherche et qui peine dans le labeur et dans les larmes
Et qui obtient quelquefois quelque perfection,
Le saint est moins difficile pour les autres.
Il est moins exigeant pour les autres. Il sait ce que c'est.
Il est exigeant pour soi, difficile pour soi. C'est plus difficile.

Les Pharisiens trouvent toujours les autres indignes et tout le monde

indigne.
Mais moi qui ne vaux peut-être pas ces hommes de bien, dit Dieu,
Je suis moins difficile, je trouve
Que ce Joinville est homme et que c'est saint Louis qui a trente fois
vaincu,
Trente fois surmonté, trente fois remonté, trente fois surpassé la
nature de l'homme.
Je trouve que ce Joinville est commun, que c'est un bon chrétien, un
bon pécheur de l'espèce commune,
Et que c'est ce saint Louis au contraire qui est trente fois hors du
commun, trente fois saint, trente fois hors de l'espèce ordinaire.
Je trouve que ce Joinville n'est pas indigne et même qu'il est digne,
Et que c'est ce saint Louis qui est trente fois digne
D'être mon fils dans mon cœur et d'appuyer son épaule
Contre mon épaule.

D'ailleurs ce qu'il avait eu en Égypte, dit Dieu,

Et ce qu'il attrapa en Tunisie,
Ce grand épuisement de tout son corps
Et cet incoercible
Flux de ventre dont il mourut
Ne valaient pas mieux que cette lèpre qu'il consentait d'avoir.
Il n'y a point de maladie de bonne, dit Dieu. Je le sais, c'est moi qui
les ai faites.
C'est pour cela qu'il se fait tant de saluts, et des plus beaux, dans la
maladie,
Et des plus grands.
Et que tant de saints sortent de la maladie
Naturellement comme du ventre de leur mère et que tant de
saintetés
Sortent naturellement de la maladie les plus éclatantes, les plus
tendres, les plus chères, les plus fleurissantes de toutes,
Et qu'il y a manière de tourner la maladie et la mort par la maladie
en martyre même.

Pour moi, dit Dieu, quand je vois,

Quand je considère cette maladie qu'est réellement la lèpre,
Cette inexpiable maladie farineuse aux croûtes blanches,
Qui les défait morceau par morceau,
(Qui défait leur corps charnel),
Qu'un homme qui en a vu, réellement,
Qui a vu de la lèpre et des vrais lépreux
Dise tranquillement qu'il aimerait mieux attraper la lèpre que de
tomber en péché mortel,
C'est-à-dire dise réellement qu'il aimerait mieux attraper cette
maladie-là que de me déplaire,
J'en suis saisi moi-même, dit Dieu, et je tremble d'admiration
Devant tant d'amour et je suis honteux
D'être tant aimé.
Mon fils qui les aimait tant, comme il avait raison de les aimer. Qu'un
homme, que ce roi qui n'a que ce corps après tout
(enfin ce corps sur terre et qui n'en aura jamais d'autre sur terre) (et
quand il en est dépouillé,—de quel dépouillement,—c'est une
fois pour toutes)
Dise tranquillement qu'il aimerait mieux attraper la lèpre que de
tomber en péché mortel,
C'est-à-dire dise tranquillement qu'il aimerait mieux attraper cette
maladie-là que de me déplaire,
Moi-même je n'en reviens pas, dit Dieu, qu'il y ait un homme comme
ce saint Louis,
(et tant d'autres saints et tant d'autres martyrs)
Et je suis confondu d'être tant aimé.

Et il faut que ma grâce soit tellement grande.

Et éternellement je serai en reste avec eux

Car dans mon paradis même ils m'aimeront éternellement autant.

Je demeure tremblant, dit Dieu, je demeure confondu de cette

preuve d'amour.
De tant de preuve d'amour et il n'y a que mon fils
Qui n'est point en reste avec eux, car pour eux comme eux il a
souffert
Un martyre d'homme.
Et il est mort pour eux comme ils sont morts pour lui.

Et qu'il y ait un homme qui ait dit cela non point comme un propos,
Non point comme une lèpre de propos,
De discours,
Mais réellement d'une lèpre réelle,
De la lèpre non point d'une lèpre de parole, d'une lèpre de récit,
Mais d'une lèpre toute prête, toute proposée.

Et qu'il n'ait pas dit cela, cette sorte d'énormité,

Avec un grand geste, avec éclat,
Mais qu'il ait dit cela simplement,
Comme allant de soi, comme une chose ordinaire,
Dans le texte même de son propos, dans le tissu ordinaire de sa vie,
Cela c'est la fleur, dit Dieu, cette aisance,
Et à cela je reconnais le Français,
La race à qui tout est simple et commun et ordinaire,
Cette race de toute gentillesse.

Et je reconnais ici la résonance et le rang du Français

Et je salue
Leur ordre propre.
Peuple à qui les plus grandes grandeurs
Sont ordinaires.
Je salue ici ta liberté, ta grâce,
Ta courtoisie.

Ta gracieuseté.
Ta gratitude.
Ta gratuité.

Demandez à ce père si le meilleur moment

N'est pas quand ses fils commencent à l'aimer comme des hommes,
Lui-même comme un homme,
Librement,
Gratuitement,
Demandez à ce père dont les enfants grandissent.

Demandez à ce père s'il n'y a point une heure secrète,

Un moment secret,
Et si ce n'est pas
Quand ses fils commencent à devenir des hommes,
Libres,
Et lui-même le traitent comme un homme,
Libre,
L'aiment comme un homme,
Libre,
Demandez à ce père dont les enfants grandissent.

Demandez à ce père s'il n'y a point une élection entre toutes

Et si ce n'est pas
Quand la soumission précisément cesse et quand ses fils devenus
hommes
L'aiment, (le traitent), pour ainsi dire en connaisseurs,
D'homme à homme,
Librement,
Gratuitement. L'estiment ainsi.
Demandez à ce père s'il ne sait pas que rien ne vaut
Un regard d'homme qui se croise avec un regard d'homme.

Or je suis leur père, dit Dieu, et je connais la condition de l'homme.

C'est moi qui l'ai faite.
Je ne leur en demande pas trop. Je ne demande que leur cœur.
Quand j'ai le cœur, je trouve que c'est bien. Je ne suis pas difficile.
Toutes les soumissions d'esclaves du monde ne valent pas un beau
regard d'homme libre.
Ou plutôt toutes les soumissions d'esclaves du monde me répugnent
et je donnerais tout
Pour un beau regard d'homme libre,
Pour une belle obéissance et tendresse et dévotion d'homme libre,
Pour un regard de saint Louis,
Et même pour un regard de Joinville,
Car Joinville est moins saint mais il n'est pas moins libre,

(Et il n'est pas moins chrétien).

Et il n'est pas moins gratuit.

Et mon fils est mort aussi pour Joinville.

A cette liberté, à cette gratuité j'ai tout sacrifié, dit Dieu,
A ce goût que j'ai d'être aimé par des hommes libres,
Librement,
Gratuitement,
Par de vrais hommes, virils, adultes, fermes.
Nobles, tendres, mais d'une tendresse ferme.
Pour obtenir cette liberté, cette gratuité j'ai tout sacrifié,
Pour créer cette liberté, cette gratuité,
Pour faire jouer cette liberté, cette gratuité.

Pour lui apprendre la liberté.

Or je n'ai pas trop de toute ma Sagesse

Pour lui apprendre la liberté,
Je n'ai pas trop de toute la Sagesse de ma Providence.