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In my blog posts, I’ve already talked about the concept of sustainability and its relationship to planning. Another word that has increasingly become part of that conversation is 鈥渞esilience.鈥� Both are important in understanding how planning needs to be used to help create more livable communities and regions.

The two terms refer to very similar results, and some people use them interchangeably. But I believe the best way to think about resilience is as a major component of overall community sustainability. I think about resilience in terms of the viability of the natural systems, community infrastructure, and other key systems that are critical to the long term ability of a community or region to survive and thrive.

Perhaps the most critical of these is the human connection to water, from its importance in the health of the regional ecology to its conveyance systems for use by humans, to flood control, to its importance for commercial and recreational use.聽 The resilience of these water-related systems is critical to the future livability of a place.

The same thing can be said of the network of systems by which people move themselves and their goods, which includes all of the various transportation systems and the modes of travel on them. Ensuring that the streets, pedestrian ways, rails, waterways, airways and their related means of travel are well supported and work well together are critical to the resilience of a community.

In addition, there’s the electrical grid and the accompanying power facilities on which we depend, education systems, and a number of others. The key point is that their resilience, their ability to withstand the tendency of man-made elements to deteriorate and otherwise become inadequate over time, is critical to sustaining human life. The importance of planning for the resilience of these systems cannot be over-stated.