A Community Sense of Place

CARRI is a team. From the very beginning we have “borrowed boldly” from any team member willing to contribute to the point that today we have very little memory of who had what thoughts and suggestions in the development of our ideas and processes. You can get some idea of the breadth of these team members from our web site.


Blogging is normally not a team sport. The CARRI team has quite a lot to say, however, and this Blog is one more way to give them an opportunity to say it. Today’s thoughts come from Dr. Andy Felts of the College of Charleston.


Andy writes:


“My wound is geography.” So Pat Conroy has his protagonist, Tom Wingo, begin The Prince of Tides. Wingo/Conroy then goes on to describe the beauty that defines what is called the South Carolina “Lowcountry,” a land of vast salt marshes, streams and rivers that twist in labyrinthine patterns as they wend their way to the ocean. Even from Charleston’s peninsula, you can see what Wingo described as the “quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark.” The beauty of this rare place has left its imprint on many people.


When I first began working with John Plodinec and Robin White [other CARRI teammates] and we started talking about the idea of community resilience, I invoked this sentence and described the attachment of people to this area as a sort of “stickiness.” It seems that Charlestonians are simply determined to stay here—come earthquake, high water or war.


In 1886, Charleston endured one of the largest earthquakes ever to strike east of the Mississippi. The city suffered extensive damage. More than 2,000 buildings collapsed or sustained serious damage, some severely. Property damage estimates show that as much as 25 percent of the total value of all property was wiped out in a few brief minutes. Richard Cotê in his book, City of Heroes, describes the remarkable events that ensued. There was no federal or state aid; Charlestonians had to rely on the beneficence of donors from outside. Yet, in less than two years, the Mayor declared they were no longer in need of help and even returned money to donors. By then, the city was well into the process of rebuilding and recovery.


Just a little more than 100 years later, in 1989 Hurricane Hugo hit with such fury that Tom Brokaw on the national evening news the next night declared that Charleston was “gone with the wind.” But it was not. Though Hugo is still in the top five most damaging storms, its wind did not blow Charlestonians away. Instead they “stuck,” rolled up their sleeves and went about the business of recovery. Within two years, the economy had returned to pre-Hugo levels.


In CARRI, this notion of “stickiness” might be more commonly understood as “Sense of Place” in describing what we think it takes to make a resilient community. I have been struck every time we have introduced this concept to an audience. As I gaze around the room, I invariably see heads nod in affirmation: “Yes, I understand that. Yes, we do have a sense of place.”


Charleston is not unique in this respect. Paeans have been written about the Oregon coast, the mountains of Wyoming, the plains of Oklahoma, the hills of East Tennessee and many, many more places in this vast and varied nation.


As our thinking about this concept has evolved, we have realized it is more than an attachment to geography that keeps people stuck. It is also buildings and public spaces. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley describes baseball stadiums as places where “memories are made.” As well, it is an attachment to neighbors and fellow citizens—a Sense of Community if you will, and a feeling of belonging.


While rebuilding infrastructure and restoring the economy are vital to any community’s recovery from a major disaster, that Sense of Place/Community, fuzzy though it may be, truly gets at the heart of recovery. CARRI is about saving people’s lives—helping them stay stuck.

Resilient Homes are Key to Resilient Communities

We believe that one of the most important things a community has to do to reestablish itself after a disaster (after saving lives and property to the greatest extent it can) is to get its people back to work. Productive enterprise, as much as any other activity of the community reestablishes the normal rhythms and fabric of the community. Getting all of the segments of the community back to work quickly begins to reconstitute the community’s economic base and prevents long term job loss because of population dislocation. A working community says “we’re back and we’re recovering.”

Key to getting back to work is having some place to live. A resilient community plans and prepares to get its people back into their homes as quickly as possible. People who get back into their own homes even under less than optimal conditions are much more ready to participate in the process of restarting the community.

A CARRI affiliate, The Resilient Home Program, is a coalition of the willing working to improve the life of homeowners following natural disasters. Combining the resources of the Savannah River National Laboratory, North Carolina State University, the US Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory and Clemson University, the Resilient Home team is examining the complete spectrum of ways to get people back into their homes quickly following a disaster. These include: response – stabilizing the home and rendering it a safe interim shelter; rebuilding – rebuilding with available resources in a more durable manner than before the disaster; prevention – protecting the home from the short- and long-term effects of a disaster; and assessment – determining the extent of damage that occurred to the home in a quick and cost effective manner.

Getting people back into their homes is important. You can find more about the Resilient Home Program through a link on the CARRI web site, http://www.resilientus.org/.

Resilience Is A Growing Business

Resilience is a growing business. The number of researchers and centers studying resilience in one way or another has blossomed over the past two years. The number of federal agencies with resilience initiatives or divisions working in resilience policy grows daily. All of these are worthwhile efforts and will clearly help the nation focus on the important task of ensuring that we can better recover from significant disturbances to the fabric of our society no matter the scale or cause. The more we know as the result of evidence-based research and the more that we create policy and procedures for multi-disciplined, cross-sectional response and recovery, the better America will be able to protect itself from large scale disruptions.

Unfortunately, most of the research efforts remain largely uncoordinated. While the numerous conferences, workshops and symposia serve an important function for sharing information, they tend toward examining focused aspects of resilience and do not shed light on the overall state of resilience research nor do they identify research gaps and requirements in a way useful to government, academic, or scientific organizations seeking to sponsor work in resilience.

Similarly there is no federal interagency process for resilience. Nothing better demonstrates this than an examination of the various federal agency definitions of resilience and even the different ways the definitions are expressed and applied within a single agency. Agencies are developing resilience plans and applying resilience resources with no common policy framework to ensure that these resources and organizational efforts are effective.

There is evidence to suggest that this challenge is recognized. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) recently organized Regional Consortium Coordinating Council (RCCC), an effort by the Office of Infrastructure Protection to bring together regional organizations that are attempting to work significant interdependency issues, is clearly a step in the right direction. Last year’s two-day symposium for researchers by the DHS, Science and Technology Directorate, University Programs Division attempted to survey the field of resilience research although there has been no identifiable follow-up to document either results or a coordinated way forward. The need for coordination remains.

CARRI intends to try to help with a very small part of the research challenge. Collaborating with other centers and institutes who work in this field, we will convene a day-long workshop for researchers in conjunction with the Annual Natural Hazards Workshop in Colorado this summer. We are excited that Director Kathleen Tierney and the staff of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder have graciously agreed to work with CARRI in convening this workshop. We are in the process now of working with a group of associates from other centers to define an agenda that will assist in surveying the current state of thinking about community resilience and identify significant research needs. I will provide more information in subsequent postings as the agenda develops.