Strong Communities are Safer Places to Confront Disaster

This week’s issue of The New Yorker features “Adaptation“, an article by Eric Klinenberg discussing “climate-proofing” strategies that will help our cities be better adapted for the array of possible climate-related disasters. Among the costly, highly engineered solutions such as seawalls and resilient power grids are social infrastructure strategies.

Klinenberg uses as an example a 1995 heat wave that caused 700 deaths in Chicago. Two adjacent Chicago neighborhoods with comparable demographics fared very differently. His research found that those living in a socially connected neighborhod where residents knew and interacted with one another were far more likely to survive the crisis than those living in a neighborhood with weaker social infrastructure. Here, an excerpt from Klinenberg’s interview with Steve Inskeep for NPR:

INSKEEP: OK. So you’re telling me that if I were to live in an old-style urban neighborhood, where there’s a coffee shop down the street, where there’s a corner store, where there’s a corner dry cleaner, where people walk around and they may know the neighbors, and kids play on the street, that I am more likely to survive in a disaster because of the kind of community that I’m in?

KLINENBERG: For many disasters, that is absolutely true.

Social strategies are increasingly being taken seriously by planners and municipal officials and Klinenberg’s work is likely to spur even wider acceptance. Resiliance in the face of crisis is yet another argument to support the design and development of places that are socially coherent.