Building Resilient Urban Communities

Many societies in the world live with different types of risks and the threat of disasters has always presented a major challenge to devise ways to achieve sustainable development by reducing patterns of vulnerability. Disaster reduction is therefore crucial and must have a place in national policies in order to create favourable conditions for effective and efficient hazard mitigation at various levels. This can help in increasing the resilience among communities at risk by enabling them to withstand shocks, cope with emergencies as they bounce back from the impact and adapt in new ways to cope with future threats. The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of resilience in general and what this means before, during, and after disaster impact. Case studies are cited to indicate how resilience operates or fails to occur and why. The study defines how resilience can be developed to create sustainable systems and structures that focus on robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity.