Hi! I'm not an expert of resilience issues, but I've been reading a lot on this topic recently. If you have a look at the original concept (the ecological one by Holling (1973) Resilience and stability of Ecological Systems, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics + Gunderson and Holling (2002) Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems, Island Press, Washington DC) you will find a nested description of the Adaptive Cycle. This means that there is not a conflict between individual and social Adaptive Cicles, but there is a kind of reciprocal relationship and dynamic balance, I think.

Again, I'm not an expert in the field, but I have studied childhood resilience in the past. I think this is a really interesting concept for discussion. I think that, the idea of increasing resilience for 'all', in itself lacks clear direction as there are too many factors which increase/decrease our resilience as individuals, meaning it would surely be impossible to come up with a one-size-fits-all model. Maybe collective resilience doesn't conflict individual resilience, but rather is a product of it.

In relation to the study of resilience, Grotberg (1995) stated that there is "insufficient understanding on the dynamic interaction of [various] factors, their roles in different contexts, their expression and their sources."

Hi! Thinking aloud: For me, resilience contrasts vulnerability. Vulnerability is the negative factors that make people and places susceptible to harm while resilience is the positive characteristics of people or places which makes them able to withstand some negative force and bounce back after being impacted by something. Improved resilience for all? "All" is a very big word and resilience will hardly be distributed evenly. It will be possible to come up with examples that increased resilience for some will imply worsened conditions for others, I'm sure. I have problems with seeing factors such as resilience-culture and resilience-knowledge that is inherent to the social structure and networks of a place as contributing to worsened conditions for others (but someone else may of course come up with an example). For other factors, however, I see that a conflict potential may exist, for example in connection with allocation of scarce resources. Similar conflict potential over resources I think you will find in the relationships between individuals and the collective while, again, I have problems with seeing the "resilience within" as a conflict potential.

From the work I have done on Resilience I believe that Resilience is "the reaction to vulnerability". In this sense it is a dynamic property and I do not fully agree with Ivar's view that resilience might be identified as the positive characteristics of an entity making it capable to bounce back. For me the "bouncing back" process is Resilience and this process may lead to a new regime of balance very different from the starting regime before the appearance of the stress.

Resilience attitudes are actually performed by a wide variety of entities / agents in a city or region: Authorities and institutional organizations, individuals and households, social groups and business networks…. The focus of my question is what happens to the citizens if an urban community for instance is qualified with resilient authorities / institutions. Reversely, if the community is qualified with resilient citizens (versus risks and adversities) what can be the impact of this individualized resilience to the institutions and the urban community as a whole? Have you in mind examples of self-centered resilience that exacerbates vulnerability and exposure of others and/or collective vulnerability? Furthermore, have you come upon experiences of resilience triggering new hazards currently or in the future?

In the case of Athens’ social and economic crisis several cases of resilience have proved to transfer vulnerability to the future and other agents, also to produce new risks and exposure. Since the beginning of fiscal crisis in 2010 the Greek Government has displayed an outstanding capacity to avoid default (i.e. resilience); state adaptations however have translated into extra vulnerability for social groups, particularly the weakest. A crowd of households in Athens are increasingly exposed to the chronic risks of malnutrition, infectious diseases and epidemics, psychological depression and suicide, criminal assault, homelessness and forced migration. The reasons are related to wage and pension cuttings, elevation of direct and indirect taxation, shrinkage of social welfare public provisions and other policies aiming at fiscal rationalization and remediation. This has been indeed a resilient political option of the Government which opted dismantling the welfare system instead of other possible options such as chasing tax evasion or cutting the privileges of political and economic elite. It is obvious that this is about transformation of state’s vulnerability (to debt crisis) to human and social and its transference to every social group dependent on the state’s welfare system. The reverse transference through resilience has also proved to be true: resilient individuals and households turn to wood fuel for heating, resort to cheaper but unsafe housing accommodation and turn to cheap meals and food stuff of questionable safety. These practices have already or may lead in the future to new hazards and collective exposures: atmospheric pollution, technological accidents, urban fires, communicable diseases, illegal wood-cutting and deforestation.

Above cases indicate that individualized may come in conflict with collective Resilience. How this contradiction might be handled through policy? This has been the essence of my question.

The addition of the possibility of existence of scale breaks actually allows resilience to be applicable at different scales. In that sense I would agree that it "means resilience for all"/Cross-scale resilience

While the theory is based on a continuous process, it does not allow for disjointed, interruptions such as "punctuated equilibrium" (a terminology due to Stephen Jay Gould). Hence this non-tandem feature in reality might make it difficult to reconcile/ generalize the theoretical predictions of a resilient system. The Stockholm Resilience Centre has highlighted this as one rationale for merging resilience science with complexity theory.

http://www.urbanmorphologyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IJAR-paper.pdf

http://www.stockholmresilience.org/download/18.aeea46911a31274279800093552/1381790085207/Theme+plan+%28final%29.pdf

Article Cross-scale Structure and Scale Breaks in Ecosystems and Oth...