Why Prospects for Resilience for Jamaica Bay

New York City woke up to issues of resilience on October 29, 2012. One might have thought that the first twelve years of the twenty-first century would have already made the point. Terrorism in 2001, major street protests in New York City in 2003 and 2011, an electricity blackout in 2003, major heat waves in 2006 and 2008, financial collapse and recession in 2009–2010, and other storms such as Tropical Storm Tammy in 2005 and Hurricane Irene in 2011, all significantly disturbed the everyday life of the city and in some cases put significant pressure on the established order. They were shocks that destroyed physical, social, and economic structures, and afterward required a process of recovery through which structures were rebuilt. The capacity of a system to recover from shocks such as these, and adapt to changing drivers and disturbances, is resilience.