BIG NEWS! Resilience 2:1 became a real non-profit last summer. It's kind of like growing up. That means we have to have an Annual General Meeting [AGM]. An online meeting that is open to all members. I would love to see all members at a meeting. And no worries, many of us have tons of practice with these meetings. My students only had to remind me once today that I was on mute. So please join us on May 10, Monday, at 7 pm for a short but legally mandated meeting. In the meantime, read the newsletter, pass it on, and come with any questions or feedback .
Yours, Cheryl Bradbee, Chair of the Board

Issue #01 - April 21, 2021 - CONTENT

01. The Lessons of Resilience
By Cheryl Bradbee, BPhil, MCS, MDiv, MLA, PhD
02. How can we reach out more effectively? 
By Hadi Ismail
03. Resilient Architecture as a part of Resilience 2:1
By Ivan Martinovic, OAA, FRAIC

04. Postmetropolis in relation to Covid19
By Aleksandar Janicijevic, Dipl. Ing. Arch

05. Upcoming Annual General Meeting and other news

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01. The Lessons of Resilience

By Cheryl Bradbee, BPhil, MCS, MDiv, MLA, PhD

Early this term I asked if any of my Ryerson students had experienced a natural disaster. Several had. No one mentioned Covid, yet we have all lived through a global natural disaster for the past year. It caused us to experience both acute and chronic stress. So, what are the lessons for going forward with climate change?

1. We are not teaching resilience yet, mostly. Most classes I know still talk about sustainability. I teach that nothing is sustainable. Sustainability implies stable ecosystems as the context in which we act. Those don’t exist anymore or anywhere on the planet. Sustainability confuses students when they should be focused on mitigation and adaption to the changed climate.  Continue ↓

2. Students want more information. They know they need more as climate change challenges their survival. Yes, that sounds dire but look at Australia. In just over a year, residents around Sydney have experienced drought, heat waves, traumatic wildfires, a pandemic, and most recently flooding due to extreme rain. Resilience is defined by learning and flexibility as one’s context changes. Whether a resilient person, city, or country, all are capable of realizing the context has shifted then adapting one’s behavior to the new context. If a food crop you depend upon can no longer grow in your ecosystem then you need to change crops. That’s resilience. 

3. Research shows that resilient people are flexible people. People who have rigid ideas or are unable to let go of control often cannot manage a situation with shifts and changes. That is one of the great lessons from Covid – the need for flexibility in the face of an ever-mutating virus. 

4. The other lesson that we have seen is that the scientists are right. When they said cases would rise if we reopened, they were repeatedly right. Yet, we resist learning from them. Policies were made that denied what they were saying. This is important. Who will we believe going forward into multiple and constant climate crises?  Continue ↓

5. The final lesson for me is about radical change. The countries that managed Covid the best shut down early and hard. Research has demonstrated that was essential to success. Those that wavered back and forth experienced constant problems. Students are not yet radical enough in their thinking about climate change and its effects on them personally and professionally. They waver with the magical thinking that small changes will produce sufficient results. People tend to want to extend into the future what they know from yesterday. It won’t work with climate change. 

The experience of Covid has been an important lesson in resilience. I hope we don’t miss the opportunity to apply it to climate change.
Continue to the next article ↓

02. How can we reach out more effectively?

By Hadi Ismail

The board of R2:1 wants to reach out more. We are investigating ways to extend our contacts and impact. The board has been looking at how the current website and an extended portal may provide opportunities for a broader sphere of influence and membership. We hope to increase our capacities in two areas.

The first is to educate on resilience. This involves content creation and a format that will appeal to post-secondary students. There are educational programs on the web that are formatted specifically to act as a game, provide rewards and make learning enjoyable through bitesize lessons. Board member Cheryl is most interested in how to better gamify the experience of learning to encourage post-secondary students and the general public to engage with the topic. Continue ↓

At the same time board member Hadi and his collaborator Rafe, who does web creation professionally, has proposed a new portal to encourage membership in a social community that emphasizes resilience learning and leadership. Modelled on other websites it would include a newsfeed with constant updates about the environment, sustainability and resilience. It could include tips and insights needed for leadership in the workplace and communicate with potential employers. Links could be made between members to provide mentoring relationships.

For the user there would be several benefits:
1. They will become part of a supportive and growing community.
2. They will become part of a social community in which members can communicate directly within the platform as well as have access to a news feed to stay in tune with the latest info. Members will also have the ability to post directly into the newsfeed
to share their info with the different members of the association.
3. They will have access to a job board in which members can see the most current and relevant opportunities posted directly by members, executives, and/or employers.
4. The mentors page will allow members to identify themselves as either mentors and mentees and connect with one another to build valuable networking relationships.
5. The events page will allow members to see the latest initiatives going on within the association and allow them to RSVP for the events directly through the portal.
Continue ↓

Education is about content and process. Through these two initiatives the board of R2:1 seeks to enhance both. Ideas? Comments? Feedback? We are open to suggestions and help from those with knowledge in these areas. Let us know so we can work together to be the best website/portal/app available.

You can see full version of this proposal on-line

Continue to the next article ↓

03. Resilient Architecture, a part of Resilience 2:1
By Ivan Martinovic, OAA, FRAIC

The public’s understanding of the importance of Sustainability in everyday life has been growing rapidly, and awareness of the importance of Resilience is steadily following in its footsteps. While Sustainability is asking us to stop (or at least significantly reduce) the irreparable harm that we have inflicted on our environment for the sake of our collective future, Resilience has shown us that the environment can also do a great harm to us at a much faster pace. In less than a decade, storms, floods, fires, and other types of extreme weather events, have caused great damage, including a significant loss of life. Communities, politicians, businesses and, especially insurers, stood up and took notice. Quite suddenly, Resilience entered the everyday vocabulary. Continue ↓

My focus on specific aspects of Resilience, as they apply to the built environment; cities and individual buildings, is informed by my professional background as a practicing architect and my personal inclination to get involved more at the level of details, rather than just with general solutions. Incremental changes may not be able to quickly resolve the issues of climate change, but I do believe that small-scope solutions for the localized issues in the architectural and urban planning realm will contribute significantly to the increased resiliency of our buildings, communities, and cities.

It is time for architecture to concentrate on solving people’s practical problems rather than attempting to create everlasting monuments of its greatness. Therefore, my efforts in practice and in teaching are focused on looking for issues and problems that can be addressed, solved, or at least mitigated right now, with the tools and approaches we already have available. Continue ↓

With that in mind, I am looking for suggestions of Resilience-related architectural problems that need specific, concentrated, and immediate solutions, as I would like to address those issues in a future undergraduate architectural elective course. I am also collecting precedents that have already dealt with similar issues, as a first step in informing ourselves and our future students of the problems encountered so far, and the solutions offered. Please contact me if you want to share your ideas or comments.

Continue to the next article ↓

04. Postmetropolis in relation to Covid19
By Aleksandar Janicijevic, Dipl. Ing. Arch

Postmetropolis (new urban form) is a term dealing with dramatically restructured megacities that have emerged world wide. Toronto with almost 10 million people in the metropolitan area is of course an excellent example. As globalization is a compression of the world and intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole, global city-regions are focusing their attention on the “rights to the city” and the “history of the present”. A genuine connection with, and respect and space for, the cultural other, a recognition of intertwined fates. Megacities tend to concentrate the best and the worst—globally connected and locally disconnected, physically and socially.

Participant observation is a data collection method by scholars used in qualitative research. This method is employed in many disciplines, anthropology, sociology, communication studies, human geography, psychogeography and social psychology. The central question in visual anthropology is that we have to decide how to take a camera into the field, while dealing with such issues as the observer effect, and in addition, social distancing in our pandemic present.
Continue ↓

Reflexivity journals are the next step referring to circular relationships between cause and effect, especially as embedded in human belief structures. We are prompted to think about how our ethnicity, race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, and other factors might influence research and enter the study with no misconceptions about bringing in subjectivities into the data collection process. As a process it involves intimately observing the environment and seeing what may have been previously unobserved.

This whole process is disturbed, but I also think intensified, by the global Covid19 pandemic. During this time I developed a plan to further develop the practise of observation specific to overgrown urban conglomerations. Many community based groups are already active, more or less radical, so using the current “stay at home order” and “everywhere active social media”, the time is now to start looking for the ways to provide better future for generations to come. I strive to provide “guidance/reminders” and get the younger generation interested.

What we need is noticing and pointing a finger to the extreme or just powerful instances of deterioration of the cities affected by climate change and contribution of Postmetropolis to the pollution and excessive energy consumption. As Marcel Proust states, “The real voyage of discovery consists of not seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Continue ↓

We are all in this together and we should all make our contribution: Stay two meters apart, wear masks, wash our hands, avoid gathering with people you don’t live with, take care of each other and get vaccinated as soon as possible. It will end soon, positive thinking is helpful, but this lesson of how dependent, interconnected and fragile our world is should be remembered.
→ Visual Addition to Postmetropolis
→ Psychogeography, window to the urban future

Continue to the next article ↓

06. Upcoming AGM and other news

Just to remind you our next mandatory AGM is set up for Monday, May 10th, 2021 at 7:00 pm. All members will receive personalized invitation.

We hope to expand Resilience 2:1 network so feel free to contact us if you would like to join or know someone that would like to join. Membership is free but it includes the ability to make connections across institutions, to do research, and to publish initial findings or links to your publications on Resilience2:1 site. If you are working on resilience issues whether as an academic, professional, or community member we would love to hear from you, to work with you and to encourage you in your efforts.

We have intensive collection of Blog/Conversation posts for exploration on Resilience 2:1 website:
• Our biggest challenge? Lack of imagination or
• Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism
Explore our Resources and Links sections for guidance toward information regarding Climate Change.

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