A few days ago, major portions of Spain and Portugal went dark. Without warning, millions found themselves without power. As reported by Reuters, the widespread outage affected critical infrastructure across both nations, with the cause still under investigation.

This wasn't a localized failure or a minor inconvenience. This was a massive disruption affecting two European nations simultaneously.

What makes this event particularly significant isn't just its scale, but what it reveals about our approach to resilience. As officials worked to restore services and urged citizens to remain calm, a strange paradox revealed itself – one I've been wrestling with since speaking at a European Urban Initiative conference last week: Why do we demand 72-hour resilience from individual citizens but not from the systems they inhabit?

The Spain-Portugal outage wasn't specifically predicted. No one had anticipated that two entire countries would lose significant portions of their power grid in a single event. Yet it exposed the kind of systemic vulnerability that emergency planners have long warned about – vulnerabilities that are rarely addressed in how we design our communities and infrastructure.

The Preparedness Double Standard

Earlier this month, I addressed a room of urban planners, sustainability experts, and civic officials at the European Urban Initiative conference. The topic: integrating community resilience into urban design. The conversation was illuminating – not just for what was said, but for who wasn't in the room.

Missing were emergency managers. Absent were crisis responders. Security planners were nowhere to be found – not because they chose not to attend, but because they weren't invited to this conversation.

This wasn't a failure of the conference organizers. Rather, it revealed a larger pattern: these professionals are typically siloed in their own planning sessions, their own frameworks – disconnected from the very people designing the communities they would someday need to protect. The value of this engagement was precisely to begin bridging this gap, bringing crisis management discussions to urban planners who traditionally haven't been part of this conversation.

This separation reflects a deeper inconsistency in how we approach resilience. We tell citizens:

• Keep 72 hours of water and food on hand
• Have backup power sources ready
• Prepare for self-sufficiency during emergencies
• Know evacuation routes and emergency protocols

Yet we design cities with:

• Water distribution systems calculated for normal usage patterns with minimal margins for disruption
• Centralized power grids with insufficient redundancy for major failures
• Buildings designed for sustainability in isolation rather than as interconnected community systems
• Infrastructure elements developed independently without an integrated resilience strategy

This is the resilience paradox: We demand individual preparedness while designing collective vulnerability.

From Individual Resilience to Systemic Resilience

The standard recommendation – prepare for 72 hours without services – didn't emerge arbitrarily. It represents a calculated assessment of how long emergency services might need to restore basic functions after a disaster.

But this raises a question no one seems to ask: If we know systems might fail for three days, why aren't we designing them to withstand three days of disruption?

The answer lies in a fundamental governance failure: We've separated the people who plan for crises from the people who design the systems that experience those crises.

Consider how we approach urban water systems. Engineers design for efficiency and everyday reliability. Cost-benefit analyses rarely factor in the cascading impacts of a system-wide failure. The result is infrastructure that works wonderfully – until it doesn't.

Now imagine if we applied the same resilience standards to city infrastructure that we apply to individual preparedness:

• Water systems designed to maintain pressure for 72 hours without external power
• Electrical grids with distributed generation and storage capacity
• Neighborhood-scale food reserves positioned throughout urban areas
• Communications networks with multiple redundant pathways

These aren't impossible standards. They're exactly what we tell individuals to achieve. Yet we rarely demand them from our collective systems.

From Building Design to Community Resilience

The challenge becomes clear when we look at how sustainability and resilience are approached in urban planning. We design highly energy-efficient buildings with solar panels, but they're not connected to community-wide systems. We implement rainwater capture for individual structures without integrating these capabilities into neighborhood-scale water security.

This fragmented approach represents a fundamental limitation in how we conceptualize resilience. As I observed at the conference, we plan at a building level rather than a community level, creating isolated islands of sustainability that can't support each other during crises.

Consider a typical urban water system. Engineers calculate capacity based on daily and nighttime usage patterns, perhaps with modest margins (±10%) to accommodate peak demands or fire loads. This approach optimizes for efficiency during normal operations but leaves little flexibility for extended disruptions.

Consider what a truly resilient urban power grid would look like:

• Neighborhood-scale microgrids that can operate independently
• Distributed energy resources including solar, battery storage, and small-scale generators
• Automated load-shedding capabilities that preserve critical services
• Redundant distribution pathways that prevent single points of failure

None of this technology is speculative. Most exists today. What's missing isn't capability – it's governance structures that prioritize resilience over efficiency.

The Missing Integration

At last week's conference, I posed a fundamental question to the urban planners and designers in the room: "If we ask individuals to survive for 72 hours without external support, why can't we design cities that can do the same?"

The question resonated powerfully, particularly with representatives from Eastern European cities along the frontlines of conflict in Ukraine, where energy security has become increasingly critical. The silence that followed wasn't from disinterest, but reflection – this perspective simply hadn't been part of their design framework.

This gap isn't just administrative – it's existential. We've created artificial divisions between "normal" urban planning and "emergency" planning. Between sustainable development and security. Between efficiency and resilience.

The results are predictable: Cities that function beautifully during normal times but collapse when stressed. Systems optimized for cost savings rather than continuity. Infrastructure designed for average conditions rather than extreme events.

Integrating these perspectives isn't just about adding emergency managers to planning meetings. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how we approach urban design:

• Embedding security considerations into sustainability frameworks
• Treating resilience as a primary design parameter, not an afterthought
• Recognizing that true sustainability includes the ability to withstand shocks
• Designing systems that degrade gracefully rather than fail catastrophically

Sustainability and Resilience: Two Sides of the Same Coin

The Spain-Portugal outage, while not specifically anticipated at this scale, reveals a truth about our critical infrastructure: mass-scale events are happening with increasing frequency across Europe and globally. These events should serve as clear indicators of what's to come if we don't fundamentally change how we design our communities.

What's becoming increasingly clear is that sustainability and community resilience aren't separate goals – they're two sides of the same coin. We don't need to choose between environmentally conscious design and crisis-resistant communities. In fact, the most effective approaches accomplish both simultaneously.

A truly sustainable city isn't just one with a minimal environmental footprint – it's one that can continue functioning when external systems fail. Similarly, a resilient community doesn't require sacrificing environmental principles – many of the same design features that reduce dependence on centralized resources also make communities more sustainable.

Consider distributed energy generation: Solar panels and microgrids not only reduce carbon emissions but also provide critical power redundancy during grid failures. Water recapture systems simultaneously conserve resources and create local reserves for emergencies. Green spaces improve air quality while providing natural cooling during heat waves and managing stormwater during floods.

The question isn't whether we should prioritize sustainability over resilience or vice versa. The question is why we've treated them as separate domains for so long when they naturally reinforce each other.

Designing for Integrated Resilience

The question isn't whether disruptions will occur. They will. The question is whether our communities will bend or break when they do.

The answer depends on choices we make today – not just as individuals stocking emergency supplies, but as societies designing the systems that sustain us.

This integration is particularly urgent for cities in regions facing heightened security concerns, such as those in Eastern Europe contending with energy security challenges related to the conflict in Ukraine. But the principle applies universally: if we expect individual households to survive for 72 hours without external support, shouldn't we design communities with the same capability?

The next major power outage is coming. The next water system failure. The next supply chain disruption. These aren't separate challenges requiring separate solutions – they're interconnected vulnerabilities demanding integrated approaches.

By recognizing sustainability and resilience as complementary aspects of the same fundamental goal – creating communities that thrive both in normal times and during crises – we can build cities that are not only greener but also more secure, not just more efficient but also more adaptable.

This isn't about adding crisis management as an afterthought to urban planning. It's about recognizing that true sustainability inherently includes resilience, and genuine resilience necessarily embraces sustainability. Only by bringing these perspectives together can we create the communities we'll need for an increasingly unpredictable future.

This article was inspired by discussions at the European Urban Initiative conference on sustainable urban development. The views expressed are personal observations rather than official positions of any organization.