Kyle King: [00:00:00] So you likely recall that on April 25th this year, millions across Spain and Portugal experienced a sudden power outage. Traffic systems failed. Hospitals switched to backup generators, communication networks went down. Air travel was disrupted or suspended altogether, a multinational infrastructure failure had struck without warning.
Welcome to the Christ Lab podcast. I'm your host, Kyle, and today we are examining what I call the resilience paradox. A contradiction I observed while working with the urban planners in Europe recently. So let's explore why we built a world that demands extraordinary adaptive capacity from individual people while accepting fundamental weakness from the systems they depend on.
As authorities work to restore service, citizens responded [00:01:00] as they'd been trained, checking on vulnerable neighbors. Conserving device batteries using emergency supplies, following the preparedness protocols. Now common across a lot of Europe. Watching this unfold shortly after presenting at the European Urban Initiative Conference on Resilience, I was struck by a troubling contradiction.
We've constructed a society that expects remarkable adaptability from everyday citizens while tolerating inherent fragility in our critical infrastructure. And this is where you start to see the preparedness contradiction. Keep 72 hours of supplies, have backup power options. Know multiple evacuation routes be self-sufficient during emergencies.
This guidance amongst some of the many other guidances out there has become standard from emergency agencies worldwide based on practical assessment. That's after a significant disruption. Basic services might take three days to restore even so much as up to 14 days or to two [00:02:00] weeks, yet strangely. We rarely apply this three day resilience standard to our infrastructure itself.
Our water systems operate with minimal capacity margins, power grids lack self-sufficient redundancies, and buildings optimize for individual efficiency rather than functioning at neighborhood scale support systems during a crisis. And this is what I mean by the resilience paradox. We've made peace with infrastructure vulnerability while pushing adaptation and responsibility to individuals.
So where is this professional disconnect? At the European Union Urban Initiative Conference in Lafayette, I noticed something revealing about how we approach community design. The attendees included urban planners, sustainability experts, and government officials, but more noticeably emergency managers were not present.
Security professionals were not really in that conversation. They were not really part of the training audience and first responders had a voice, but sort of at a panel level. And this wasn't just really an oversight, it reflected the [00:03:00] persistent separation that we see between those who design our communities and those who are tasked with protecting them.
And so during a session on urban development, I asked a simple question of if we tell citizens to be prepared to function independently for 72 hours during emergencies, shouldn't we design neighborhoods with that same capability built in? That's when there was just a lot of silence. Not really rejecting the idea, but confronting a perspective that not necessarily has been incorporated into their own professional framework or community standards or city standards.
And so this disconnect appears consistently across multiple sectors. Emergency managers create response plans for communities they never help design. Urban planners develop neighborhoods without building in crisis. Planning, resilience and other capabilities and sustainability experts focus on resource efficiency without considering security implications.
We've manufactured artificial boundaries between everyday planning and emergency planning, [00:04:00] between sustainability and security, between efficiency and resilience and the predictable result. Communities that work beautifully under normal conditions, but falter under stress. So where is the infrastructure that adapts?
What if we applied. Resilient standards to systems rather than just people. Current water infrastructure typically plans as an example here for modest demand fluctuations, perhaps in 10, 10 to 15% above normal usage. Building in additional fire loads and fire usage. A resilience centered approach would be possibly fundamentally different.
Incorporating distributed storage throughout communities, designing gravity fed emergency distribution networks, installing neighborhood filtration capabilities, and integrating rainwater collection not only at an individual building level, but at a community scale. This isn't theoretical. Broader DAM has transformed public spaces into water management zones that serve daily needs while providing critical capacity.
[00:05:00] During flooding, copenhagen's climate adaptation converts streets and parks into stormwater systems that protect essential infrastructure. These approaches address multiple vulnerabilities simultaneously from climate impacts to infrastructure failures, to security challenges, and similar principles work across sectors.
Electrical systems could incorporate neighborhood microgrids maintaining critical services during broader failures. Food networks could establish community scale reserves throughout urban areas, and communication systems could create redundant pathways, preventing cascading outages. The power of these approaches lies and their multiple benefits.
Distributed energy systems reduce emissions while providing crucial backup capacity. Water recapture systems, conserve resources while establishing local reserves and green infrastructure improves daily life while managing crisis conditions. So how do we eliminate the false divisions, the Spain and Portugal outage?
Revealed an inescapable truth. The boundaries [00:06:00] between planning domains exist only in our organizational structures, not in physical reality. When power fails, it cascades through water systems, communication networks, transportation, healthcare, and food security. Simultaneously, this recognition demands fundamentally reconceptualizing resilience.
It isn't merely an emergency management specialty or a sustainability add-on feature. It's an essential property of a well-designed system that must be integrated from the beginning. The stakes are particularly high for communities facing immediate challenges. Eastern European cities dealing with energy security issues as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
They cannot treat resilience as optional. Their ability to maintain essential services during disruption isn't academic. It's an immediate necessity. But the principle applies everywhere. Whether threats emerge from climate change, aging infrastructure, supply chain vulnerabilities, or security concerns, the fundamental requirement remains communities must function effectively, even when external systems fail.
[00:07:00] So let's talk about integration pathways now moving forward. Requires more than adding emergency managers to planning meetings, even though that would help. We need to recognize resilience as a core design parameter for every system. As fundamental as efficiency, sustainability, or accessibility. This integration requires changes across several fronts.
First, governance structures must eliminate artificial divisions between planning domains. The processes evaluating a development environmental impact should equally assess its resilience capabilities. Infrastructure investment evaluations should weigh both sustainability metrics and security parameters.
Second, professional education must cross traditional boundaries. Urban planners should understand crisis dynamics. Emergency managers should participate in community design. Security professionals should engage with sustainability initiatives. The next generation in each field needs fluency and adjacent domains.
Finally, we need metrics and incentives, [00:08:00] evaluating resilience as highly as efficiency. We quantify cost savings from optimized systems, but rarely do we measure the cost of the catastrophic failures that might lead from suboptimal design. We incentivize sustainability through certifications like the lead certification, but have no equivalent framework for resilience.
What we measure determines what we build. How do we place prevention over preparation? The next infrastructure failure is already forming the next water system, breakdown, the next supply chain disruption. These aren't isolated challenges needing separate solutions. They're interconnected vulnerabilities requiring integrated approaches, and so the choice isn't sustainability versus security, or efficiency versus resilience.
The false opposition of these priorities. Has been really just a fundamental misunderstanding or a fundamental mistake. A truly sustainable community isn't just environmentally responsible. It maintains essential [00:09:00] functions regardless of external conditions. A genuinely secure community doesn't sacrifice environmental principles and embraces them as crucial to long-term stability.
These obstacles or the obstacles aren't really technological. We have the capability to build inherently resilient communities today, the barriers are in governance. Whether we will transform how we make decisions about the systems sustaining our own communities. The Spain, Portugal outage will be fixed.
Power will return daily, life will resume. But the underlying vulnerability remains not just an electrical infrastructure, but in a fragmented approach to all the systems that communities depend upon. So we've accepted a world where demanding more adaptation from individual people than from our collective infrastructure is the norm.
So the question is, why? Sustainability and security are two sides of the same coin. We have better options. We should pursue them. Our communities deserve nothing [00:10:00] less. Thank you for listening to Crisis Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed today's discussion, I invite you to continue the conversation on LinkedIn when we post our articles and of course, visit Crisis Lab do io to learn more about our work in crisis management and resilience and the courses that we have on offer.
The question before us isn't really whether we should prepare individuals to handle a crisis and to be prepared. Of course we should. The deeper question is why we accept these fundamental vulnerabilities in our infrastructure that make those crises inevitable. So remember, in today's planning, decisions are creating tomorrow's disaster outcomes.
So the question is also how will you help shape those decisions and really build resilience free communities. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. [00:11:00]
