Bouncing further

In the language of resilience, there are two ways of approaching the post-crisis period.

Bounce back corresponds to the idea of “returning to normal”: after an earthquake, flood, or flash flood, the city rebuilds itself by simply seeking to restore infrastructure and services to their pre-event state. This approach has the advantage of quickly restoring functionality, but it often leaves the same vulnerabilities in place. It is a return to square one.

Conversely, bounce further proposes transforming the crisis into an opportunity for change. It is no longer a question of returning to what existed before, but of reaching the level where we should have been. In other words, we must go beyond simply returning to normal, not only to recover what has been lost, but also because, sometimes, the “normal” of before was not the most appropriate solution.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is a case in point: it showed that the “normal” that existed before a disaster is not always desirable. Instead of returning to the old state of affairs, residents aspired to a “new normal” that was better suited to their social, economic, and political needs.