The Gotham Rebound

This body of work investigates factors that promote resilience in city dwellers during times of crisis. From infrastructure failure to terror threats, urban communities seem more likely to suffer great losses in unnatural catastrophes due to their high population density. Inquiring about the ways that resilience is at its greatest in urban environments this thesis collection explores how city spaces, diverse populations, and the expansive interpersonal networks arising therein can create cultures of preparedness at the individual, interpersonal, and community scales.

In the wake of disaster, recovery is forefront in community discourse, however, preparation and prevention are often overlooked factors of preemptive recovery. Because disaster is not the event that occurs, rather it is the extent of the negative ramifications of the event that occurs, the ensuing research and design offerings seek to create cultures of preparedness in urban contexts for those who cannot, or will not, extricate themselves from a disastrous situation, thereby redefining urban resilience as the extent to which the inhabitants of urban spaces are equipped to thrive during various scales of crisis.