Last month the city of Oakland released its long-awaited resilience plan, the Resilient Oakland Playbook. “Resilience” is the 21st-century name for the concept that communities can get up quickly when they’re knocked down, and avoid being knocked down in the first place.
I’ve always thought of resilience in terms of how we deal with natural hazards — earthquake, flood, landslides, sea-level rise, fire. Oakland used a definition that seems closer to familiar city politics and good-government ideas. Frankly, it read as if Mayor Schaaf had simply copied and pasted part of her recent speeches:
Resilience in Oakland means equitable access to quality education and jobs, housing security and community safety. It means building vibrant infrastructure to better prepare for shocks like earthquakes and stresses like climate change. In Oakland, resilience means catalyzing our diverse pool of talents and perspectives to tackle these challenges, both inside and outside our government, with particular focus on addressing the needs of the most vulnerable members of our community.
This will take some getting used to. The geologic hazard of earthquakes is given its due, although there are no new ideas in the playbook beyond the ongoing, snail’s-pace work of encouraging retrofits of old soft-story apartments. The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, a major source of relevant knowledge that’s headquartered in Oakland, didn’t participate in writing the Playbook.
Emergency preparedness is represented by a seven-month “Love Your Block” initiative in the Fire Department’s valuable CORE program. That was supposed to start in October, but there’s no sign of it on the city’s website.
The geologic hazards of climate change (a possible rise in floods and wildfires) and sea-level rise are pervasive in the Playbook. That’s OK, although I consider them remote problems. They will slowly creep up on us, noticeable only if you take a snapshot every decade. We need to make long-term plans and float bond issues to deal with them.
But there’s no mention of the mud that wipes out roads in Oakland every year. A “vibrant infrastructure” has to deal with our chronic landslides.
The word “landslide” isn’t in the playbook once — homebuilders in the hills, you’re free to continue business as usual. Houses on alluvial hillsides, you’re off the radar.
Oakland needs the things in the Resilience Playbook. But we need more than that — we need to cultivate what Robert Muir Wood, a writer I’ve long admired, calls a disaster culture. Last month in the L.A. Times, Wood pointed to the Dutch as exemplars, citing their centuries-long effort to win land from the sea. “What Holland created — a national narrative of resilience, shared by all the people — is what L.A. (and every city threatened by natural disaster) should aspire to. Today, with the power of information technology and education, it won’t take centuries to evolve.”
Disasters don’t wait decades, and neither can we. Maybe the Playbook is how we’ll get to resilience. I’ll be happy if it is.
Oakland Geology 
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