From Resistance to Resilience
How do Protest Movements lead to Grassroots Disaster Responses?
This article was adapted from remarks presented at a panel discussion organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU), University of Chicago, on January 12, 2023.
Thank you to friends at CEGU for the kind invitation to speak in Chicago (in January no less!). And it’s even more exciting to be able to respond to this provocative theme of the event today — Resisting Urban Resilience.
Some of you in the audience may know that my work has focused on public space and resistance. But I also teach in a landscape architecture professional program at the University of Washington, Seattle. In landscape architecture, urban resilience is almost synonymous with large-scale physical infrastructure: coastal breakwater, stormwater infrastructure, and design competitions such as Rebuild by Design and Resilience by Design which privilege design solutions over other actions and initiatives.
In a way, I have been resisting this narrow focus on urban resilience in my work, which is not to say that large-scale infrastructure is irrelevant to urban resilience. But it is important for us not to overlook other equally important manifestations of resilience including grassroots actions, such as the bike brigade in New York City after Hurricane Sandy. With major transportation access all closed, including subway lines at the time, the volunteers on bikes were first on the scene to bring emergency food and supplies to those in need after Sandy.
When neighborhoods were out of power after the hurricane, it was the neighbors and volunteers again who set up pedal-powered charging stations so that people could recharge their phones and call their loved ones. In the immediate aftermath of Sandy, community gardens became gathering places for neighbors to find support from each other, including the Beach 91st Street Community Garden which happened to have opened just a year before.
And speaking of resistance and resilience, what could be more appropriate than Occupy Sandy that turned networks of mobilization formed during the Occupy Wall Street movement into relief efforts after Sandy?
Resistance in East Asia
It was through Sandy that I first became interested in the connection between resistance movements and urban resilience. In 2015, during my Fulbright study in Taipei, I began to look at grassroots initiatives in the region that emerged after protest events such as the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. For instance, I came across Fixing Hong Kong which began as a group of carpenters, repair people, and volunteers.
Members of Fixing Hong Kong were responsible for building the “self-study area” during the protest that allowed students to study for exams during the occupation. After the protest, the group sustained its activism by offering free repairs for people, especially in working-class neighborhoods, as a way to engage people in conversation about democracy and social justice and to raise political awareness.
In Taipei, I followed groups including Do You a Flavor (DYAF). DYAF emerged after the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan in which young people occupied the parliamentary chamber for 24 consecutive days in protest against a free-trade agreement with China. Members of DYAF were volunteers in charge of handling donated food at the time. After the movement, they turned their activism to work on social issues such as homelessness.
One of their best-known and still ongoing projects is “Stone Soup,” a monthly gathering of volunteers who solicit donated food materials, cook together, and share meals with the people sleeping on the street. Hundreds of people — mostly strangers and young people — have since joined these activities. The volunteers do not just hand out food but also sit down and share meals with people experiencing homelessness who also struggle with social isolation and stigma.
In another project, they worked on redesigning the merchandise for street vendors. DYAF not only redesigned the packaging but also linked together organic producers, vendors, and consumers through the introduction of new merchandise. The profits are split three ways: 65% for producers, 20% for vendors, and 15% for operating costs.
Pandemic Initiatives
The work of Fixing Hong Kong and DYAF began as a form of resistance. But how do acts of resistance like these contribute to or become a form of resilience over time against crises and disasters? The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportune window for examining the capacity of these organizations and how they address crises at the community level.
During the height of the pandemic in Hong Kong, for instance, Fixing Hong Kong shifted gear from doing home repairs to distributing masks to those in need, which were in short supply at the time. Specifically, they focused their effort on sanitation workers who often did not have access to masks. To understand better the populations they were serving, volunteers reached out to the sanitation workers’ association to learn about their daily routines, locations, and better ways to communicate and connect with the sanitation workers. Through this process, Fixing Hong Kong was able to develop partnerships and collaboration with other organizations.
In Taipei, during the pandemic, DYAF worked with other social service and social innovation organizations (six altogether) and turned a community hub into a temporary logistics center for sorting and distribution of donated food and supplies. Some organizations were in charge of fundraising and soliciting donations; others were in charge of checking in donations, sorting, deliveries, and so on. The hub was located in the epicenter of the worst COVID outbreak in Taipei in May of 2021.
Like Fixing Hong Kong, the work of the hub went far beyond just the deliveries of goods. The different organizations raised enough money to hire people to perform the tasks, people who lost their jobs during the pandemic. DYAF also helped other organizations set up or join crowd-funding platforms. These organizations are now able to reach out to a wider network of supporters, and the financial condition of these organizations has also improved as a result.
Bottom-Up Resilience?
In July 2020, I co-organized a webinar in collaboration with APRU (Association of Pacific Rim Universities), titled “Bottom-Up Resilience.” We were joined by colleagues from various cities in East and Southeast Asia who shared with us similar cases they either have observed or have been involved with during the pandemic.
We learned about initiatives such as Life Cycles PH, a Manila-based group that raised funds to provide bikes to healthcare workers so they could go to work safely when the public transit system was shut down during the lockdown. Another initiative in Manila, Survival Pack, involved crowd-funding and delivering food supplies to help people who were out of work during the pandemic, particularly the many street vendors who lost their customers due to the lockdown.
In Hong Kong, the homeless advocacy organization ImpactHK saw the population they served jumped 10-fold from about 20 people a day to over 200. During the pandemic, they also started to partner with other organizations to provide temporary shelters for people experiencing homelessness.
Our own Seattle Street Sink, a project developed in partnership with Real Change, a homeless advocacy organization in Seattle, provided people on the street with a way to maintain their hygiene during the pandemic. The DIY design of the project allowed it to be replicated quickly throughout the city, hosted by businesses, non-profit organizations, schools, and religious organizations. It was even adopted by a research center at Duke University that worked with the City of Durham to install 20 sinks located in public spaces throughout the city.
From Resistance to Resilience
What can we learn from these instances of bottom-up initiatives, and what makes these efforts unique and significant, vis-à-vis their institutional counterparts? I would like to finish by offering a few quick observations
Embedded — First, unlike the institutional practices of resilience introduced from outside, these initiatives are typically embedded in the local contexts, involving the mobilization of social relationships and existing assets and resources in the community. It was through this embeddedness that socially and culturally appropriate responses could be developed or applied. Through the initiatives, the local communities can build and strengthen their ability to cope with and adapt to crises and disturbances.
Networked — Secondly, the initiatives demonstrate the power of collaboration, partnerships, and pooling together resources and assets among networks of small organizations. The networks and relationships can help overcome the limited capacity of individual groups or organizations if they act alone. The development of these networks and connections also represents a form of scaling up. By aggregating resources and capacity through these networks, communities can collectively address crises and challenges.
“Subjectivized” — Lastly (although this is not an exhaustive list), the initiatives demonstrate greater subjectivity on the part of the communities in terms of how they can take matters of responding to crises and disturbances into their own hands. Rather than depending solely on institutional responses or outside aid that don’t necessarily meet the needs of the local community, the organizations can develop more localized and self-determined responses that in turn strengthen their capacity and ability to respond to current and future crises.
The three characteristics above define a different type of resilience that speaks to the individual and collective agency of communities and civil society organizations to respond to a variety of challenges that they face. The dimensions of embeddedness, networking, and subjectivity also speak to the relationships between resistance and resilience. It is through a better understanding of these processes that communities and civil society groups can potentially develop the capacity to overcome not only short-term crises and disturbances but also long-standing barriers and challenges.
