Building Urban Resilience through Social Connectedness (pt 2)

When imagining the city and modern society facing social and ecological crises, we tend to turn to dystopian thinking thinking. This is a rather ineffective approach, as it paralyzes us from making necessary changes to adapt. Rather, we can take a disruptive imaginings approach, in which we begin to question our  perceptions, and cultural norms that dictate the way our modern urban lifestyle unfolds. This is what resilience thinking looks like. One way to conduct a disruptive imagining is to create a prototype in order to imagine how the world might look like if we were to build resilience. 

We wanted to imagine a different social future in our cities. Particularly, we were responding to a failure in medium-high density neighborhoods to foster healthy levels of social interactions among neighbors or building inhabitants. Following the Healthiest City Strategy, a government document that outlines goals for such a sustainable future, including a priority action in the realm of cultivating connections in the city, a group of students and I, under the guidance of Vancouver-based CityStudio, an innovation hub, and InWithForward, a service design firm, co-created a program called Rezcue Buddy to experiment with social connectedness. The exercise was done to determine whether we could meet the City of Vancouver's goal: "have each Vancouverite know four people in their network." 

We found this goal to be extremely challenging to meet, which demonstrates that due to a number of social, structural, and cultural boundaries, we are limited in bridging social interaction among strangers, and thus may limit ourselves in finding urban resilience.