VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

The passage of the 2023/24 US Inflation Reduction Act under a presidential administration that included veterans of the environmental justice movement promised to be a significant proof of concept for the mutuality of environmental response, societal resilience and social equity. Its 2025 defunding and the subsequent dismantling of federal engagement with environmental, social and justice concerns of all kinds have completely transformed the US landscape in record time. As a faculty at Columbia University in New York trained in architecture and urbanism but located as faculty in the sustainability management field, I have been teaching a course entitled ‘Responsiveness and Resilience in the Built Environment’ for almost fifteen years. The actions of the US Federal government since January 2025 have demanded a complete rethinking of what it means to teach a course such as this to students who will go on to work in public and private sector to further a more holistic understanding of what resilience means. I see the opportunity of this conference in defining and comparing not only the various meanings and enactments of resilience – as the aspiration to an imagined state of equilibrium, as the broader capacity to absorb and persist through change, as a social state of collaboration and support, among others – but also what it means to find new commonalities and approaches at this difficult moment. I hope to highlight the potentials and limitations of teaching in the US as a testbed for what it might mean to pursue a resilience agenda while the social, financial and policy infrastructure built since the early environmental and social justice movements of the mid-20th century are being – or have already been – irrevocably destroyed.