Resilience as a system with a front door

At the recent Community Resilience Summit at City Hall - where I had the chance to listen in with two hats on, representing Pineapple Partnerships alongside my voluntary work with the environmental charity EcoJudaism - one question kept surfacing. Everyone is talking about resilience as the climate crisis accelerates, but what does it actually mean in practice on the ground?

I came away with a clearer sense of what is missing. We have plenty of risk registers, and plenty of plans for isolated emergencies. What we don't have is a shared account of how help reaches people when several pressures arrive together and keep arriving.

Lord Toby Harris, Chair of the National Preparedness Commission, described the underlying macro problem well: our systems are moving more slowly than the world around them. Extreme weather, food insecurity, cyber disruption and social pressures don't queue up and take turns. Their effects overlap and compound each other. For example, lose communications and every other response gets harder to coordinate.

That changes the question. If the pressure on our places is continual rather than a string of exceptional incidents, what exactly are we trying to make resilient? And how does resilience happen at a neighbourhood level?

The gap in our thinking

Emergency planning is good at dealing with a single, bounded incident. My worry is that it doesn't give us a strategic model for pressures that are long, overlapping and refuse to end tidily. We say communities matter, and then leave the practical question hanging: how does a decision taken at the centre become real help for someone on their own street?

This is the critique behind my proposal. "Community resilience" is closer to an aspiration than a system. We tell communities they are essential without saying what they are connected to, what they can expect to receive or how they should help people get hold of it. We hand them the responsibility and forget the means.

Central coordination can't be the whole answer either. Government, big businesses and major supply chains will have to decide how resources are used and how a macro response runs. Yet those decisions only count if information, goods and services can travel through regional and local networks to the people who need them.

A theory of distributed support

I think place-based resilience needs three connected layers:

• Central decision-making. Government, regional authorities, large businesses and suppliers need to understand the risks, coordinate the macro response and decide where resources go. That includes preparing for the climate and systemic pressures we can already see coming, such as flooding, extreme heat and food insecurity.

• Distribution networks. We need tried ways of moving information, food, essentials and support through a place, and of doing it fairly. We also need ways to communicate if digital systems fail, alongside working relationships with local authorities and emergency services. Little of this is specific to one kind of crisis; most of it will earn its keep whatever goes wrong.

• A community front door. People need to know where to knock. Depending on the neighbourhood, that might be the local council, a faith or community hub (whether a local church, mosque, or an environmental network like EcoJudaism), a small business or a residents' group. I am not suggesting every community organisation should deliver every service. I am suggesting that each one is equipped to connect people to the wider system, instead of improvising those connections in the middle of a crisis.

Each layer leans on the other two. A local front door can't do much if there is no dependable route to information and supplies. And a well-run central response falls short if people can't find it or use it.

Building networks that work in "peacetime"

Traditional emergency planning thinks in a tidy sequence: prepare, respond, recover. Yet when pressures overlap—when a neighbourhood is recovering from winter flooding while dealing with high energy costs and preparing for summer heatwaves—those phases happen simultaneously.

You cannot simply switch on a local distribution network during an emergency if it doesn't exist the rest of the year. And recovery is always the longest stretch: people are still dealing with the knock-on effects long after an incident has left the news, so the support needs to stay organised for as long as they are. That means the most resilient community front doors are the ones that already serve a practical, everyday purpose.

This is why the conceptual work matters. Without a shared model, we can all be busy preparing for "resilience" and each be building a different piece that doesn't join up. With one, we can ask sharper questions: where will support enter a neighbourhood? Who can activate that connection? What happens if usual communications channels fail? And how do we fund and sustain those local networks before a crisis hits?

What Pineapple could contribute

Across the built environment, brilliant work is already underway on the physical and institutional side of this challenge—most recently in the UK Green Building Council's (UKGBC) Climate Resilience Roadmap and Regenerative Places work. The vital next step is building the social and operational connective tissue that links those resilient places to people on their own street.

At Pineapple Partnerships, we want to help host this thinking and build partnerships across different risks and different levels of response—connecting the institutions making strategic decisions with the local networks who know how help actually reaches people. Crucially, we want to test how shared business models can make local resilience scalable and self-sustaining: finding ways for local food hubs, community energy projects, and neighbourhood networks to generate shared commercial and social value day-to-day, so they are already funded, trusted, and ready to flex when a crisis hits.

I don't see communities as a substitute for properly organised public and institutional responses. If anything, it is the opposite. Communities need to be connected to those responses, with a clear role and the means to carry it out. If you are looking at how institutional strategies and local networks actually join up on the ground, we’d love to compare notes.

Nobody in the middle of a crisis will ask how well we described resilience at a summit. They will want to know where to go, and whether someone is there when they knock.