Building Resilient Regions

In partnership with the University of California at Berkeley and other collaborators, the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) is conducting specific research and related activities to support the Building Resilient Regions project.

In general, this project seeks to explore how regions matter, what constitutes regional success and resilience in the face of metropolitan challenges, and what factors, including regional asset bases, governance modes, actor choices and civic practices, help to build and sustain regional success and resilience. The project includes maintenance of a research network on regions, a large-scale quantitative analysis of regional performance and variation, case study research that can illuminate regional challenges and responses, and the dissemination of the results to both academics and practitioners.

The original product of this study is to create and maintain a regional spatial database that may be accessed to ascertain a variety of information on outcome measures such as employment and earnings growth, income inequality, the degree of racial segregation and isolation, and the pace of suburban sprawl. It contains demographic, economic, civic, social, housing, geographic, and population or housing unit measures - over a three decade time period to generate typologies of regional change - all at the level of “Core-Based Statistical Areas” (CBSAs). The database’s comprehensiveness concentrates an abundance of information in one location to facilitate regional assessment and transformation for a variety of researchers.

A part of the larger Network Building Resilient Regions, PERE seeks to expand the knowledge base about how regions shape the response to major national economic and demographic challenges. At the same time, it aims to provide new evidence about how regions can cultivate resilience in the face of major economic and social challenges. By comparing how diverse regions have responded to challenges, the project will show how diverse elements can work together to help build and sustain regional resilience. Quantitatively measuring regions over time allows researchers to provide policy options based on continual adaptations of economic, demographics, and social forces. Capturing such metropolitan transformation offers a look into future projections and how best to grapple and address emerging issues across the dichotomy of central cities and their suburbs.

Link the BRR site: http://brr.berkeley.edu/index.html

Publications

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Why Regions? Why Now? Who Cares?
By Manuel Pastor et al. (Journal of Urban Affairs, vol. 31, no. 3, 2009).

Resources

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Interactive tool measures whether regions are resilient in the face of rapid change or sudden shocks

Which U.S. metro region is most likely to come out of the next recession, natural disaster or other regional "shock" relatively unscathed?

A new online tool not only seeks to answer that question, but it also offers regional planners, policymakers, and others important insights on how to "weather-proof" their own metro area against the proverbial storm.

The Resilience Capacity Index (RCI), developed by Kathryn A. Foster, director of the University of Buffalo's Regional Institute, includes more than 360 U.S. metros ranked for their regional resilience based on performance across 12 economic, socio-demographic, and community connectivity indicators, ranging from income equality and business environment to voter participation and the population with health insurance. It offers maps revealing geographic patterns in resilience capacity, detailed data profiles for each metro, and a "compare metros" tool.

Dr. Foster developed the tool as part of the Building Resilient Regions (BRR) network, http://brr.berkeley.edu, a national network of experts on metropolitan regions funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and administered by the University of California, Berkeley. USC's Program for Environmental and Regional Equity has also participated in the network, contributing data, studies, and analyses of issues like the degree of immigrant integration in America's metropolitan regions.

Check out the tool - a gauge for how well a region is positioned to adapt to stress at http://brr.berkeley.edu/rci/brrhome.html

Oh, and the metro area that shows up as most resilient in this ranking? Rochester, MN.

Other tidbits:

• The Northeast and Midwest tend to be more resilient than regions in the South or West, largely because they earn high scores for affordability, the size of their health-insured population, rates of homeownership, and metropolitan stability, as measured by recent population change.
• Minneapolis-St. Paul ranks number 1 among metro areas with populations over 1 million. It ranks first because of its very high socio-demographic capacity and levels of community connection.
• Miami, FL, ranks lowest among the large metro areas because of its very low regional affordability and income equality.

So find your metro and see how you rank - but more important how you and leaders in your area can develop policies and programs that can improve resilience, prosperity and inclusion.