Viewpoint Is resilience planning's holy grail?

The sustainability flavour of the moment, resilience, is, on its face, a wisely chosen topic for urban and environmental planning. In fact, it has become so widespread that it has nearly become a mantra. Given that it is an inherent property of nature, both of living beings and of ecosystems, as well as the processes that comprise them, one finds little to argue with. In the face of this current state of affairs, invoking resilience as a mode and an object of practice, research and teaching in the planning realm would seem to make perfect sense. Resilience is nearly unquestioned, accepted without debate, an admonishment of what we should strive for in our work. In this, the practice of planning mirrors the broader society in which it is embedded. What could be wrong with that?Who is to argue this sensibility? What better than resilience to deal with the 'wrecking ball' (thanks to Bruce Springsteen) that reflects metaphorically on key impacts of contemporary society, focused as it is on progress, profit and growth? All things good, we were led to believe - if we do not include in our accounts the ever widening disparities in the distribution of income and wealth, and the steady increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that leads to growing instability and extremes in global and local climates (Stiglitz, 2012; Piketty, 2014; IPCC, 2018). Nonetheless, the sustainability movement, like the environmental and conservation movements before it, placed the aspirations and guiding principles of progress, growth and profit in question. Urban planning played no small part in these movements, to its credit. So, as a subset of or adjunct to sustainability, why would we question resilience?