Performances and performativities of resilience

Resilience has become an institutionalized buzzword in spatial planning. Regarding resilience as a Foucauldian dispositif manifest through discursivities and materialities, I demonstrate how resilience is both a process and product of governance. Signifying a particular regime of truth or configuration of powerknowledge, resilience performs both as a social-political construct and, in turn, constructs certain behaviors, expectations and so on of human and non-human actors. I discuss how spatial planning practitioners have generally conceptualized and performed resilience and demonstrate the contingent nature of resilience as both product and process, both descriptive and normative. Such boundary-crossings are often major sources of performativity. Conceiving resilience as performative practice recognizes that actors' identities, interests, knowledges, needs and so on are constructed in the practice itself. I also demonstrate that in spatial planning, resilience tends to be performed as a descriptor or end-state rather than as a process. A managerial 'command-and-control' approach trades off the evolutionary dynamics of social-ecological systems in favor of conserving the status quo. Traditionally regarded as a scientific discipline and an administrative technique which seeks to achieve specified end-states, spatial planning systems tend to be fairly rigid. A major paradox of planning practice is that a system whose main purpose is to plan for change is underpinned by structures which impinge on capacity for change. Eliding issues of power, politics and normativity and locked into planning for certainty, spatial planning practice is in tension with conceptualizations of resilience as adaptiveness and transformation.