6abc.com - February 29th 2016

The Philadelphia Department of Public Health announced the city's first case of Zika virus on Monday.

The infection was identified in a 60-year-old woman who recently returned from a trip to the Caribbean.

She was not hospitalized, officials said, and is recovering without complications.

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odi.org - Aditya Bahadur, Emma Lovell, Emily Wilkinson, Thomas Tanner - August 2015

CLICK HERE - Resilience in the SDGs - Developing an indicator for Target 1.5 that is fit for purpose (7 page .PDF file)

We outline a comprehensive approach for developing a cross-sectoral, multi-dimensional and dynamic understanding of resilience. This underpins the core message of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that development is multi-faceted and the achievement of many of the individual development goals is dependent on the accomplishment of other goals. It also acknowledges that shocks and stresses can reverse years of development gains and efforts to eradicate poverty by 2030. Crucially, this approach to understanding resilience draws on data that countries will collect for the SDGs anyway and entails only a small additional burden in this regard.

(CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION)

Philadelphia is famous for its many murals that capture the city's history and spirit, like this one by artist Carl Willis Humphrey honoring W.E.B. Du Bois. The image is painted on the wall of a historical African-American firehouse. Du Bois was a founder of the NAACP and was commissioned in 1896 to survey African-Americans living in the city's Seventh Ward as part of a study on race, The Philadelphia Negro. He is depicted with a census in hand. Photo by Shrub75/Flickr

The city is home to more than 40,000 vacant properties. Now neighborhoods are hoping a new public entity can help them bounce back from the post-industrial blues.

yesmagazine.org - by Jake Blumgart - December 27, 2013

Blighted properties drain public coffers, contribute nothing to the tax base, and serve as havens for crime and trash. After years of work . . . activists hope that a bill passed this December will finally provide Philadelphians with a tool to confront this colossal problem: a land bank.

First, there is great value in a systems approach as a heuristic for understanding interlocked social-ecological-technological processes, and in analysis across multiple scales. Yet we need to move beyond both systems as portrayed in resilience thinking, and the focus on actors in work on vulnerability, to analyse networks and relationships, as well as to attend to the diverse framings, narratives, imaginations and discourses that different actors bring to bear.

For More:

http://resilienturbanism.tumblr.com/post/7573475902/reframing-resilience

There are many definitions of resilience from simple deterministic views of resilience anchored in Newtonian mechanics to far more dynamic views of resilience from a systems perspective, including insights from quantum mechanics and the sciences of complexity.  One baseline perspective of resilience sees it in terms of the viability of socio-ecological systems as the foundation for sustainability.  For those that are ready to look beyond resilience as the ability to return to the "normal state" before a disaster, take a look at:

http://www.resalliance.org/