Urban Transformations & Regional Resilience | Virtual Lecture Series
Urban Risks & Resilience
Dr. Susan Cutter
April 14, 2021 | 12:00 - 1:30 PM (EST)
Registration Link | Flyer
The resilience concept has become more significant in the past decade as a means for understanding how cities prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Definitional differences—resilience as an outcome or end-point versus resilience as a process of building capacity—dominate the literature. Lagging behind are efforts to systematically measure resilience to produce a baseline and subsequent monitoring, in order to gauge what, where, and how intervention or mitigation strategies would strengthen or weaken urban resilience. This seminar provides an overview of research and practitioner attempts to develop urban informatics for resilience.
Dr. Susan Cutter is a Carolina Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina and director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute and the IRDR Center of Excellence on Vulnerability and Resilience Metrics. She has authored or edited 15 books, 150+ plus peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and mentored more than 60 masters and doctoral candidates.
Her research focusses on vulnerability and resilience science with specific reference to methods, models, and metrics. Her scientific contributions include the hazards of place model of vulnerability, the disaster resilience of place model, as well as tools for assessing spatial and temporal variability in vulnerability (Social Vulnerability Index or SoVI®) and resilience (Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities [BRIC] Index). Her policy-relevant work focuses on the evidentiary basis for hazard mitigation and disaster recovery policy and practice at local, state, national, and international levels. In particular, she continues to lead investigations of the disproportionate spatial and temporal impacts of disasters on vulnerable populations and the places where they live.
Dr. Cutter is an elected fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She received an honorary doctorate from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2015), and was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. She was also the recipient of her disciplines highest awards: American Association of Geographers (AAG) Lifetime Achievement, Presidential Achievement, and the Wilbanks Award for Transformation Research.