Resilience as Resistance Symposium

Bringing together practitioners and thinkers from across different spheres — adaptation experts, activists, policy makers, and designers — responding to challenges from coastal adaptation to fire recovery, this session explores the urgent challenges of environmental resilience in light of a rapidly changing climate. Compounded by new levels of precarity, how are cities and regions preparing for overlapping vulnerabilities and growing unpredictability? The “raincoat” here is a metaphor for the strategies and protections communities need in order to prepare for, withstand, and adapt to environmental disruption. Rather than focusing on singular solutions, the panel highlights diverse approaches to resilience and examines how policy, practice, and lived experience intersect when developing collective strategies. Panelists will engage both the practical tools and the imaginative frameworks shaping resilience today while trying to determine what the challenges are we are truly facing, and what “raincoat” we even need to weather them.

Framing resilience as a right rather than a privilege, this session asks who is afforded its protections and who must struggle to create it daily for survival. Moving beyond technical fixes, we examine everyday practices, cultural legacies, and community-driven strategies of resilience that are too often overlooked or erased. What does it take to achieve resilience equitably, so that the “right to resilience” becomes universal, ultimately eliminating the very need for resilience itself? This conversation will consider how can we archive inequalities, surface hidden forms of resilience, build collective capacity, and imagine more just and interdependent futures.

On May 16, 2025, an EF3 tornado cut a 21-mile swath through the city of St. Louis with particularly devastating effects to the cities north side, a portion of the city already heavily impacted by decades of disinvestment. A new Mayoral administration was just ramping up, while the federal government was slashing safety-net and emergency response programs. In the immediate aftermath of the tornadoes, long-standing community organizations stepped in to fill the gap, immediately opening resource hubs, organizing volunteer responses, and supporting a grassroots self-deployment. Other non-profits and researchers are attempting to engage key questions in the aftermath around soil contamination, impacts of tree canopy loss, and the casualties of frayed community cohesion. The symposium provides us a moment to ask: ten months later, where are we now? Leaders of those community organizations, ad hoc governmental response teams, and university researchers share experiences and in process findings regarding the environmental, social, and spatial implications of the combined slow and fast disasters impacting St. Louis as we speculate on what a resilient city for all could mean.

This is what we’ve learned (in this symposium, in this year); this is where we are (in STL, in the world).