Gauging the Resilience of City and Town Government

"The book addresses the issue of resilience in organisations - and especially resilience in those organisations that go to make up the government of a country, its towns and cities and other units employed in managing an increasingly complex world. It not only gives practical guidance on how to gauge the levels of resilience, but also ways of developing strategies to improve resilience.

The manual does indeed come at a fortuitous time. We would have done well to pay more attention to organisational resilience before the advent of the Covid19 pandemic.

Emerging economies, as well as developed economies, are all experiencing serious economic decline as they struggle to adjust to the realities of life in a pandemic. Their lack of readiness to withstand the challenges posed are being exposed in most areas of public life: health, transport, supply chains, education, human capacity management, and governance systems, to name but some. It is almost like the sticking plaster that was keeping things together has been ripped off, and the wounds below are exposed - fault lines if you like.

Some would argue that this pandemic and how we steer our way through it is just a "dress rehearsal" for the much larger disrupter that lies ahead: climate change. However one frames the issues, there can be no doubt that making sure we have resilient towns and cities is a significant way to rebuild economies and organisations and prepare ourselves for a future that is significantly different to the past. We will be surely tested to the limits.

Louis' work and the research that went into the book (with a doctorate collected along the way) will be useful.''

Extract from Preface by Brenda M. Gourley