A failure of resilience: Estimating response of New York City's public health ecosystem to sudden disaster [An article from: Health and Place]

This digital document is a journal article from Health and Place, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Adapting methodology from resilience theory in ecology, we develop an empirical model of the response of the New York City public health ecosystem to sudden disaster. Contrary to cultural expectation, 'good' and 'bad' neighborhoods-starkly differentiated by public health status reflecting longstanding economic and racial segregation-respond similarly to challenge. This suggests that the difference in health between neighborhoods is primarily predicated on the extent to which they have been, and continue to be, exposed to differing patterns of stressors and affordances, rather than to any difference in underlying socio-economic vulnerability. Paradoxically, then, these urban neighborhoods constitute a single, highly interdependent, health ecosystem, despite substantial socioeconomic and racial segregation.