A failure of resilience: estimating response of New York City's public health ecosystem to sudden disaster.
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.
Wallace
Rodrick
R
New York State Psychiatric Institute, Epidemiology of Mental Disorders Research Department, Box 47, 1051 Riverside Drive, New York 10032, USA. wallace@pi.cpmc.columbia.edu
Wallace
Deborah
D
Ahern
Jennifer
J
Galea
Sandro
S
D004190:Disasters; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009519:New York City; D011635:Public Health Administration; D012111:Residence Characteristics