NYIT to host TEDxNYIT: Meta Resiliency on Learnings from Hurricane Sandy and Global Best Practices

As New York approaches the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, the word resilience has re-emerged in popularity as a reminder of the city’s overwhelming response to last year’s disaster––and its long-reaching effects. But on October 10th, TEDxNYIT’s event, Meta Resiliency, will introduce a new theme: The resiliency of resiliency. Scheduled to take place just before the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, TEDxNYIT’s forum on “Meta Resiliency” will bring together thinkers, visionaries, and activists (not only from across the U.S., but from Sweden, Mexico, and the UK) to speak about the concept of resilience and its application in communal efforts.

The independently organized event will appropriately take place at the New York Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture and Design. Tickets are $90/person, but if you order yours before September 30th you will enjoy a forty dollar discount, or catch up on our coverage on Untapped Cities.

Taking the name seriously, Meta Resiliency does not limit its scope to communal disaster response. Rather, it uses the way New Yorkers responded to Hurricane Sandy as an ignition point to examine and harness the resilience of the human spirit, bringing in global best practices from a cross-section of fields.

The forum will run from 9 AM until 7 PM on October 10th, shifting from ideas of the “latent resiliency” in our own communities to opportunities for the pedagogy and praxis of resilience as a concept. Perhaps most concrete will be the discussion about dynamics in “visceral resiliency”: What makes a successful grassroots response? How can individuals start an explosive, full-participation movement?

You may recognize some of the speakers from their activism in and around the city. Sandy Safi from Dîner en Blanc will speak around noon on visceral resiliency. The leaders of the grassroots Sandy response movement Operation Resilient Long Island, as well as Casey Mack of Popular Architecture fame, will explore how we can best teach others about resilience. Perhaps most topically, local heroes––including first responders to  Sandy destruction and Margaret Newman of the NYC Department of Transportation––share their own accounts of the resiliency often hidden within our own communities.

A full schedule and list of speakers can be found on the event website, and a map is available to those who need help finding NYIT’s School of Architecture and Design.