March 11, 2015:

Think gargantuan, iceberg-like snowbanks. (At one point cyclists even shoveled a 40-foot tunnel through one so they could ride their bikes where the path used to be—city planning at its best.) A T-system slowed to a halt. Once-wide streets turned into one-way thoroughfares. Cars left outside in parking spots, snowed into place for months.

A new kind of urban jungle: Cold. Wind so blustery it blows your eyes closed. Snow, shoulders-high and sometimes soft enough to sink you right down and in. All this for a breath of fresh air and some beef jerky from the only store open—thank you, 7-11.

This was Boston’s everlasting winter of 2015.

And here’s what I started to think about in its aftermath. Instead of one giant-shock snowstorm, it was one on top of another in Boston. A once-acute type of disaster became a chronic stressor. Boston stands as a paradigm for any modern, over-populated city tasked with recovering from a slow-burning catastrophe.

I did some investigating and wrote an article about all this for How We Get to Next. It turns out that no matter which city you inhabit—from El Paso, Texas, to Tokyo, Japan—we all might have to depend on this year’s urban buzzword: resilience.

By Abigail Ronck, from Diamonds in the Dustheap

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