Wireless mesh networks have gained increasing interests, but the lack of security guarantee has retarded their deployment. Security solutions have applied preventive or reactive mechanisms, being inefficient to put all attacks off. We design a survivable architecture for ad hoc and mesh networks to enhance the network capability of providing essential services even in face of attacks or intrusions. Our approach integrates preventive, reactive and tolerant defense lines in a self-adaptive way. Based on our architecture, we create a survival path selection scheme, and evaluate it through simulations using urban mesh network mobility and propagation models. Results show a decrease in the impact of routing attacks with minimal performance loss.