Preface to the Book: Now more than ever, cities are hot spots responsible for threatened global ecological boundaries. Climate change impacts and global environmental change are challenges for urban dwellers, planners, and managers. To develop opportunities for the sustainable development of cities, researchers from multiple disciplines are studying the feedback, dynamics, and behaviour of urban systems in the face of change. During the 2011 Resilience Conference1 in Arizona, USA, a group of young researchers from different countries discussed critically the potential use of the resilience theory in understanding the dynamics and development of cities. Given the highly scattered literature related to ‘urban resilience’ and the different interpretations and applications of the concept, these researchers decided to set up an international urban resilience research network (later named URBNet2, Urban Resilience Young Researchers Network). Eight months after this first contact, the URBNet founders organised the First International Workshop on Urban Resilience, held in Barcelona on 18 and 19 November of 2011 with the support of the Master Programme in Landscape Intervention and Management at the Barcelona History Museum (MUHBA). The aim of the workshop was to share resilience perspectives applied to different urban contexts. The workshop was attended by more than 40 graduate students, researchers and practitioners. This report summarises presentations of the ongoing research of the network’s members that were given during the two-day workshop. The result is a review and discussion of examples showing how resilience is applied to different contexts. As a first step in understanding these contexts, we hope this compilation will inspire readers to create ways of complementing sustainability science with resilience thinking. Contributors to this report are Lorenzo Chelleri (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain), Marta Olazabal (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom and Basque Centre for Climate Change, BC3, Spain), Lilia Yumagulova (British Columbia University, Canada), James J. Waters (Tyndall Centre, United Kingdom), Anna Kunath (Helmholtz- Centre, Germany) and Guido Minucci (Politecnico di Milano, Italy). Through this report, URBNet aims to contribute constructively to the discussion on urban resilience and the opportunities and benefits of applying urban resilient thinking in urban environments.

As remarked in the presentation of the special issue of the A|Z Journal - Cities at risk - the increasing losses due to natural hazards, often combined with technological ones, let arise the need for new approaches addressed to evaluate vulnerability and resilience of cities in face of hazard factors, in order to better drive disaster mitigation policies. Tacking up this challenge, this contribution focuses on the “multifaceted” concept of resilience that, bridging different research fields (ecology, sustainability, risk, climate change), can play a key-role for enhancing cities’ capacity to deal with the heterogeneous factors currently threatening them: climate change, individual and coupled hazards, from scarcity of resources to environmental degradation. In detail, based on the in-depth analysis of the capacities of a resilient system and of the different models of resilience up to now carried out, an interpretative model of Urban Resilience has been outlined. Such a model represents a methodological tool for driving planners and decision-makers in building up resilient cities, enabling them to frame, into a comprehensive approach, the currently fragmented policies addressed to tackle different issues: from the climate change to the complex chains of hazards; from the environmental decay to the scarcity of natural resources.

IDS Evidence Report, 2014

International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, 2018

Environmental and urban problems are rooted in both ecology and urbanism contexts. The main issue in this regard is to plan, design and manage urban settlements where human beings would be able to have the desirable quality of life according to sustainable principles. The increase in social, economic and spatial vulnerabilities in cities, and the excess of degradation factors of natural environment resources show the necessity of considering resilience thinking. This paper aims to apply resilience thinking to urban studies and to identify the required basis for further research on urban resilience through a descriptive analytical review of the theoretical literature. A recent research on urban resilience in urbanization, which is a novel topic in urban resilience studies is addressed in this article. This paper aimed at introducing indices of urban resilience through a particular approach to the relationship between urban form and urban resilience. Given the literature review of urban resilience, our results show that while most research topics rely on environmental dimensions and reduction in natural hazards, such as global warming and climate change, the need for further research on spatial morphology and urban spatial structures is evident. Furthermore, additional research is needed to explore the criteria of urban resilience measurement specifically in the locational-spatial aspect.

Resilient space is one of crisis, one of immediacy and sometimes one re-constructed by catastrophe. Today, the challenge of the resilient city is not solely to attaining symbiotic relationship with nature, but one of adaptation and optimization to ecological, economical and global forces. Recently, the resilient city has transcended the notion of the sustainable city Published in the Online Journal ACTA. http://acta-arquitectura.org

Sustainable Cities and Society, 2022

Considering the rapid urbanization trends in many parts of the world and the increasing consequences of climate change, more and more cities are at risk of natural disasters and other environmental, socio-economic, and political disruptions. To address these issues, resilience thinking has attracted the attention of a wide range of stakeholders. However, despite considerable attention to this concept and its frequent usage, resilience remains ambiguous with diverse interpretations in policy discussions and academic debates about cities. Since such vague interpretations would lead to difficulties in theory and practice, the present study aims to clarify some of these concepts by providing a comprehensive review focused on resilience features and comparing different perspectives regarding urban resilience. The study results showed that the main reason behind such ambiguities is that resilience has undergone fundamental changes since its inception, and recent approaches to resilience are generally based on the non-equilibrium model of resilience. There are three main dimensions, including systems, agents, and institutions, as well as three main approaches to urban resilience, including recovery, adaptation, and transformation. This study's conceptual framework of urban resilience provides scholars and policymakers with a more transparent and comprehensive picture of urban resilience and helps them make better-informed decisions.

International Society for the Study of Vernacular Settlements

Urban change is inevitable and happens in cities and urban centers. Their land use is continuously modernized because of economic, social, political and demographic factors. However, urban resilience can provide opportunities for social interactions and plays a key role in the development of urban spaces and access to high-quality urban spaces. The link between the urban and regional aspects and social, economic, cultural, and political systems is that their characteristics are interconnected with those of urban resilience, and outer urban space can play a role in resilience through its ability to reconstruct a balanced environmental state after human intervention. Thus, urban resilience is one of the most appropriate ways to control the processes of urban change and absorb its consequences. This research examines urban resilience and its role in urban change. Its aim is to study urban resilience and its positive role in urban change, which affects the organization of a city and the...

This paper will focus on the concept of resilience in the urban systems context. Generally, urban resilience is defined as the ability to absorb, adapt and respond to changes in a city or urban system. (Da Silva, 2012). As urbanization expands globally in the face of climate change, natural disasters, and other shocks, resilience has been placed centrally in the planning agenda to tackle these threats. In this paper, two underlying challenges within urban resilience theory discourse and practice will be explored. The first challenge is found in the ongoing tension between viewing urban resilience through the lens of engineering systems or socio-ecological systems (SES). The second challenge is found in the ambiguous aspiration of urban resilience theory and practice to become more “transformative” in nature. While this paper does not offer a complete solution to either one of these challenges, it aims to clarify the debate and further shed light on dimensions that can strengthen application of the concept of urban resilience to the field of planning.

2015

Fostering resilience in the face of environmental, socioeconomic, and political uncertainty and risk has captured the attention of academics and decision makers across disciplines, sectors, and scales. Resilience has become an important goal for cities, particularly in the face of climate change. Urban areas house the majority of the world’s population, and, in addition to functioning as nodes of resource consumption and as sites for innovation, have become laboratories for resilience, both in theory and in practice. This paper reviews the scholarly literature on urban resilience and concludes that the term has not been well defined. Existing definitions are inconsistent and underdeveloped with respect to incorporation of crucial concepts found in both resilience theory and urban theory. Based on this literature review, and aided by bibliometric analysis, the paper identifies six conceptual tensions fundamental to urban resilience: (1) definition of ‘urban’; (2) understanding of sys...