The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability , 2023

The policy rhetoric of urban resilience has spread rapidly across the globe in recent years, including the scholarly debate and networks of globally oriented practitioners. Despite its success, consensus regarding its theoretical understanding and operationalization into strategies, policies, and actions is still far-off. Particularly successful in globally circulating urban resilience thinking was the 100 Resilient Cities initiative (100RC hereafter). The initiative was promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation (RF hereafter) through a significant deployment of financial and organizational means. During its existence between 2013 and 2019, 100RC was joined by cities that differed significantly in size, institutional capacities, and available resources to design and implement urban resilience strategies while putting in place "Chief Resilience Officers" within their operations. The initiative's focus was on resilience, seen as a process of overarching change in governance and institutional practices to be achieved through a highly predesigned process involving private partners-particularly globally operating consultancies-and standardized procedures. The chapter looks at the trajectory of the initiative locating it in the context of debates regarding global urban governance, transnational municipal networks, and policy mobilities. It is argued that the nature of the initiative signaled a relevant change in the nature, level of ambition, and investment in global urban governance projects and practices, and also that such highly predesigned approaches have clear limits once they encounter the highly variegated and porous realities of the different localities involved.

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Environment and Urbanization, 2014

This paper reviews what local governments in more than 50 cities are doing with regard to disaster risk reduction. It draws on the reports of their participation in the global Making Cities Resilient Campaign and its 10 "essential" components, and on interviews with city mayors or managers. These show how resilience to disasters is being conceived and addressed by local governments, especially with regard to changes in their institutional framework and engagement with communities and other stakeholders, also in mobilizing finance, undertaking multi-hazard risk assessments, upgrading informal settlements, adjusting urban planning and implementing building codes. The paper summarizes what city mayors or managers view as key milestones for building resilience, and further discusses their evaluation of the usefulness of the campaign to them. It also discusses how a local government-focused perspective on disaster risk reduction informs our understanding of resilience. This includes how development can contribute much to disaster risk reduction as well as a more tangible and operational understanding of resilience (resistance + coping capacity + recovery + adaptive capacity) that local governments can understand and act on.

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 2018

Resilience has risen rapidly over the last decade to become one of the key terms in international policy and academic discussions associated with civil contingencies and crisis management. As governments and institutions confront threats such as environmental hazards, technological accidents, climate change, and terrorist attacks, they recognise that resilience can serve as a key policy response. Many organisations including the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, government agencies and departments, international non-governmental organisations and community groups promote resilience. However, with the rapid rise of resilience has come uncertainty as to how it should be built and how different practices and approaches should come together to operationalise it (Chandler & Coaffee, 2016). Whilst there is a variety of different interpretations given to resilience from practitioners and an open debate about resilience principles and characteristics in academia, we adopt the crisis and disaster management definition of "the capacity of a social system to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances" (Boin, Comfort, & Demchak, 2010; p. 9). By developing resilience, a system becomes capable of reducing the impact of shocks and resuming normal functioning more quickly following a disaster and better equipped to meet population needs and minimise economic losses caused by crises (Lagadec, 2009; Meerow, Newell, & Stults, 2016). However, it should be noted that this definition fails to capture preexisting socioeconomic inequities within society and that in many countries "negotiated resilience" may be desirable (Ziervogel et al., 2017). Moreover, in the rapidly emerging policy discourse of resilience, cities and urban areas have become a key focus of action where rapid urbanisation and greater global connectedness present unprecedented challenges. Such increased urbanisation also concentrates risk in cities making them increasingly vulnerable to an array of shocks and stresses. Under such circumstances, city managers are increasingly seeking to enhance urban resilience by addressing underlying risk factors, and by reducing the exposure and vulnerability of people and assets to a range of current and future threats. In this sense urban resilience provides different frameworks for reducing the multiple risks faced by cities and communities, ensuring there are appropriate levels of resources and capacities to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from a range of shocks and stresses (Coaffee & Lee, 2016). Many initiatives organised through global governance networks promote the importance of city-based resilience whilst a range of private sector and philanthropic organisations have advanced programmes of work and frameworks by which cities might develop the capacities to become more resilient. Most notably, major cities throughout the world have joined the 100 Resilient Cities programme (http://www. Knowledge for Urban Resilience Implementation at the Ecole nationale

Urban Resilience in a Global Context, 2020

In the early 21 st century, resilience has become the preferred policy constellation to address futures that are extremely uncertain but that are likely to be extreme. The Bloomberg and Rockefeller Foundations have resilient cities programming, as do the World Bank, Asia Development Bank, and dozens of other mega-organizations. Resilience plays an important role in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which have set global development targets for more than one hundred nations through 2030, and have on-the-ground impacts that will shape lives in all corners of the planet for a generation (Sharma 2015: 592). 1 As Aditya Bahadur and others have argued, "The vision set out in the SDGs-for people, planet, prosperity and peace-will inevitably fail if shocks and stresses are not addressed […] A focus on strengthening resilience can protect development gains and ensure people have the resources and capacities to better reduce, prevent, anticipate, absorb and adapt to a range of shocks, stresses, risks and uncertainties" (Bahadur et al. 2015: 2). 2 Some argue that resilience is simply a trendy term, one that has gained currency in a variety of sectors because it is easy to use and extremely flexible. This may be true. But resilience as a development discourse and an urban practice directly impacts the lives of hundreds of millions of the world's most vulnerable people: It is at the core of funding, development, and aid initiatives worth tens of billions of dollars. This alone-the fact that resilience does and will continue to shape lived realities across the planet-is a reason to think seriously about the concept, discourse, and practice.

This report, the product of a joint project of the International Peace Institute (IPI) and the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) at the National University of Singapore, aims to highlight diverse sources of urban fragility and approaches to urban transformation, renewal, and resilience. Five authors explore the drivers of fragility in their cities and offer examples of policies and programs that can build resilience. The case studies are: (1) Bangkok, (2) Dhaka, (3) Mumbai, (4) Lagos, and (5) Medellín. These cases demonstrate that every city is fragile in different ways, but three common features emerge: socioeconomic and spatial segregation, rapid population growth, and suboptimal governance systems. As I analyze the lessons emerging from these cases, I suggest four guiding principles for strengthening urban resilience: (1) adapt dynamic and scenario-based urban planning, (2) optimize urban governance, (3) add voices to decision making, and (4) reduce spatial segregation.

In academic and policy discourse, the concept of urban resilience is proliferating. Social theorists, especially human geographers, have rightfully criticized that the underlying politics of resilience have been ignored and stress the importance of asking “resilience of what, to what, and for whom?” This paper calls for careful consideration of not just resilience for whom and what, but also where, when, and why. A three-phase process is introduced to enable these “five Ws” to be negotiated collectively and to engender critical reflection on the politics of urban resilience as plans, initiatives, and projects are conceived, discussed, and implemented. Deployed through the hypothetical case of green infrastructure in Los Angeles, the paper concludes by illustrating how resilience planning trade-offs and decisions affect outcomes over space and time, often with significant implications for equity.

Special Issue: Planning Practices and Theories from the Global South, 2021

Urban planning has traditionally been a public sector activity situated in the 'local': It is a place based, history-dependent activity. As Flyvbjerg (2001, p.38) states, recalling Michael Foucault, "context counts". On the other hand, there is a 'global' idea of Urban/City/Regional planning that has emerged from worldwide dynamics, which are shaping cities profoundly (Sassen, 1991). This global idea of planning has emerged from exchanges between academics and practitioners from various parts of Europe, North America, Australia and from countries of the Global South, at academic and industry-oriented conferences and meetings.

Global Environmental Change

In the context of global environmental change, much hope is placed in the ability of resilience thinking to help address environment-related risks and numerous initiatives aim at incorporating resilience into urban planning practices. The purpose of this paper is to open up a conversation on urban resilience by unpacking how diverse science methods contribute to the production of different narratives of urban resilience and mobilize different experts and forms of evidence. A number of scholars have cautioned against uncritical approaches to resilience and asked what resilience means and for whom, also pointing out the normative dimension of the concept. Building on this emerging scholarship, we use insights from science and technology studies (STS) and critical social sciences to look at the knowledge infrastructures and networks of actors involved in the development of resilience strategies. Drawing on fieldwork in Manila, Nairobi, and Cape Town, we map different narratives of urban resilience, paying particular attention to the ways in which science serves to legitimate or alienate particular perspectives on what should be done. Whereas urban resilience is often portrayed as consensual, we show that a range of narratives, with diverse material implications, exist at the city level. After discussing the multiple roles that science methods have for resilience planning, we reflect on policy implications and outline future research directions.