Urban resilience

The etymological roots of the word "resilience" stem from the Latin word resilio, meaning to bounce back. In the academic literature, the term tends to be malleable, enabling multidisciplinary collaboration on the topic. Urban resilience has conventionally been defined as the “capability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from significant multi-hazard threats with minimum damage to public safety and health, the economy, and security" of a given urban area. From this perspective, academic discussion of urban resilience has focused primarily on three distinct threats; climate change, natural disasters and terrorism. Accordingly, resilience strategies have tended to be conceived of in terms of counter-terrorism, other disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, solar flares, etc.) and sustainable energy.

More recently, there has been an increasing attention to the capability to adapt to changing conditions. This branch of resilience theory builds on a notion of cities as highly complex adaptive systems. The implication of this insight is to move urban planning away from conventional approaches based in geometric plans to an approach informed by network science that involves less interference in the functioning of cities. Network science provides a way of linking city size to the forms of networks that are likely to enable cities to function in different ways. It can further provide insights into the potential effectiveness of various urban policies. This requires a better understanding of the types of practices and tools that contribute to building urban resilience.

Building resilience in cities relies on investment decisions that prioritize spending on activities that offer alternatives, which perform well in different scenarios. Such decisions need to take into account future risks and uncertainties. Because risk can never be fully eliminated, emergency and disaster planning is crucial. Disaster risk management frameworks, for example, offer practical opportunities for enhancing resilience.

Half of the world’s population now lives in cities, a figure that is set to rise to 80% by 2050. This means that the major resilience challenges of our era, such as poverty reduction, natural hazards and climate change, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion, will be won or lost in cities. Mass density of people makes them especially vulnerable both to the impacts of acute disasters and the slow, creeping effects of the changing climate; all making resilience planning critically important. At the same time, growing urbanization over the past century has been associated with a considerable increase in urban sprawl.

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Wikipedia