Landscape and Urban Planning

2018

A MULTI-CITY EVALUATION OF CITY RESILIENCE PLAN POTENTIAL IMPACT by GABRIELLE PIERRE (Under the Direction of Rosanna Rivero) ABSTRACT City resilience as it is applied today is both a novel concept and a culmination of past knowledge and current exacerbating issues coming to a head. The expanded definition of city resilience includes disaster risk reduction in addition to city resilience as an approach to improving city function. It suggests an understanding of cities and their issues with a holistic, systems thinking perspective. This thesis evaluates ten cities from Rockefeller’s 100 Resilient Cities Network according to resilient urban system qualities such redundancy, modularity, diversity as the evaluation criteria (created by a review of urban and city resilience organization publications). Results indicate that those cities with long term adaptive strategies, generating significant changes tend to be more successful (according to the selected metric) than those that only gener...

Countries across the globe are likely to face significant challenges in coming years that will test the resilience of their cities. However, there is often a lack of proactive evidence-based analysis of available options and their outcomes as well as indicators of success or progress. Without such analysis it is difficult to clearly gauge progress towards set goals, to improve effective policy development and implementation, and to create an active learning culture that can efficiently and effectively tackle future challenges. The present work offers an introduction to research being done to develop a policy evaluation and implementation framework that can help policy-makers produce more effective resilience policies which are sustainable over time. The term sustainable resilience has some usage in the literature but has had limited uptake and has not been formally characterised until now. This new concept creates a clear differentiation from reactive disaster resilience which is often the sole focus of urban policy development. This paper contributes to developing a working concept and guiding principles for urban sustainable resilience policy. This work suggests that sustainable resilience policy will need to take into account the complexity within and between the various systems that form cities, rapidly changing technologies, environmental conditions, and emerging forms of governance. This paper also briefly outlines the methodology that will be used to continue to develop a sustainable resilience policy framework and evidence-based assessment tool.

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.

Energy Procedia, 2014

The notion of resilience is rapidly gaining ground in the urban sustainability literature. The frequency of recent incidents including natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes, and also difficulties caused by the economic downturn has highlighted the vulnerability of human settlements and makes the appropriate consideration of resilience in the planning for future of urban areas of vital significance. Development of an assessment framework for evaluating the extent of resiliency of urban areas can be an effective way of incorporating resiliency-related issues into the urban planning process. For this purpose, it is necessary to clarify the implications of the resilience concept for the sustainability of urban areas. It is also important to identify resilience-related principles and criteria that should be embedded in the framework for assessing the resiliency of urban environments. This study involves an initial review of the literature on resilience and urban sustainability to extract a comprehensive set of criteria that can be used to develop an urban resilience assessment system. Moreover, it tries to design a conceptual framework, illustrative of the interrelations between these various set of criteria. Criteria for assessment of the resilience of urban areas are divided into several main themes that cover environmental, economic, social, and institutional dimensions of sustainability. These themes would further be broken down into major criteria to account for important relevant areas such as land use, infrastructure, health, etc. The output of this study can be used as the basis for defining a set of precise indicators that will constitute a potential assessment tool for measuring the resilience of urban developments. The resilient assessment process has the capacity to provide decision makers with a clear and comprehensive picture of the resilience of the development proposal and supports them in making better informed decisions.

This paper investigates the theoretical and research literature on urban resilience. It examines various definitions of the concept and explores its social, economic, and institutional dimensions as components of a dynamic system. The study design was a descriptive review of relevant material collected from high quality scientific databases using the purposeful sampling method. The results indicated that the social ecology model of urban resilience provided a coherent and dynamic approach to the study of urban resilience. This model comprises economic, social, and institutional dimensions, the components of which have different functions in relation to urban resilience in the face of changes and pressures. To be effective, the system must be flexible and contain a variety of resources and functions to make predictions, deal with adverse events, and make provision for possible failures. System stability and balance require active and knowledgeable actors and institutions that enable appropriate communication between them. In this approach, a resilient city not only has the ability to absorb and withstand disasters, but also contains a variety of internal and external resources to regain balance. Resilient systems are the result of a series of decisions and actions at different times. The necessary capacities must be developed in the economic, social, and institutional dimensions to create economic stability, increase awareness and public cooperation, and develop efficient institutions to legislate for and implement urban resilience programs.

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

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.

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.

Sustainability, 2016

Urbanization is a major driver of land use change and global environmental decline. With accelerated urbanization worldwide, it is essential to put in place new policies to conserve urban ecosystems, species and the services these provide in order to secure more sustainable, resilient and livable cities for the 21st century. In urban planning, the concept of resilience has broadly replaced the word sustainability. In recent years, resilience indicators have been gradually developed, but few address urban resilience from a social-ecological systems perspective. We develop a methodological framework to measure urban resilience, define an urban resilience index and apply it to Spanish province capitals as a case study. Results show that most Spanish province capitals are far from being resilient. We conclude that increased efforts to measure urban resilience should be in place, and we offer the urban resilience index as a theoretical framework for measuring resilience in urban social-ecological systems that can be gradually improved as more data become available.