CITY POLITICS
AND THE
ENVIRONMENT
INTRODUCTION
• There is little debate that cities are at the center of climate
change mitigation and adaptation action (Seitzinger et al., 2012).
• Ever-growing cities, needed to house an ever-growing
population, require an ever- growing amount of resources for
their development and maintenance, and the often high-
consumerist lifestyles of their residents (Dodman, 2009).
• At the same time, it is in the cities that there are so many
activities that impacts our environment that causes climate
change.
• In addition to climate change, urban policy- makers and
implementers face other considerable challenges they need to
adapt their cities to- including rapid technological change and
increasing human-made threats such as terrorism and cyber-
attacks.
• Because of this, Urban Policy makers need to keep pace with the
unforeseeable things and a future while also aiming to maintain
and increase livability and social well-being in cities.
• This realization has led to a surge of resilience policies and
governance interventions for urban systems
RESILIENCE
POLICIES
• Disaster resilience is seen as the 'shield', 'shock
absorber' or buffer that moderates the outcome to
ensure benign or small-scale negative consequences"
(Manyena, 2006, p 438).
• The focus of this concept is on surviving high-
impact, relatively low-frequency events and quickly
getting basic urban functions back online, without
necessarily addressing the hazard's cause.
This approach is different to traditional disaster planning
and recovery in that:
1) there is a focus on "hazard mitigation and preparedness
rather than post-disaster management";
2) it includes non-natural hazards such as security
challenges and accidents; and
3) it includes institutional aspects that focus on protecting
infrastructure systems
ENGINEERING
POLICIES
• This can be defined "as the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium or steady-
state after a disturbance".
• It has also been widely used in the literature without the adjective engineering".
Ahern, (2011, p342) for example defines resilience as the capacity of system to
respond to change or disturbance without changing its basic state".
• Using this concept in urban policy and governance means that the critical success
factor is speed of recovery to the system's prior state, and that returning to a state of
equilibrium is an indicator of persistence and stability, which are both desirable
(Davoudi, 2016).
• The implication of using this type of concept is that resilience policy tends to be
reduced to emergency response with an emphasis on short-term damage reduction
and recovery.
ECOLOGICAL
POLICIES
• Here resilience is defined by "the speed of recovery
to a state of equilibrium and the intensity of the
disturbance that it can absorb while remaining
within a "critical threshold" (Davoudi, et al., 2012)
• This perspective focuses on system relationships
persisting and remaining functional and controlled
while under stress. It "relates to the functioning of
the system rather than the stability of its component
populations or even the ability to maintain a steady
ecological state" (Adger, 2000)
SOCIO-
EECOLOGICALPOLICI
ES
• C.S. Hollings, who has been mentioned as the "father" of ecological
resilience, "believed that an extended ecological resilience concept could
provide a new and useful framework for understanding how the
individual, communities, organizations and ecosystems face a number of
known and not yet known uncertainties, challenges and opportunities“
• SER is a systems approach which is based mainly on three aspects:
1) being able to absorb disturbances while remaining within a "normal" or
acceptable state;
2) capacity to self-organize; and
3) being able to build capacity for learning and adaptation
• Therefore, Resilience is defined in terms of "the
amount of change, the system can undergo and still
retain the same controls on function and structure",
"the degree to which the system is capable of self-
organization"; and "the ability to build and increase
the capacity for learning and adaptation"
EVOLUTI0NARY
POLICIES
• This concept is derived from SER with an adapted anarchy
model of adaptive cycle that has four phases of change:
Growth, conservation, creative destruction and
reorganization.
• It has the same elements as SER but advocates that "the very
nature of systems may change over time with or without an
external disturbance"; this has been also included within
SER by some commentators but its proponents reject this
perspective
• This is often referred to as the ability to "bounce forward"
to which we come back in what follows
BUILT-IN POLICIES
• Bosher's Book defines resilience as "a quality of a
built environment's capability (in physical,
institutional, economic and social terms) to keep
adapting to existing and emergent threats“
• This concept focuses on the idea of intuitively and
proactively coping with dynamic changes
CLIMATE CHANGE
POLICIES
• This concept is used to "emphasize the idea that cities, urban
systems, and urban constituencies need to be able to quickly
bounce back from climate-related shocks and stresses“
• Leichenko, additionally highlights that climate change is just
one source of shocks and stresses, and that "promotion of
urban resilience to climate change will thus require that
cities become resilient to a wider range of overlapping and
interacting shocks and stresses".
• Therefore, efforts to increase climate change resilience need
to be handled in conjunction with urban development and
sustainability.
