Urbanisation is one of the great driving forces of the twenty-first century. Cities generate both productivity and creativity, and the benefits offered by high-density living and working contribute to sustainability. Cities comprise multiple components, forming both static and dynamic systems that are interconnected directly and indirectly on a number of levels. Bringing together large numbers of people within a complex system can lead to vulnerability from a wide range of hazards, threats and trends. The key to reducing this vulnerability is the identification of critical systems and determination of the implications of their failure and their interconnectivities with other systems. One emerging approach to these challenges focuses on building resilience -defined here as the degree to which a system can continue to function effectively in a changing environment. This paper puts forward a framework designed to help engineers, planners and designers to support cities in understanding the hazards, threats and trends that can make them vulnerable, and identify focus areas for building resilience into the systems, which allow it to function and prosper. Four case studies of cities whose resilience was tested by recent extreme weather events are presented, seeking to demonstrate the application of the proposed framework. IntroductionIn addition to urbanisation trends, which mean for the first time that more than 50% of people live in urban environments globally, the climate is changing. While both trends are being recognised and projected, the inherent uncertainty of their impacts is putting immense pressure on cities and their critical role in sustaining the lives and livelihoods of their citizens, their economies and environments (da Silva et al., 2010).For engineers, planners and designers an increasingly uncertain world presents challenges for traditional modes of predicting risk based on historical data, and reducing exposure to natural hazards by designing land use and defences to 'keep nature out'. While it is possible to make infrastructure projects themselves more durable in the face of projected changes in climate, considered en masse these investments can collectively decrease (Brown and Kernaghan, 2011) the ability of