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The aim of this paper is to develop a framework by drawing on three broad perspectives on resilience: engineering, ecological, and evolutionary, and to use this framework to critically examine the approach adopted by the draft London's climate change adaptation strategy. The central argument of the paper is that the Strategy's emergency planningcentred approach to climate adaptation veers between a standard ecological understanding of resilience and the more rigid engineering model. Its emphasis is on identifying 'exposure' and 'vulnerability' to risk from climate events and on bouncing back from the consequences of such exposures to a normal state, rather than on the dynamic process of transformation to a more desirable trajectory. The paper concludes that fostering resilience involves planning for not only recovery from shocks, but also cultivating preparedness, and seeking potential transformative opportunities which emerge from change.

It is often suggested that a defining feature of planning is its interventionist nature which requires connecting knowledge to action. With the upsurge of evidence-based planning, much is rehearsed about the utilitarian necessity of making such connection. What is less widely discussed is the epistemological nuances and challenges of knowledge-action relationship. This essay aims to contribute to the latter by conceptualising planning as practice of knowing. This is to shift the focus from knowledge as something that planners have to knowing as something that planners do. I would argue that, rather than thinking about knowledge as having an instrumental place in planning, it is more useful to think about planning as practice of knowing that involves knowing what, knowing how, knowing to what end and doing. Seen in this way, practice of knowing is a dynamic process that is situated and provisional, collective and distributed, purposive and pragmatic, and mediated and contested.

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