Conceptualizing Dimensions and Characteristics of Urban Resilience: Insights from a Co-Design Process

Abstract

Abstract:Resilience is a multi-faceted concept frequently used across a wide range of disciplines, practices, and sectors. There is a growing recognition of the utility of resilience as a bridging concept that can facilitate inter-and transdisciplinary approaches to tackle complexities inherent in decision making under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Such conditions are common in urban planning, infrastructure planning, asset management, emergency planning, crisis management, and development processes where systemic interdependencies and interests at stake influence decisions and outcomes. A major challenge that can undermine the use of resilience for guiding planning activities is the value-laden and contested nature of the concept that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Because resilience is context-specific and generally depends on local aspirations, this issue can be partially tackled by adopting participatory approaches for the conceptualization of resilience. This paper provides an example of how co-design methods can be employed for conceptualizing resilience. The Structured Interview Matrix was used as a technique to facilitate discussions among a diverse group of researchers and practitioners attending the International Workshop on Tools and Indicators for Assessing Urban Resilience. Participants deliberated on issues related to constituent elements of urban resilience, including its position vis-à-vis concepts such as adaptation and sustainability, institutional factors that can enable/constrain resilience building, and the challenges of conducting and operationalizing urban resilience assessment. This paper can be considered as an initial step towards further exploration of participatory approaches for clarifying the underlying dimensions of complex concepts such as resilience.

Indicators for Monitoring Urban Climate Change Resilience and Adaptation

“…Supporting evidence for this can be taken from the fact that much more has been published on climate resilience and environmental issues than on climate resilience and economic issues. Moreover, this discussion displayed the importance of a negotiation-focused approach for defining place-specific attributes of urban resilience and its measures [44].…”

From Policy Challenge to Implementation Strategy: Enabling Strategies for Network Governance of Urban Resilience

“…Incentives to collaborate, past history of conflict or collaboration and imbalances in the power or resource between organizations are all critical conditions to understand in the initial conditions to understand collaborative governance, but also the institutional design of the actual network needs to assessed. These conditions might not be sufficient to comprehend fully how individual organizations have their own institutional mechanisms which enables (or impedes) them to participate in working across boundaries (Sharifi et al, 2017). In both cities, some organizations taking part in the network choose to name a person (actor) who acts as a representative to take part in the discussions around planning for emergencies.…”

Landscape-Based Assessment of Urban Resilience and Its Evolution: A Case Study of the Central City of Shenyang

“…Currently, urban areas are being exposed, to varying degrees, to challenges ranging from daily disorders to permanent damage, including urban diseases such as traffic jams and air pollution, extreme weather events, and a variety of natural and man-made disasters. Given that the majority of the world's population now lives in cities and this situation will follow a growing trend in the foreseeable future, focusing on the resilience and sustainability of cities is imperative and should be given precedence [4][5][6].…”