From Risk Management to Urban Resilience: Urban Development in the Context of the Twenty-First-Century Disaster Risk Reduction Framework

Abstract

Resilience building has appeared before us intensively over the last decade as a policy agenda for local governments of all sizes. The starting point is the recognition that while cities grow exponentially, they are facing threats which are more acute and regular owing to changing climatic conditions, urbanization, and interdependency. The past 15 years have witnessed a steep growth in the adoption of the concept of urban resilience as a key urban development approach, particularly by subnational authorities whether city or regional governments and states. Risk reduction through a development lens is increasingly approached as a game-changing development paradigm, whereas the alternative is unsustainable costs in financial and material resources and, more importantly, increasing threat of loss. Nevertheless (as it is more often than not the case with policy) there is no single definition for resilience, while the term itself certainly does not only belong to the field of urban planning; rather resilience is an old term commonly used to describe human behavior in psychology and ecosystem dynamics in environmental and social studies. The chapter offers a comprehensive review of the development of the urban resilience agenda as a global sustainable development goal and a means to transform administrations, as a change management mechanism to address complex twenty-first risks and crisis all the while adjusting to the massive transformation the climate-related goals demand. This chapter frames in a comparative global context the evolution of urban resilience, both as a means to change management in local administration and as a central policy goal to address the unprecedented twenty-first-century shocks and stresses. Furthermore, the chapter discusses urban resilience in the context of the city of Tampere and the SURE program under the Urban Innovative Actions initiative—the case featured in this book.