Introduction: Governing for urban resilience

Abstract

There is urgency afoot to acknowledge the disconnection between ecological realities and the persistence of past ways of constructing the social, as if it is in isolation from the ecological. The urban is the common ground: an endlessly burgeoning, frequently contested home to spaces, institutions and people. 'Governing for urban resilience' brings together research that considers the meaningfulness and possibilities inherent in conceptualising and implementing social-ecological resilience as a process for radical social change and offering a lens for connecting these urban narratives. The urban is then acknowledged as a site of heightened complexity, harbouring diverse social and ecological realities and imaginative potential. The Special Issue challenges past ways of ordering and limiting the city, while building on more recent interpretations of it as interwoven processes associated with enhancing connectivity -whether ecosystems or social networks. Four themes emerge from the articles: locating action; using scale to interrogate and facilitate change; acknowledging the asymmetry of power relations in order to focus on social justice as critical to change; and incorporating local knowledge and the catalytic force of memory to assist that change. The papers have applied the ideas of resilience and social-ecological resilience to their existing urban research, asking, in the main, whether this lens assists us to know more about what has occurred in the case studies. Overall, the outcomes suggest the strengths and weaknesses of policies and projects and in some cases the potentially transformative processes that encourage a social-ecological resilience framing for future research.

Building capacity through urban agriculture: report on the askîy project

“…Gardens allowed for participation and realization of local knowledge and a reconnection to the land. 25 Memory and daily acts of gardening represented a greater connection to traditional knowledge and culture. Grow ing vegetables acted as a catalyst in reconnecting to First Nation ancestry and the earth by growing traditional plants (e.g.…”

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

“…Beilin and Wilkinson [47] describe forms of resilience governance ranging from top-down, state-directed policies to bottom-up community-led actions and hybrid models involving the interactions between these. The persistent but uncertain nature of urban disasters calls for flexible urban governance systems where decision-making systems comprise several scales and actors [48].…”

Turin and Lingotto: resilience, forgetting and the reinvention of place

“…In the U.K., Mehmood (2016) has focused on investigating the Transition Town movement to highlight how bottom-up, innovative and creative, initiatives are key sources for communities to tackle change. In the special issue, 'Governing for urban resilience', edited by Beilin and Wilkinson (2015), Wagenaar and Wilkinson (2015) have analysed how discourses and assumptions of social-ecological resilience shape spatial planning processes in Melbourne. In another recent special issue (Lazzeretti & Cooke, 2015), Pasquinelli and Sjöholm (2015) have offered a multi-scalar perspective to investigate how artists draw on and navigate through a variety of spaces at different scales (from the intimate space of their studios, through their neighbourhoods and cities to cyberspace) and cope with the precariousness of their jobs.…”