Resilience assessment: a useful approach to navigate urban sustainability challenges

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Cities and towns have become increasingly interested in building resilience to cope with surprises, however, how to do this is often unclear. We evaluated the ability of the Resilience Assessment Workbook to help urban areas incorporate resilience thinking into their planning practice by exploring how a resilience assessment process complemented existing planning in the local government of Eskilstuna, Sweden. We conducted this evaluation using participant observation, semistructured interviews, and a survey of the participants. Our findings show that the resilience assessment contributed to ongoing planning practices by addressing sustainability challenges that were not being addressed within the normal municipal planning or operations, such as local food security. It bridged longer term sustainable development and shorter term crisis management, allowing these two sectors to develop common strategies. Our study also highlighted that the Resilience Assessment Workbook could be made more useful by providing more guidance on how to practically deal with thresholds and trade-offs across scales, as well as on how to manage transdisciplinary learning processes. This is the first in-depth study of a resilience assessment process, and it demonstrates that the Resilience Assessment Workbook is useful for planning and that it merits further research and development.

Improving participatory resilience assessment by cross-fertilizing the Resilience Alliance and Transition Movement approaches

“…Although the Transition Movement aims to be inclusive, it has been criticized for lacking diversity (Smith 2011, Feola andNunes 2014) and for focusing more on raising awareness than experiential learning (Seyfang and Haxeltine 2012). Nevertheless, in our study we found that the Transition Movement approach complemented the Resilience Assessment's lack of guidance on process design (Sellberg et al 2015).…”

“…The last category was based on preliminary case study findings, which indicated that the Transition Movement approach focused more on practical tools, whereas the Resilience Assessment had a stronger theoretical foundation. This notion also aligned with another recent study of a resilience assessment process (Sellberg et al 2015). In order not to miss interesting findings, we also included interpretations of resilience in practice that emerged from the text analysis (2E in Table 1).…”

“…Previously, scholars applying Resilience Assessment in practice have found that it fails to provide guidance on how to manage the participatory learning process (Mitchell et al 2014, Sellberg et al 2015. Furthermore, although resilience scholars often emphasize transformational change for sustainable development (Gunderson and Holling 2002, Folke et al 2010, Olsson et al 2014, the practice of Resilience Assessment as of yet has failed to support transformations of social-ecological systems (Walkerden et al 2013, Sellberg et al 2015. Earlier work has addressed these issues by combining Resilience Assessment with ideas from adaptive management and collective learning (Walkerden et al 2013, Mitchell et al 2014.…”

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

“…It is suggested that regular and iterative assessment and the development of different future scenarios (that analyze future changes within short, medium, and long-term time horizons) can facilitate brainstorming on the complexities of urban system dynamics and, to some extent, prepare communities to deal with future uncertainties [4,58,59]. Such assessments and scenario-making processes may be resource intensive as they require regular updates of changing thresholds and baseline conditions [4,58]. Although regular assessment and scenario making can be somewhat effective, a shift from the "fail-safe" approach to the "safe-to-fail" approach requires acknowledging inadequacy and incompleteness of scientific knowledge for dealing with future changes and uncertainties.…”

“…There is now a growing recognition among planners that the "predict and prevent" approach to planning fails to appropriately accommodate modern complexities and persistent uncertainties [57]. It is suggested that regular and iterative assessment and the development of different future scenarios (that analyze future changes within short, medium, and long-term time horizons) can facilitate brainstorming on the complexities of urban system dynamics and, to some extent, prepare communities to deal with future uncertainties [4,58,59]. Such assessments and scenario-making processes may be resource intensive as they require regular updates of changing thresholds and baseline conditions [4,58].…”