Territorial Resilience: Toward a Proactive Meaning for Spatial Planning

Abstract

The international debate on resilience has grown around the ability of a community to prepare for and adapt to natural disasters, with a growing interest in holistically understanding complex systems. Although the concept of resilience has been investigated from different perspectives, the lack of understanding of its conceptual comprehensive aspects presents strong limitations for spatial planning and for the adoption of policies and programs for its measurement and achievement. In this paper, we refer to “territorial resilience” as an emerging concept capable of aiding the decision-making process of identifying vulnerabilities and improving the transformation of socio-ecological and technological systems (SETSs). Here, we explore the epistemology of resilience, reviewing the origins and the evolution of this term, providing evidence on how this conceptual umbrella is used by different disciplines to tackle problem-solving that arises from disaster management and command-control practices to augment the robustness. Assuming the SETSs paradigm, the seismic and structural engineering, social sciences and history, urban planning and climatology perspectives intersects providing different analytical levels of resilience, including vulnerability and patrimony from a community and cultural perspective. We conclude that territorial resilience surpasses the analytical barriers between different disciplines, providing a useful concept related to complex problem-solving phenomena for land use planning, opening a new research question: how can territorial resilience be measured, acknowledging different units and levels of analysis aiding decision-making in spatial plans and projects? In attempting to understand a resilient system, quantitative and qualitative measurements are crucial to supporting planning decisions.

Knowledge Map of Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development: A Visual Analysis Using CiteSpace

“…From an urban perspective, such as accessibility optimization [77], commute time reduction [78,79], land mismatch for building a compact city [80,81], as well as enhancing the quality of urban life, fostering urban growth, facilitating contraction, reducing edge problems [82], establishing ventilated corridors [83], fostering regional resilience and flexibility [84][85][86], and promoting city resource circulation [87,88], scientific spatial planning is required. In many studies, we can see that various institutions or researchers try to use spatial planning to coordinate urban population [10], land [89,90], and industry to achieve ecological optimization of land use [91,92].…”

Integrating Ecosystem Vulnerability in the Environmental Regulation Plan of Izmir (Turkey)—What Are the Limits and Potentialities?

“…The approach we used can be collocated among the experimental works which want to define new tools and methods for supporting the decision making of environmental planning at different scales [12][13][14]. Particularly, we intend to bridge the gap between theory and the practical utilization of the Ecosystem Service in real planning documents, as indicated by Costanza et al (2017), where the revision of the ES cascade model shows how spatial modelling constitutes a basic pre-condition for achieving the sustainability of plans and projects at different scales [15,16].…”

Territorial Resilience of Metropolitan Regions: A Conceptual Framework, Recognition Methodologies and Planning Response—A Case Study of Wuhan Metropolitan Region

“…Foreign research mainly focuses on post-disaster emergency reconstruction planning and vulnerability and multiple risk assessment, prevention and planning methods. The purpose of such research is to explore the operational path of territorial resilience [ 6 ]. On the other hand, domestic studies have focused on how the concept of resilience can be integrated into the existing spatial planning and governance system [ 7 , 8 ].…”