The Resilient Metamorphosis of Cities

Abstract

The multiplicity and breakdown of risks, their mutual interaction and amplification, as well as the multidimensionality and multi-scale nature of their natural and anthropogenic causes and effects on the city and the communities, are fertile contents of a growing cultural, social and technical awareness of an ever-increasing range of actors facing the precariousness and uncertainty of the future that is fuelled by those risks. It seems increasingly clear to the "risk society," as defined by Ulrich Beck, that the few risks that we can consider to be of exclusively natural origin, such as seismic and volcanic ones, intersect and overlap the many risks of an anthropic nature, i.e. produced by the ways in which cities have been built and their metabolism has been consolidated: from hydrogeological and hydraulic risks to those related to the pollution of the soil, water and air, to micro-climatic risks, by impoverishment of ecosystems and desertification. Some of these have consequences on a planetary scale, contributing to climate change-from global warming to extreme rainfall and atmospheric events in general, to rising sea levels-which return like a boomerang effect at the local scale, amplifying the structural criticalities of urban conditions. This circular local/global dynamic is combined with the risks associated with the increasingly intense processes of social exclusion in cities in this longlasting crisis of urban economies and of intense migration in many parts of the planet. Despite the marked asymmetries that can be detected in the growth of learning and capability to cope with risks, also due to these social imbalances, awareness is growing not only of what should not be done, but also of what should be done; developing strategies and tactics that are capable of stimulating and governing a resilient metamorphosis of the

From Urban Vulnerabilities to Resilience: Lessons from Messina's Integrated Risk Approach

“…The now-established awareness of risk as a human construct and the definitive overcoming of the idea of natural disaster as an act of nature leads to the view that hazards of exclusively natural origin are only those related to natural events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic events for which historically we tended to associate the term hazard with "natural phenomena" because they were characterized by sudden or acute impact (UNDRR, 2020). These natural hazards, on the other hand, intersect and overlap with multiple anthropogenic hazards, namely those produced by the ways in which cities have been built and how their metabolism has been consolidated (Wolman, 1965;Gasparrini, 2017): hydraulic and hydrogeological risk; soil, water, and air pollution; microclimatic hazards; ecosystem depletion and desertification; and also landslides and floods, which are usually considered natural in origin but are in fact induced and amplified by anthropogenic action (Jabareen, 2015;Sterzel et al, 2020). Taking into consideration what has happened in the Specialist Conferences at the international level, the change of focus on the issue of hazards becomes evident.…”