Resilience
Considering the rapid urbanization trends in many parts of the world and the increasing consequences of climate change, more and more cities are at risk of natural disasters and other environmental, socio-economic, and political disruptions. To address these issues, resilience thinking has attracted the attention of a wide range of stakeholders. The general goal of resilience is to ensure the system's survival and continued performance. In addition, it focuses on the at-risk people life quality in times of both crisis and normal circumstances. Other objectives are returning to the normal, reducing vulnerability, adaptation, improving capacities and strengths, and sustainable development.
Urban resilience can also be viewed differently in terms of general resilience and specified resilience (or targeted resilience). Due to the type of risk, planning for resilience involves a broad scope, ranging from a specific type of stress to a wide range of disruptions. On the one hand, general resilience is about the overall resilience of a system to uncertain events, which is the system's resilience against all kinds of stresses, including completely novel ones (a broad system response to threat). On the other hand, specified resilience is referred to issues related to certain aspects of a system, which a known or specific disturbance may cause (a focused system response to threat).
Resilience is a multi-dimensional concept,, and researchers from different academic backgrounds have argued about the nature of urban resilience and have pointed out various dimensions for the conceptualization of the city systems' resilience at different scales, which often causes confusion. Four correlated urban resilience dimensions that are frequently referenced in resilience theory and practice debates are (1) governance systems, (2) metabolic flows, (3) built environment, and (4) social systems.
In addition, there are diverse and sometimes contradictory definitions for urban resilience, from resistance against change to maintaining the status quo through transformation. In general, there are three different resilience approaches based on the time scale (short, medium, and long-term) and the conceptual model of resilience (equilibrium, non-equilibrium model) as fundamental and sometimes contradictory components of urban systems: recovery, adaptation, and transformation.
As shown in the figure above, the urban resilience dimensions, including systems, agents, and institutions, might become more resilient either in general or against a specific disruption, depending on different situations and contexts. The phases of resilience are other vital concepts in urban resilience. These phases start with exploitation, continue with conservation and collapse, and end with the reorganization. As shown in the figure, it starts from the beginning and continues after completing the cycle. Moreover, to make a city resilient, we can adopt different resilience approaches, recovery/ coping, adaptation, and transformation, which differ in the scope of actions and the time frame. The recovery/coping approach is more about slighter changes in the shorter term. As we move on to the transformational approach, changes are more fundamental and happen in the longer term. In the first approach, the main emphasis is on keeping the current condition and returning to the normal after a disruption. This approach would not warrant structural transitions, which are essential for the empowerment of urban systems to enter a new regime after a sudden shock or even during chronic changes. Over-reliance on short and mid-term approaches might be in contrast with the nature of resilience thinking, which seeks new opportunities for growth and moving towards new development trajectories. Thus, the more planners and policymakers move towards adopting transformational adaptation based on evolutionary resilience, the more it is likely to achieve the goals of resilience planning, particularly sustainable development (Amirzadeh, Sobhaninia, and Sharifi, 2022).
Illustrative Publications