Abstract
Eighty-five percent of United States citizens live in urban areas. However, research surrounding the resilience and sustainability of complex urban systems focuses largely on coastal megacities (>1 million people). Midsize cities differ from their larger counterparts due to tight urban-rural feedbacks with their immediate natural environments that result from heavy reliance and close management of local ecosystem services. They also may be less path-dependent than larger cities due to shorter average connection length among system components, contributing to higher responsiveness among social, infrastructural, and ecological feedbacks. These distinct midsize city features call for a framework that organizes information and concepts concerning the sustainability of midsize cities specifically. We argue that an integrative approach is necessary to capture properties emergent from the complex interactions of the social, infrastructural, and ecological subsystems that comprise a city system. We suggest approaches to estimate the relative resilience of midsize cities, and include an example assessment to illustrate one such estimation approach. Resilience assessments of a midsize city can be used to examine why some cities end up on sustainable paths while others diverge to unsustainable paths, and which feedbacks may be partially responsible. They also provide insight into how city planners and decision makers can use information about the resilience of midsize cities undergoing growth or shrinkage relative to their larger and smaller counterparts, to transform them into long-term, sustainable social-ecological systems.
Highlights
Inhabitants of urban systems in the U.S rely upon a suite of ecosystem services such as waste remPorvopale,rtwyater filtration, food prDoveifisnioitnioinng, and recreation
The literature on adaptive governance recognizes the need for attention to legitimacy, transparency accountability and other attributes of good governance in any effort to sustain its implementation [34,38,39], and we propose that no system that ignores these issues is likely to be sustained in a developed, Western, democratic nation
An integrative approach is necessary for capturing properties that emerge from the complex interactions of these subsystems and their component parts
Summary
Sustainability 2016, 8, 844 quantifying relative, place-based resilience in social-ecological contexts requires careful definition of the reSsuisltiaeinnabcileityo2f0w16h, a8,t8,4t4o what, and for whom [8,9]. A system in a desirable state can be resilient for a short time interval but not at larger scales; that is, despite stability in terms of basic structure and function, the system is not sustainable over longer time intervals for various reasons. Midsize cities may be more responsive to sustainable transformations than their large city counterparts due to their different scales of processes, components, and feedbacks. We categorize the resilience of urban systems as composed of three overlapping subsystems: (1) socio-economic, (2) ecological, and (3) infrastructure Within these subsystems, we propose measurable axes that theoretically or empirically contribute to their resilience. The importance of particular variablesfeedbacks is context dependent, and this list is not exhaustive
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