Building Resilient Communities

As the challenges of globalization and climate change intensify, the importance of urban resilience in city planning is becoming increasingly evident. To adapt to this trend, innovations and improvements are essential in traditional urban land-use patterns to better fulfill the requirements of resilient urban development. In this context, this study constructs an urban resilience evaluation index system from four perspectives: social resilience, engineering resilience, ecological resilience, and security resilience to evaluate the urban resilience of Changsha City. A thorough assessment of the resilience mechanisms in Changsha’s urban layout was conducted, employing the SD-FLUS model. A resilient urban scenario is also established to restrict the conversion of high-resilience land into other land types and to predict urban land-use structures under a resilience-oriented directive. The findings indicate that areas with high ecological and safety resilience in Changsha are primarily located in the western Weishan mountain system, along with eastern mountain systems like Jiuling, Lianyun, and Mufu, forming the “green veins”. The central areas are characterized by “blue veins”, mainly represented by rivers such as the Xiangjiang, Weishui, Longwanggang, Jinjiang, Liuyang, and Laodao. Within the central urban area, high-resilience regions are primarily distributed along a framework consisting of “one ring (the city’s three-ring line), two mains (Xiangjiang and Liuyang rivers), one heart (urban green core), and six wedges”, specifying various green corridors. Under the resilience-oriented scenario, the model predicts that by 2025, the total built-up area in Changsha will be 1416.79 km². Areas with high social and engineering resilience are mainly concentrated in the central urban areas of Changsha, as well as Ningxiang and Liuyang, aligning closely with the objectives of Changsha’s latest round of national spatial planning. The built-up area layout should complement Changsha’s topography and water systems, expanding in a wedge-like manner. Overall, Changsha’s planning has successfully integrated social, engineering, ecological, and safety resilience, enhancing its adaptability and long-term sustainability. This research proposes a land-use simulation method guided by the concept of urban resilience, providing valuable insights for resilience-oriented city planning in Changsha and other cities facing similar challenges.

BackgroundThe term resilience describes stress–response patterns of subjects across scientific disciplines. In ecology, advances have been made to clearly distinguish resilience definitions based on underlying mechanistic assumptions. Engineering resilience (rebound) is used for describing the ability of subjects to recover from adverse conditions (disturbances), and is the rate of recovery. In contrast, the ecological resilience definition considers a systemic change: when complex systems (including humans) respond to disturbances by reorganizing into a new regime (stable state) where structural and functional aspects have fundamentally changed relative to the prior regime. In this context, resilience is an emergent property of complex systems. We argue that both resilience definitions and uses are appropriate in psychology and psychiatry, but although the differences are subtle, the implications and uses are profoundly different.MethodsWe borrow from the field of ecology to discuss resilience concepts in the mental health sciences.ResultsIn psychology and psychiatry, the prevailing view of resilience is adaptation to, coping with, and recovery (engineering resilience) from adverse social and environmental conditions. Ecological resilience may be useful for describing vulnerability, onset, and the irreversibility patterns of mental disorders. We discuss this in the context of bipolar disorder.ConclusionRebound, adaptation, and coping are processes that are subsumed within the broader systemic organization of humans, from which ecological resilience emanates. Discerning resilience concepts in psychology and psychiatry has potential for a mechanistically appropriate contextualization of mental disorders at large. This might contribute to a refinement of theory and contextualize clinical practice within the broader systemic functioning of mental illnesses.

The concept of resilience is long established across a wide-range of disciplines, but its evaluation in many ecosystems has been challenging due to the complexities involved in quantifying a somewhat abstract dynamical phenomenon. We develop a framework of resilience-related concepts and describe their methodological approaches. Seven broad approaches were identified under the three principle concepts of (1) ecological resilience (ecological resilience, precariousness and current attractor), (2) engineering resilience (short-term recovery rate and long-term reef performance), and (3) vulnerability (absolute and relative vulnerability) respectively. Using specific examples, we assess the strengths and limitations of each approach and their capacity to answer common management questions. The current synthesis provides new directions for resilience assessments to be incorporated into management decisions and has implications on the research agenda for advances in resilience assessments.

Social–ecological resilience describes the ability of complex adaptive systems to negotiate and respond creatively to change. Its origins combine understanding of the structure and dynamics of ecological systems with findings from anthropology—particularly human ecology and indigenous knowledge—and other social sciences. Key concepts are the adaptive cycle , a four‐stage pattern of change common to many complex adaptive systems, and panarchy , the way that adaptive cycles interact across spatial and temporal scales. The newer concept of community resilience integrates social–ecological resilience with insights from previously unrelated concepts of resilience in developmental psychology, disaster response, and community development and has been operationalized in a range of practical fields. In response to rhetorical use of vernacular concepts of resilience to justify conservative agendas in mainstream political discourse, overt politicization of resilience science is becoming increasingly common.

Although the concept of resilience is increasingly being incorporated into environmental policy and linked to ecological restoration goals, there is considerable uncertainty regarding how resilience should be defined and measured in practice. Here we briefly review some of the definitions of resilience that have been proposed, including those referred to as “ecological” and “engineering” resilience. We also examine evidence for the existence of multiple stable states in forest ecosystems, on which concepts of ecological resilience are based. As evidence for multiple stable states is limited, we suggest that ecological resilience may often have limited value as a goal for forest restoration. We illustrate how engineering resilience can potentially be measured by estimating the rate of forest recovery following disturbance, through analysis of recovery trajectories using meta-analysis and ecological modelling approaches. We also highlight the potential value of resistance as a restoration goal, which can similarly be estimated using such approaches. Based on application of these concepts, we suggest how guidance for restoration practitioners could potentially be developed, to support the practical achievement of both resilience and resistance during forest restoration.

The question of what and how to measure ecological resilience has been troubling ecologists since Holling 1973s seminal paper in which he defined resilience as the ability of a system to withstand perturbations without shifting to a different state. This definition moved the focus from studying the local stability of a single attractor to which a system always converges, to the idea that a system may converge to different states when perturbed. These two concepts have later on led to the definitions of engineering (local stability) vs ecological (non-local stability) resilience metrics. While engineering resilience is associated to clear metrics, measuring ecological resilience has remained elusive. As a result, the two notions have been studied largely independently from one another and although several attempts have been devoted to mapping them together in some kind of a coherent framework, the extent to which they overlap or complement each other in quantifying the resilience of a system is not yet fully understood. In this perspective, we focus on metrics that quantify resilience following Holling’s definition based on the concept of the stability landscape. We explore the relationships between different engineering and ecological resilience metrics derived from bistable systems and show that, for low dimensional ecological models, the correlation between engineering and ecological resilience can be high. We also review current approaches for measuring resilience from models and data, and we outline challenges which, if answered, could help us make progress toward a more reliable quantification of resilience in practice.

Resilience, a concept typical in the natural sciences, has for some years been part of vocabulary of spatial planning but it is as yet relatively unexplored. Its common definition still represents resilience as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and to reorganise itself, by returning to the original state. Complexity theory shows that resilience is a bottom-up process, closely related to self-organization of a system, which could change the role of institutions and community in urban governance. Recently, the concept of resilience has been associated with the Transition Towns movement, a bottom-up initiative promoted by civil society. Better known as “urban initiatives for the transition”, they are a set of bottom-up practices of urban management, aimed at achieving a self-sufficient and “zero impact” model of urban development. In this perspective, the research question is: could this new paradigm of development and spatial organization really be a new approach in urban governance? The paper focuses on the epistemological dimension of the concept of resilience in spatial planning. The purpose is to understand the extent of innovation in planning practices and urban governance. In particular, the first part of the paper provides a review of the theoretical framework of resilience and the second analyzes the Transition Towns movement, with particular reference to the role of stakeholders. The main aim is to study the implications of the concept of resilience in spatial planning and, in particular, how it translates in the Transition Town experiences. The related outcome is to reflect on the perspective of institutional innovation, in terms of new urban governance.

Journal Article Transitioning communities: community, participation and the Transition Town movement Get access Phil Connors, Phil Connors * Phil Connors is a Lecturer in International and Community Development in the School of International and Political Studies at Deakin University. *Address for correspondence: Phil Connors, Lecturer in International and Community Development, School of International and Political Studies, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC 3217, Australia; email: phil.connors@deakin.edu.au Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Peter McDonald Peter McDonald Peter McDonald is a freelance researcher and casual academic with Deakin University. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Community Development Journal, Volume 46, Issue 4, October 2011, Pages 558–572, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsq014 Published: 26 February 2010

Groundwater systems play a vital role in maintaining water supply during periods of climate extremes such as droughts. However, the decreased recharge, coupled with the increased pumping rates, interferes with the natural feedback mechanism of the aquifer system, potentially pushing them beyond their resilience thresholds and causing regime shifts. Understanding and quantifying groundwater resilience is essential for evaluating how these systems maintain stability and adaptability under stress. Historically, resilience has been viewed through two lenses: engineering resilience, which emphasizes the speed of recovery to a single equilibrium, and ecological resilience, which focuses on the system’s ability to absorb disturbances before shifting to a different state. The latter approach acknowledges multiple stable states and the possibility of regime shifts. While both perspectives are essential, no existing framework has integrated them to provide a comprehensive understanding of groundwater resilience. This study presents the Endurance, Recovery, and Resilience (ERR) framework, which combines engineering and ecological resilience definitions to assess the stability and adaptability of groundwater systems. We define resilience as the ability of a system to endure disturbances and return to its original stable state, capturing both recovery and adaptability dynamics. We apply the ERR framework to seasonal groundwater levels and rainfall time series of 19 subbasins in the Ganga Basin. Using Wavelet Transform Decomposition, we isolate rainfall-induced groundwater fluctuations and calculate their magnitude of oscillation as Groundwater Sensitivity to Rainfall (GSR). This GSR time series serves as the state variable for computing the Dynamic Resilience Indicator (DRI), which reflects the groundwater system's states and resilience under different conditions. Our findings reveal that groundwater systems exhibit multiple stable states and adaptive regime shifts in response to rainfall variability. Subbasins with high resilience show better adaptability to rainfall changes, whereas low resilience subbasins display limited response, suggesting a need for more tailored management strategies. The ERR framework provides a robust methodology for assessing groundwater resilience, with broader implications for adaptive management across environmental systems. By integrating both engineering and ecological perspectives, this framework offers valuable insights for understanding and managing groundwater resources amidst the challenges posed by climate variability.

The term resilience describes stress-response patterns across scientific disciplines. In ecology, advances have been made to clearly define resilience based on underlying mechanistic assumptions. Engineering resilience (rebound) is used to describe the ability of organisms to recover from adverse conditions (disturbances), which is termed the rate of recovery. By contrast, the ecological resilience definition considers a systemic change, that is, when ecosystems reorganize into a new regime following disturbance. Under this new regime, structural and functional aspects change considerably relative to the previous regime, without recovery. In this context, resilience is an emergent property of complex systems. In the present study, we argue that both definitions and uses are appropriate in ecotoxicology, and although the differences are subtle, the implications and uses are profoundly different. We discuss resilience concepts in ecotoxicology, where the prevailing view of resilience is engineering resilience from chemical stress. Ecological resilience may also be useful for describing systemic ecological changes because of chemical stress. We present quantitative methods that allow ecotoxicologists and risk managers to assess whether an ecosystem faces an impending regime shift or whether it has already undergone such a shift. We contend that engineering and ecological resilience help to distinguish ecotoxicological responses to chemical stressors mechanistically and thus have implications for theory, policy, and application. Environ Toxicol Chem 2017;36:2574-2580. © 2017 SETAC.

This review provides an overview and integration of the use of resilience concepts to guide natural resources management actions. We emphasize ecosystems and landscapes and provide examples of the use of these concepts from empirical research in applied ecology. We begin with a discussion of definitions and concepts of ecological resilience and related terms that are applicable to management. We suggest that a resilience-based framework for management facilitates regional planning by providing the ability to locate management actions where they will have the greatest benefits and determine effective management strategies. We review the six key components of a resilience-based framework, beginning with managing for adaptive capacity and selecting an appropriate spatial extent and grain. Critical elements include developing an understanding of the factors influencing the general and ecological resilience of ecosystems and landscapes, the landscape context and spatial resilience, pattern and process interactions and their variability, and relationships among ecological and spatial resilience and the capacity to support habitats and species. We suggest that a spatially explicit approach, which couples geospatial information on general and spatial resilience to disturbance with information on resources, habitats, or species, provides the foundation for resilience-based management. We provide a case study from the sagebrush biome that illustrates the use of geospatial information on ecological and spatial resilience for prioritizing management actions and determine effective strategies.

Quantifying the relationship of resilience and eco-efficiency in complex adaptive energy systems

The rise of resilience: Evolution of a new concept in coastal planning in Ireland and the US

Research suggests that trait resilience may be best understood within an ecological resilient systems theory, comprising engineering, ecological, and adaptive capacity resilience. However, there is no evidence as to how this theory translates to specific life domains. Data from two samples (the United States, n = 1,278; the United Kingdom, n = 211) facilitated five studies that introduce the Domain-Specific Resilient Systems Scales for assessing ecological resilient systems theory within work, health, marriage, friendships, and education. The Domain-Specific Resilient Systems Scales are found to predict unique variance in job satisfaction, lower job burnout, quality-of-life following illness, marriage commitment, and educational engagement, while controlling for factors including sex, age, personality, cognitive ability, and trait resilience. The findings also suggest a distinction between the three resilience dimensions in terms of the types of systems to which they contribute. Engineering resilience may contribute most to life domains where an established system needs to be maintained, for example, one's health. Ecological resilience may contribute most to life domains where the system needs sustainability in terms of present and future goal orientation, for example, one's work. Adaptive Capacity may contribute most to life domains where the system needs to be retained, preventing it from reaching a crisis state, for example, work burnout.

Shifting cultivation is a traditional agricultural practice in most tropical regions of the world and has the potential to provide for human livelihoods while hosting substantial biodiversity. Little is known about the resilience of shifting cultivation to increasing agricultural demands on the landscape or to unexpected disturbances. To investigate these issues, we develop a simple social-ecological model and implement it with literature-derived ecological parameters for six shifting cultivation landscapes from three continents. Analyzing the model with the tools of dynamical systems analysis, we show that such landscapes exhibit two stable states, one characterized by high forest cover and agricultural productivity, and another with much lower values of these traits. For some combinations of agricultural pressure and ecological parameters both of these states can potentially exist, and the actual state of the forest depends critically on its historic state. In many cases, the landscapes’ ‘ecological resilience’, or amount of forest that could be destroyed without shifting out of the forested stability domain, declined substantially at lower levels of agricultural pressure than would lead to maximum productivity. A measure of ‘engineering resilience’, the recovery time from standardized disturbances, was independent of ecological resilience. These findings suggest that maximization of short-term agricultural output may have counterproductive impacts on the long-term productivity of shifting cultivation landscapes and the persistence of forested areas.