Contrasting the framing of urban climate resilience

Arjan Wardekker

doi:10.1016/j.scs.2021.103258

Abstract

Cities worldwide face climate change and other complex challenges and strive to become more resilient to the shocks and stresses that these bring. The notion of urban (climate) resilience has become highly popular in both research and practice. However, the concept is inherently malleable; it can be framed in different ways, emphasising different problems, causes, moral judgements, and solutions. This review explores contrasting ways of framing urban climate resilience and their potential consequences. It identifies four typical framings: Urban Shock-Proofing (short-term & system focus), Resilience Planning (long-term & system focus), Community Disaster Resilience (short-term & community focus), and Resilient Community Development (long-term & community focus). These framings lead to different approaches to urban resilience and climate adaptation in research, science-policy-society interactions, governance, and practical resilience-building. They also offer different synergies with wider sustainability efforts, including the SDGs. Resilience Planning is widely represented in urban climate adaptation research. However, Resilient Community Development, dealing with community self-determination, equity, and deeper long-term socio-political determinants of vulnerability, is currently underdeveloped. Expansion of current scientific and institutional toolboxes is needed to support and build community-based adaptive and transformative capacities. Explicit reflection on framing is important to facilitate collaboration among actors and across disciplinary and departmental siloes.

Highlights

Cities worldwide are vulnerable to climate change, due to their geographic locations, large fraction of hardened surfaces, and large concentration of people and capital at risk (Revi et al, 2014; Koop & Van Leeuwen, 2017; Rosenzweig et al, 2018)
It identifies four typical framings: Urban Shock-Proofing, Resilience Planning, Community Disaster Resilience, and Resilient Community Development. These framings lead to different approaches to urban resilience and climate adaptation in research, science-policy-society interactions, governance, and practical resilience-building
This review presents a framing analysis of the literatures on urban climate resilience

Summary

Introduction

Cities worldwide are vulnerable to climate change, due to their geographic locations (e.g. along coasts and rivers), large fraction of hardened surfaces, and large concentration of people and capital at risk (Revi et al, 2014; Koop & Van Leeuwen, 2017; Rosenzweig et al, 2018). Cities face numerous other challenges, including increasing urban populations, migration, housing, social and economic problems, demographic change (e.g. aging), political change, and other environmental and resource concerns and constraints (UN, 2018; Vandecasteele et al, 2019). These challenges ‘compete’ with climate-related issues for the attention of policymakers, but can impact local vulnerability to climate change. Cities are looking for creative approaches to become more climate-proof and sustainable, preferably ones that are holistic (tackle multiple problems), present a positive perspective on the tasks at hand, and can handle uncertainty and complexity

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