Exploring Resilience in Urban Management

Abstract

Exploring urbanresilience Until recently, resilience among adults exposed to potentially traumatic events was thought to occur rarely and in either pathological or exceptionally healthy individuals. However, that the most common reaction among adults exposed to such events is a relatively stable pattern of healthy functioning coupled with the enduring capacity for positive emotion and generative experiences. A surprising finding is that there is no single resilient type. Rather, there appear to be multiple and sometimes unexpected ways to be resilient, and sometimes resilience is achieved by means that are not fully adaptive under normal circumstances More often than not resilience is still mostly discussed as “bouncing back” from a disturbance of some sort, be it terrorism, building collapse, floods, drought, fires, climate change etc. The focus is very much on rebuilding and recovery, a particular engineering resilience perspective. However, the current, more ecological concept of resilience is not only about “bouncing back” and recovery in my opinion, but also about the ability to adapt, often discussed as adaptive capacity . In this context resilience is the capacity of a system to experience shocks and stresses while retaining function, structure, feedbacks and, therefore, identity. Resiliency is not just about bouncing back as it were, it is a lot more than that. If you buy the idea that we need to be building social-ecological resilience , then city or urban planning and management still has a long way to go towards definition or understanding of social-ecological resilience that moves beyond recovery and rebuilding following disturbance of any kind as discussed above. Additionally, resilience needs to be linked to sustainability so that the resilience we are trying to plan and design for actually helps us move towards desired future sustainable systems states, and not undesirable ones. Current resilience planning and management efforts may just as likely be locking our urban systems into undesirable ones, away from sustainability. Planning for urban resilience, and specifically adaptation, is well under way in a number of cities around the world. This abstract gives and explores some of the current approaches and strategies to urban resilience in cities. Resilience is key to enhancing adaptive capacity. Are there elements that sustain adaptive capacity of social-ecological systems in a world that is constantly changing? Addressing how people respond to periods of change, how society reorganizes following change, is the most neglected and the least understood aspect in conventional urban management. We can identify and expand on two critical factors that interact across temporal and spatial scales and that seem to be required for dealing with natural resource dynamics during periods of change and reorganization: learning to live with change and uncertainty as is the case in the 21 st century; nurturing diversity for resilience;