From Resilience to Transformation Via a Regenerative Sustainability Development Path

Abstract

Urban resilience frameworks and strategies currently taken up in cities around the globe fall short of adequately preparing urban communities for the scale of change that many will face in coming decades. For cities aiming to address the impacts of climate change in a proactive sense as well as post-disaster, urban resilience presents itself as a useful frame, grounded in both ecological systems theory and psychological theory. This chapter tackles the question of where the notion of resilience helps, and where it holds cities back, in terms of urban planning and policy. Resilience in the urban planning and policy context may hold cities back because it lacks normative value in social and political spheres. That is, while concepts such as social justice and sustainable development suggest a normative direction for planning toward the improvement of our communities, resilience thinking does not imply any value-based criteria by which communities might determine how best to “bounce back” or “bounce forward.” Additional tools for urban resilience planning are needed, and we suggest and elaborate here upon two: the development path and regenerative sustainability. The notion of the development path originated within the IPCC process and draws upon futures studies, scenario planning and backcasting, in order to understand the social and political change and decision making implications of responding to climate change. The second concept we offer, regenerative sustainability, can be considered as the work of increasing the capacity of the current generation to give back more than we receive. The contribution of these two concepts to the value of urban resilience thinking in political contexts is explained through a discussion of five possible scenarios of urban transformation, which vary in terms of the social and political intentions at work in the strategies needed to build resilience.