Local Planning Practice towards Resilience: Insights from the Adaptive Co-Management and Design of a Mediterranean Wetland

Emma Salizzoni,Fernando Alcalde-Rodríguez,Ruben Talavera-Garcia,Rocío Pérez-Campaña

doi:10.3390/su12072900

Emma Salizzoni, Fernando Alcalde-Rodríguez + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su12072900

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Abstract

Although widely, as well as recently explored, the concept of urban resilience still poses important issues in terms of its operationalization. For this reason, best practices that show how the resilience concept has been turned into planning practice are much needed. This article presents and discusses the case study of the Charca de Suárez Nature Concerted Reserve, an urban wetland situated along the Andalusian coast (Spain), to contribute to filling the gap on the operationalization of urban resilience at the local planning level. In the Charca, an adaptive co-management and design approach has been successfully put into practice to foster local urban resilience. Starting from some recent key studies on planning and management policies for urban resilience, we propose a framework to read, understand and evaluate the Charca experience, and more generally, resilience-based projects. The analysis highlighted the following crucial key aspects for urban resilience in the Charca case study: A collaborative governance model; and the building of community-capitals. The Charca de Suárez Nature Concerted Reserve can actually be acknowledged as an innovative planning practice, a source of inspiration for visions and experiments oriented to urban resilience.

Highlights

The resilience paradigm has gained huge academic attention over the last years in a wide range of disciplines
The rapid rise of the resilience concept has been paired with the uncertainty on how it should be operationalized [2,3], which explains why resilience remains greatly unpracticed in contemporary urban planning and design [4]
At present, the extensive discussion on the concept itself and its meaning in urban planning seems to have reached some agreed milestones that we can consider as starting points to advance towards its operationalization within planning: (1) The need for a non-equilibrium and evolutionary approach; (2) The need for an adaptive co-management and design approach; (3) The crucial role played by green infrastructures and nature-based solutions; (4) The contribution made from case studies to elucidate the complex processes involved in resilience implementation within planning practice, with special attention to the local scale

Summary

Introduction

The resilience paradigm has gained huge academic attention over the last years in a wide range of disciplines. In the context of urban studies and planning, urban resilience may be defined as the ability of complex socio-ecological systems to persist, adapt and transform in response to a wide variety of stresses (for a review of the concept, see Meerow et al [1]). At present, the extensive discussion on the concept itself and its meaning in urban planning seems to have reached some agreed milestones that we can consider as starting points to advance towards its operationalization within planning:. The intrinsic changing and non-linear nature of social-ecological systems in time and space [3,10] implies the existence of multiple pathways towards resilience, as a continuum from persistence to transformation [1]. It is clear that there is no a “definite strategy” for resilience, but a transitioning to resilience [11] that implies multiple strategies in time and space in an evolutionary resilience framework [12]

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