Resilient Urban Form: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Resilience is widely recognized as a pre-requisite for achieving sustainability. Despite the wealth of research on urban resilience, no comprehensive work has been published on the association between urban form and resilience. Form of cities can affect their capacity to survive and thrive in the face of adverse events. Better understanding of the concept of ‘resilient urban form’ and ‘resilient urban form typologies’ is, therefore, essential for achieving more advances in urban resilience. It is essential to elucidate the meaning of ‘resilient urban form’ and explain what issues should be considered to achieve resilient urban morphologies. This chapter elaborates on the concept of ‘resilient urban form’ and introduces a conceptual framework that can be used for its assessment. The conceptual framework emphasizes paying attention to the following issues: ‘resilience of what?’, ‘resilience at what geographic and temporal scale?’, ‘resilience to what’, and ‘resilience for what?’. To answer the first question, various underlying components of urban form should be identified. The issue of ‘resilience at what geographic scale?’ implies that dynamics and interactions across various geographic scales need to be considered. Certain urban form components may be relevant to multiple scales and have different and even opposing affects across different scales. The question of ‘resilience at what temporal scale?’ indicates that, for example, certain urban forms may be desirable when the growth speed of the city is high, but detrimental after it reaches its growth limit. The question of ‘resilience to what?’ is important as certain forms may be favorable in terms of resilience to some hazards but undesirable with respect to others. Finally, elaboration on the question ‘resilience for what?’ helps better understand what specific resilience qualities can be improved through promoting favorable urban forms. The conceptual framework can be utilized to further elucidate the nature of relationships between different components of urban form and resilience of cities. It can also be used to assess resilience of different urban forms across different geographical and temporal scales.