The emerging addition of resilience as a component of sustainability in urban policy

Abstract

The concept of resilience is progressively capturing the interest of scholars and practitioners in the field of urban policy. This increase in interest is directed towards the need for a better understanding of the conditions for effective and legitimate governance in a complex, interconnected, and volatile world fraught with a new class of poorly understood systematic risk. We are progressively observing resilience as a component of sustainability as the dominant organising frame in the field of urban planning. The application of the adapted Wilkinson (2011) framework, which we situate within a broader framework for evaluating metropolitan plans (Nguyen, Davidson & Gleeson, 2018), reveals the extent to which newly released metropolitan plans are incorporating strategies for social-ecological resilience. Our point is to offer an early assessment of the framing of social-ecological resilience within the embedded understanding of metropolitan planning practice. Our research has revealed that social-ecological resilience thinking has been incorporated only to a limited extent into metropolitan planning strategies worldwide, as demonstrated through the evaluation of our two sites—OneNYC and Plan Melbourne. We have argued that OneNYC incorporates the strategies of social-ecological resilience to a greater extent than Plan Melbourne, possibly pointing to a strengthening governing system by incorporating processes of social learning and adaptation. We conclude by acknowledging the critical insights into the limitations of the reality of implementing these ideas of social-ecological resilience within policy settings (see Duit, 2016), and which requires urgent consideration within a fuller institutional study that must in any case await the fuller roll-out of social-ecological resilience in sustainability agendas within city strategic planning.