Understandings of urban resilience meanings and principles across Europe

Abstract

In the last decade many papers have explored the challenges of defining and framing urban resilience. Academic literature has recently emphasised how urban resilience differs from urban sustainability, while urban policy agendas use these terms almost interchangeably. This paper explores European academics' and city practitioners' perspectives around urban resilience meanings and principles. It aims to enhance the understanding of the concept's evolution and to discuss the gap between theory and implementation. To do so, we conducted a survey among around 100 junior and senior European scholars from different fields and interviewed 24 city practitioners.Both academics' and practitioners' perspectives have aligned with the latest conceptualisations of urban resilience. The respondents endorsed transformative and “bouncing forward” approaches, emphasizing that nowadays challenges stand within reconciling and combining transformation and resistance to change resilience perspectives. The more engineering, robustness and safety driven ones seem to be left behind. However, inconsistencies emerged when addressing implementation and resilience characteristics: interviews' responses showed how practices are still driven through robustness and safety-driven measures. The paper critically discusses these emerging conceptual misalignment and gaps to overcome in future research and practice.