Urban in Question: Recovering the Concept of Urban in Urban Resilience

Abstract

Existential threats from climate change, weather-related disasters, and other crises have drawn increasing attention to urban resilience. Prior work has focused on explicating resilience and proposing various definitions of it. But the emphasis on describing resilience might overlook what urban means in discussions of urban resilience. This paper investigates how urban resilience scholarship conceptualizes and defines the term urban. I conduct a literature review and content analysis of recently published urban resilience articles. The results reveal how urban is prominently featured, but its conceptual use is not identified, and the term is left undefined. The findings suggest serious concerns about the applicability and generalizability of urban resilience to different contexts. The paper contributes to the literature by showing how conceptualizing urban alternately as a shared subject of study, influential condition, or measurement category has far-reaching implications for urban resilience planning, implementation, and assessment. Drawing upon the idea of simulated annealing, the paper suggests that taking a few conceptual steps backward may help our understanding of urban resilience—and cities to bounce back better.