Urban resilience has been emerging as a necessary quality of our cities in order to anticipate, recover from, and adapt to shocks and stresses. Advocated by the most prominent international agendas and frameworks dealing with urban development, resilience is nowadays coupled with other key urban goals, as the one of sustainability. Unfortunately, notwithstanding the sprawl of resilience, many “resilient city” initiatives are failing to integrate local communities or sustainability goals within their strategies. In some cases, this has induced environmental and climate gentrification, or reinforced ‘business as usual’ and unsustainable patterns of developments, while tackling and reducing specific risks and vulnerabilities.
Why to re-frame Urban Resilience and its implementation?
As a consequence, experiences of “building resilient cities” remain fragmented, characterized by a variety of resilience trade-offs (i.e. addressing resilience to drought through desalination plants, while inducing to a reduction of energy resilience and sustainability). This highlights the need for a more integrated and inclusive approach to design and manage urban resilience, addressing climatic, environmental, socio-economic challenges while minimizing trade-offs among them, and maximizing synergies between resilience and sustainability.