Enabling strategies and impeding factors to urban resilience implementation: A scoping review

Abstract Despite growing interest in urban resilience, there is a significant gap between discourse and the capacity to develop resilience in practice. This scoping review assembles and shares evidence and insights from empirical studies of attempts to implement urban resilience published between 2005 and 2017. More precisely, it seeks to identify enabling strategies, impeding factors and trade‐offs in the implementation of urban resilience. Findings are presented along the dimensions of urban resilience detailed in the City Resilience Framework (ARUP/Rockefeller Foundation): Health and Wellbeing, Economy and Society, Infrastructure and Environment, and Leadership and Strategy (which we present as a cross‐cutting theme). While some enabling and impeding factors in implementation are associated with a specific dimension, others are common to all three. Across dimensions, we find that transparent, inclusive and supportive governance reduces the risk of negative impact that resilience implementation will have on communities. Conflicting priorities of managing risk and meeting short‐term needs are found to diminish the potential for transformative resilience action. Integrating risk into planning appears as a promising strategy in all dimensions of resilience. Trade‐offs are found in resilience implementation, and range from adverse effects associated with infrastructure to power imbalances when the power to implement resilience privileges one system level over another.