The politics of resilient cities: whose resilience and whose city?

AbstractIt is vital to acknowledge the socio-political complexity of the deployment of the term 'resilience' and to develop a more unified set of expectations for the professions and disciplines that use it. Applied to cities, resilience is particularly problematic, yet also retains promise. Like resilience, the term 'city' is also subject to multiple contending definitions, depending on the scale and on whether the focus is on physical spaces or social communities. Due to cities and city-regions being organized in ways that both produce and reflect underlying socio-economic disparities, some parts are much more resilient than others and therefore vulnerability is often linked to both topography and income. Uneven resilience threatens the ability of cities as a whole to function economically, socially and politically. Resilience can only remain useful as a concept and as progressive practice if it is explicitly associated with the need to improve the life prospects of disadvantaged groups. This dimension is often lost in definitions of resilience drawn from engineering and ecology, but remains central to conceptualizations linked to social psychology. To improve the prospects of cities proactively (and reactively), there is a need to unify the insights from the multiple professions and disciplines that use 'resilience'.Keywords:: disaster recoveryequityresilienceresilient citiessocial justiceurban planning and designurban politics AcknowledgementsThe author thanks participants in the January 2013 Resilience Workshop at the ETH, as well as BRI's anonymous reviewers and Dr Shomon Shamsuddin for providing comments on this paper. This research did not receive external funding.Notes1 Since 2010, ICLEI: Local Governments for Sustainability has sponsored an annual Resilient Cities forum (see http://resilientcities.iclei.org/) that has yielded a series of Resilient Cities books. The Rockefeller Foundation sponsors the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN), which is part of a larger initiative on 'Developing Climate Change Resilience', while the MacArthur Foundation has a 'Building Resilient Regions' initiative intended to help places 'rebound from or deflect economic shocks' (see http://brr.berkeley.edu/). The theme for the 2013 Joint Congress of the North American and European Planning Schools was 'Planning for Resilient Cities and Regions' (see http://aesop-acspdublin2013.com/).