Urban resilience implementation: A policy challenge and research agenda for the 21st century

Resilience has risen rapidly over the last decade to become one of the key terms in international policy and academic discussions associated with civil contingencies and crisis management. As governments and institutions confront threats such as environmental hazards, technological accidents, climate change, and terrorist attacks, they recognise that resilience can serve as a key policy response. Many organisations including the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, government agencies and departments, international non-governmental organisations and community groups promote resilience. However, with the rapid rise of resilience has come uncertainty as to how it should be built and how different practices and approaches should come together to operationalise it (Chandler & Coaffee, 2016). Whilst there is a variety of different interpretations given to resilience from practitioners and an open debate about resilience principles and characteristics in academia, we adopt the crisis and disaster management definition of “the capacity of a social system to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances” (Boin, Comfort, & Demchak, 2010; p. 9). By developing resilience, a system becomes capable of reducing the impact of shocks and resuming normal functioning more quickly following a disaster and better equipped to meet population needs and minimise economic losses caused by crises (Lagadec, 2009; Meerow, Newell, & Stults, 2016). However, it should be noted that this definition fails to capture preexisting socio-economic inequities within society and that in many countries “negotiated resilience” may be desirable (Ziervogel et al., 2017). Moreover, in the rapidly emerging policy discourse of resilience, cities and urban areas have become a key focus of action where rapid urbanisation and greater global connectedness present unprecedented challenges. Such increased urbanisation also concentrates risk in cities making them increasingly vulnerable to an array of shocks and stresses. Under such circumstances, city managers are increasingly seeking to enhance urban resilience by addressing underlying risk factors, and by reducing the exposure and vulnerability of people and assets to a range of current and future threats. In this sense urban resilience provides different frameworks for reducing the multiple risks faced by cities and communities, ensuring there are appropriate levels of resources and capacities to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from a range of shocks and stresses (Coaffee & Lee, 2016). Many initiatives organised through global governance networks promote the importance of city-based resilience whilst a range of private sector and philanthropic organisations have advanced programmes of work and frameworks by which cities might develop the capacities to become more resilient. Most notably, major cities throughout the world have joined the 100 Resilient Cities programme (http://www. 100resilientcities.org/) (Rockefeller Foundation & Arup, 2015), pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, to develop resilience strategies to face disruptive events and address vulnerabilities that amplify crises and erode coping abilities (e.g., inequality, ageing infrastructure, environmental degradation) (100 Resilient Cities, 2016). Organisations of the United Nations are also urging the development of operational frameworks for dealing with integrated risks management, as the UN Habitat City Resilience Profiling Programme, enhancing resilient communities building in relation to Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (UN, 2015) that followed the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters (ISDR, 2005). However, empirical studies show that despite the popularity of resilience, its implementation sometimes lead to business as usual approaches neglecting social justice (Anguelovski et al., 2016; Ziervogel et al., 2017), or lock-in the development path through unsustainable trajectories, and thus resulting in a complex and underestimated set of trade-offs across spatial and temporal scales (Chelleri, Waters, Olazabal, & Minucci, 2015). This implementation gap (Coaffee & Clarke, 2015) remains between resilience as ambitious objective and the “demonstrated capacity to govern resilience in practice” at the urban level (Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015; p. 1265). The implementation of resilience challenges the normal functioning of public administrations (Bourgon, 2009; Duit, 2016) by highlighting the need to replace silos with horizontal management (Matyas & Pelling, 2015), take interdependence with external partners into account (Henstra, 2012; McConnell & Drennan, 2006; Valiquette L’Heureux & Therrien, 2013), and encourage flexible and adaptive processes rather than regular routines that maintain the status quo (Pelling & Manuel-Navarrete, 2011; Stark, 2014). Whilst from a governance perspective we can readily acknowledge that “the building of urban resilience will be most effective when it involves a mutual and accountable network of civic institutions, agencies and individual citizens working in partnership towards common goals within a common strategy” (Coaffee, Murakami-Wood, & Rogers, 2008), municipal authorities are undoubtedly struggling to do so. In seeking to identify the different knowledge gaps and future research questions regarding the implementation of urban resilience we ran a 3-day intensive knowledge-brokering workshop on Co-constructing Knowledge for Urban Resilience Implementation at the Ecole nationale DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.12233