Planning, platforms, participation: city resilience and illegal drugs in Belfast (original) (raw)
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Climate and Development, 2017
The aim of this paper is to analyse the emergence of the concept of 'urban resilience' in the literature and to assess its potentials and limitations as an element of policy planning. Using a systematic literature review covering the period 2003-2013 and a combination of techniques derived from narrative analysis we show that diverse views of what urban resilience means and how it is best used (as a goal or as a conceptual/analytical framework) compete in the literature. Underlying these views are various (and sometimes diverging) interpretations of what the main issues are and what forms of policies or interventions are needed to address these issues. Urban planners need to be better aware of these different interpretations if they want to be in a position to use resilience appropriately and spell out what resilience can bring to their work. The review also highlights that the notion of urban resilience often lacks adequate acknowledgement of the political economy of urbanisation and consequently does not challenge the status quo which, some argue, is socially unjust and environmentally unsustainable. As such it runs the risk to be seen as simply making marginalised urban communities more resilient to the shocks and inequity created by the current dominant paradigm.
The politics of resilient cities: whose resilience and whose city?
Building Research & Information, 2014
It 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 cityregions 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'.
Operationalising Resilience within Urban Planning – Bridging Theory and Practice
plaNext - Next Generation Planning, 2016
Over the past two decades, the concept of 'urban resilience' has gained increasing attention within the field of urban planning. More recently, interest in the concept can be partly linked to the recent global economic crisis, which has stimulated much debate around pre-crisis urban development models, and more broadly around the ability of modern planning systems to adequately adapt and respond to changing circumstances. This paper reviews the scholarly literature on urban resilience and concludes that despite its increasing ubiquity, the concept still lacks precise definition, and operationalising the concept within the planning domain remains a challenge. Specifically, the paper highlights the importance of distinguishing between 'equilibrium' and 'evolutionary' understandings of resilience, with particular focus on the potential of the evolutionary perspective to aid analysis of local planning responses to the recent global economic crisis. In doing so, the paper also queries the potential contribution of new institutionalism, and discursive institutionalism in particular, in enhancing our understanding of the resilience concept in this context, and in addressing some of the common critiques attached to it.
Mainstreaming resilience in urban policy making? Insights from Christchurch and Rotterdam
Geoforum, 2020
Despite the burgeoning popularity of resilience as an urban policy narrative, we know little about how policymakers and planners approach the challenge of operationalising urban resilience or what problems they face. Although their ultimate goal is presumably to integrate resilience goals into sectoral policy and decision-making as well as to dissolve policy silos, the concept of mainstreaming has received relatively little attention in urban resilience literature so far. To address this void, we use the concept of mainstreaming to analyse the two cities of Christchurch and Rotterdam, both participants in the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities Programme. We identify three main challenges that are apparent in both cities despite their contextual differences. The first is to make resilience a top priority for policymaking and planning because it competes with other urban development agendas for political commitment. Secondly, institutionalising cross-sector governance constitutes a challenge because participation in 100 Resilient Cities brings few incentives for institutional reforms. The third challenge-to actively engage decision-makers from public and private sectors-arises because urban policymakers and planners are not sufficiently equipped to convince them to invest additional resources in terms of personnel, time and money and to dissolve conflicts of interest between them. In the light of these challenges, we argue that participating in 100 Resilient Cities is a relevant but not sufficient first step towards mainstreaming urban resilience in Christchurch and Rotterdam. In addition to developing a resilience strategy and appointing a Chief Resilience Officer, formal changes (for instance in procedural law and national policymaking) are required, to address the challenges identified.
Problematizing resilience: Implications for planning theory and practice
Cities, 2015
This paper problematizes the introduction of the concept of resilience into the planning domain from three main starting points: 1. The nature of the events which are said to require resilience; 2. The different nuances in meaning that resilience assumes according to those different events, and 3. The theoretical and operational problems the concept entails. The paper sustains that: 1. The quest for a resilient behavior or a resilient answer, and the claim to improve urban and territorial resilience do not find the same justification in every kind of event; 2. Multiple sub meanings are embedded within one interpretation of resilience that leave the concept open to rather large margins of ambiguity, which emerge considering its operationalization; 3. The concept seems to fit and to be appropriate within different paradigms, planning traditions and policy frameworks. Its alleged 'neutrality' is one of the main reasons of its pervasiveness, but also of its ambiguity, showing latent controversial implications, which are progressively emerging in critical planning theory.
Sustainability, 2020
Resilience has become a popular term in spatial planning, often replacing sustainability as a reference frame. However, different concepts and understandings are embedded within it, which calls for keeping a critical stance about its widespread use. In this paper, we engage with the resilience turn in spatial planning and we dwell on the relation between resilience and sustainability from a planning perspective. Building on insights from ecology, complex system theory and epistemology, we question whether resilience can effectively act as a 'boundary object', i.e., a concept plastic enough to foster cooperation between different research fields and yet robust enough to maintain a common identity. Whilst we do not predicate a dichotomy between resilience and sustainability, we argue that the shift in the dominant understanding of resilience from a descriptive concept, to a broader conceptual and normative framework, is bound to generate some remarkable tensions. These can be associated with three central aspects in resilience thinking: (i) the unknowability and unpredictability of the future, whence a different focus of sustainability and resilience on outcomes vs. processes, respectively, ensue; (ii) the ontological separation between the internal components of a system and an external shock; (iii) the limited consideration given by resilience to inter-and intra-generational equity. Empirical evidence on actual instances of planning for resilience from different contexts seems to confirm these trends. We advocate that resilience should be used as a descriptive concept in planning within a sustainability framework, which entails a normative and transformative component that resonates with the very raison d'être of planning.
Keywords in planning: what do we mean by 'community resilience'?
In this paper, we critically explore the combination of a dynamic, multilayered understanding of community with an open-ended, ‘emergent’ understanding of resilience, and highlight the relevance for planners. We argue prevailing planning policies and practices on community resilience tend to work with rather simplistic, onedimensional understandings of both ‘community’ and ‘resilience’. The multiple layers of meaning that are embedded in the word community are ignored when it is treated as an add-on intended to give underlying ideas about resilience planning greater public appeal. Apart and together the concepts of community and resilience bring into play a host of tensions between, for example, continuity and change, resistance and adaptation, inclusion and exclusion. This paper offers a framework for ensuring that these important considerations are openly negotiated within transparent normative frameworks of planning policy and practice.
The city politics of an urban age: urban resilience conceptualisations and policies
Palgrave Communications
Around the globe, cities seek to improve their resilience to face the stresses and shocks that are expected from global climate change and other threats. In implementing urban resilience policies, they are guided by different urban resilience conceptualisations. What is meant by the concept differs between scholars, governments, as well as international organisations that seek to study, advise on and implement urban resilience policies and governance interventions. This article presents a review of the urban resilience literature since the 1970s. It seeks to map and interrogate dominant urban resilience conceptualisations, and decipher whether and how different understandings of the concept can result in essentially different policies and governance interventions and outcomes. In contrasting the 'what' of urban resilience (various conceptualisations) with the 'why' of urban resilience policy (bouncing back, falling forwards, persistence) it investigates approaches to overcome some of the key critiques to urban resilience policy and research.
Preface to the Book: Now more than ever, cities are hot spots responsible for threatened global ecological boundaries. Climate change impacts and global environmental change are challenges for urban dwellers, planners, and managers. To develop opportunities for the sustainable development of cities, researchers from multiple disciplines are studying the feedback, dynamics, and behaviour of urban systems in the face of change. During the 2011 Resilience Conference1 in Arizona, USA, a group of young researchers from different countries discussed critically the potential use of the resilience theory in understanding the dynamics and development of cities. Given the highly scattered literature related to ‘urban resilience’ and the different interpretations and applications of the concept, these researchers decided to set up an international urban resilience research network (later named URBNet2, Urban Resilience Young Researchers Network). Eight months after this first contact, the URBNet founders organised the First International Workshop on Urban Resilience, held in Barcelona on 18 and 19 November of 2011 with the support of the Master Programme in Landscape Intervention and Management at the Barcelona History Museum (MUHBA). The aim of the workshop was to share resilience perspectives applied to different urban contexts. The workshop was attended by more than 40 graduate students, researchers and practitioners. This report summarises presentations of the ongoing research of the network’s members that were given during the two-day workshop. The result is a review and discussion of examples showing how resilience is applied to different contexts. As a first step in understanding these contexts, we hope this compilation will inspire readers to create ways of complementing sustainability science with resilience thinking. Contributors to this report are Lorenzo Chelleri (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain), Marta Olazabal (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom and Basque Centre for Climate Change, BC3, Spain), Lilia Yumagulova (British Columbia University, Canada), James J. Waters (Tyndall Centre, United Kingdom), Anna Kunath (Helmholtz- Centre, Germany) and Guido Minucci (Politecnico di Milano, Italy). Through this report, URBNet aims to contribute constructively to the discussion on urban resilience and the opportunities and benefits of applying urban resilient thinking in urban environments.