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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled Resilient urban planning: major principles and criteria from 2014 by Ayyoob Sharifi and Yoshiki Yamagata presented at the 6^th International Conference on Applied Energy, and then published in Energy Procedia. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see the implications of the resilience concept for the sustainability of urban areas. This article proposes a conceptual framework to assess resilience and urban sustainability based on a set of criteria and their interrelations.

Since the publication of the Fourth Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change in 2007, which provided evidence that climate change is already occurring, there has been a noticeable shift in the rhetoric about climate change. This rhetoric moved from mitigation only to mitigation and adaptation strategies. The scientific community and policy makers are now coming to realise that adaptation measures are critically important in addressing the impacts of continuing climate change. While climate change is a global issue affecting various human settlements, the impacts are expected to be more sever in cities due to increasing urban populations. Many of these urban areas are also located in places that are prone to a wide array of natural and man-made disasters.

Other agents, such as managerial mistakes, recurring economic crises and terrorism, beside climate change can also cause disturbance in the urban system. Addressing this wide range of threats requires having appropriate knowledge of the main parameters influencing the mitigation and adaptation practices in cities. An integrated framework composed of various resilience related criteria can assist urban planners and decision-makers in their efforts to identify areas that need work and improvement. The criteria can also simplify resilience as a complex issue and make it more understandable to various stakeholders in the society. Therefore, the major purpose of this paper is to identify key criteria of urban resilience that can be used as a starting point for developing a more integrated framework for assessment and improvement of the resilience of urban areas.

The concept of resilience has traditionally been used in physics and psychology to respectively indicate the ability of an object to return to its original position after receiving a hit and the ability to successfully survive a shock or trauma. It was first introduced into ecology in 1973 by Holling who described it as a measure of the ability of systems to absorb change and disturbance without losing the pre-disturbance relationships between their constituent elements. However, there is still no single universally accepted definition for resilience. Like sustainability, resilience is a normative concept which is not easy to be presented in quantitative terms.

On the other hand, there seems to be a broad consensus in the research community that a city as a dynamic entity is not only an ecological system but a social one. As a dynamic socio-ecological system, a city is undergoing a constant process of change and adaptation. This implies that resilience in urban areas should be considered as an adaptive process which does not necessarily require the system to return to an equilibrium state after having been hit. Including time scale, resilience can be also understood as a system’s ability of short-term coping and long-term adaptation. A community should be able to absorb impacts in the short term and self-organise and increase its capacity for learning in the long run.

Unfortunately there seems to be little focus on the development of tools for assessment of urban resilience. Historically there has been more highlight on sustainability and its assessment on different scales. Arguably, sustainability and its assessment tools can be used as a proxy for assessing resilience, but this is not always true. There is still no research collating various resilience related criteria into one assessment framework which is what this research aimed to create.

The authors established six themes – infrastructure, security, environment, economy, institutions, and social and demographics – with subthemes and criteria as a starting point for assessing urban resilience. Infrastructure includes water, energy, spatial configuration and location, transportation, green infrastructure, defence structures, sheltering, building and design, and technology and information as subthemes. The criteria for green infrastructure are parks, forest conservation, and waste management, while the defence structures includes coastal defence structures like dykes and dunes as criteria, for example.

Security has defensible spaces, visibility of security infrastructure, and surveillance cameras among others as criteria. The environment has the subtheme of ecosystem, with criteria like biodiversity, erosion rates and proximity of different habitants. Economy as a theme contains urban agriculture, diversified livelihoods, taxation and fiscal policies, housing capital and employment as criteria for example. The theme of institutions has two subthemes: planning with proactive planning, level of flexibility and scenario-based planning as example criteria, and governance with criteria of political stability, strength of leadership and transparency, among others. Social and demographics theme includes social cohesion, cultural diversity and education, among others, and has a subtheme of health with responsive health systems, health coverage and health access as criteria.

The authors highlighted the need for further investigation for a more comprehensive list with clarified relevance of each criterion to adaptation and mitigation efforts. Also, it should not be forgotten that these criteria do not act in isolation and their interlinkages and how that reinforce each other should also be studied. The relatively comprehensive set of criteria could help developing indicators to measure overall resilience. Evaluating the performance against these criteria would help planners and decision-makers acquire a reasonable amount of knowledge about the community’s status with respect to resilience and make more informed decisions.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Resilience was first described as the system’s ability to absorb change and disturbance without losing the pre-disturbance relationships between their constituent elements.
2. Translating that to communities, resilience can include the adaptive process in which the system is not required to return to an equilibrium, with short-term coping and long-term adaption. Therefore, a community should be able to absorb impacts in the short term and self-organise and increase its capacity for learning in the long run.
3. Evaluating the resilience performance based on indicators could help planners and decision-makers acquire a reasonable amount of knowledge about the community’s status with respect to resilience and make more informed decisions.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. Is there a final set of criteria for urban resilience or is it always changing and evolving as cities do being dynamic socio-ecological systems?
2. How much are decision-makers and planners use such criteria sets? Is it increasing in number seeing the need for resilience due to climate change and other challenges?
3. How resilient is your own community and urban area? What could be enhanced for them to survive a shock and learn from it?

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