Resilience-Oriented Urban Planning

The concept of resilience is increasingly used in scientific and political discourses on sustainable urban development and urban disaster risk reduction. It has its roots in disciplines such as physics, psychology and ecology and is a relatively new concept in the field of urban planning. This chapter aims to explore the implications of integrating resilience thinking into urban planning. It introduces the concept of resilience-oriented urban planning and discusses how it is distinct from conventional urban planning. Extending the theory of adaptive cycle, it is argued that urban planning should not be considered as a static process. Urban systems are dynamic entities characterized by non-equilibrium dynamics and constantly go through the four phases of ‘exploitation’, ‘conservation’, ‘release’, and ‘reorganization’. Resilience-oriented planning is needed to address dynamics and complexities of urban systems. This chapter provides discussions on paradigm shifts that are needed to integrate resilience thinking into urban planning. These paradigm shifts are discussed in the context of different planning themes, namely, strategy making and visioning, public participation, equity and empowerment, learning from traditional local knowledge, institutional reforms, social networks, sectoral and spatio-temporal dynamics, land use planning, and urban infrastructure. The chapter concludes with some discussions on how these paradigm shifts contribute to integrating principles that underpin the concept of resilience into urban planning and design.

The Resilience Matrix is a framework for the performance assessment of integrated complex systems. This chapter reviews the development of the matrix then describes two case studies and discusses lessons learned. The structure is a 4 × 4 matrix; the rows describe the four general management domains of any complex system (physical, information, cognitive, social) as described in the US Army’s Network-Centric Warfare doctrine and the columns describe the four stages of disaster management (plan/prepare, absorb/withstand, recover, adapt) as defined by the US National Academy of Sciences in their definition of disaster resilience. Collectively, these sixteen cells provide a general description of the functionality of a system through an adverse event. The matrix serves as an organizing framework for a screening-level assessment of the resilience of a system with respect to each critical service it provides. Indicators linked to each cell can be used to describe system performance and identify areas for further investigation. Additionally, the matrix framework can be used to organize the many government agencies and community institutions across different spatial scales that contribute to the operation of each critical service. In this way the matrix serves as a tool to initiate resilience planning and coordination, address jurisdictional issues, and identify gaps in the various roles and responsibilities for complex urban systems where human performance and decision making plays a critical role. The case studies described here (Rockaway, New York City and Mobile, Alabama, USA) are focused on coastal community resilience in the face of storm surge and flooding; however, the lessons learned speak to the broader contribution of the resilience matrix to the fields of risk assessment and urban planning.

Indian cities are experiencing multiple simultaneous transitions in demography, income, governance, physical expansion and infrastructures, amplifying existing challenges of providing housing, water, sanitation, employment and clean environment. With little capacity to cope with risks from the in situ climate, added risks from climate change present an overwhelming challenge. The global, long-term and highly uncertain nature of climate change phenomenon has contributed to the remoteness and sparseness of the treatment of climate change risks in the framing of city development policies. Building sustainable and climate resilient cities and communities require quite the opposite approach to conventional urban policies and plans. Several Indian cities have announced policies to build resilience to climate change; however, the extent of institutionalization of climate change resilience in the local government agenda is not well understood. This chapter reviews India’s urban development and governance structures in the context of urban climate change resilience. Drawing from the case study of Ahmedabad city’s Heat Action Plan, the paper highlights the key issues faced by local governments in mainstreaming climate change resilience in formal urban policies.

Local governments are at the forefront of responding to climate change in developing risk assessments and mitigation and adaptation strategies. In the Australian context, local government plans and strategies are emerging, however the extent to which municipalities are planning effectively for climate change and whether they are delivering on outcomes is difficult to assess. While there are a number of frameworks for monitoring, evaluating and reporting climate change adaptation and urban resilience, very few have been implemented at the local scale. This paper will present a case study from a group of councils in metropolitan Melbourne who have collaborated to develop a ‘fit-for-purpose’ framework to track how well they are adapting to climate change and to improve their resilience. The project process, framework design, indicators and pilot implementation phase will be outlined including an analysis of the challenges and issues that emerged in developing and implementing an approach to monitoring and evaluation. We seek to contribute to the gap in knowledge around ‘doing adaptation’ in particular how we can monitor and evaluate progress. In the post Paris climate policy context, much more attention is needed on how we can better understand the “actual experience of adaptation” which broadly asks “are we adapting”? (Ford and King in Mitig Adapt Strat Glob Change 20:505–526, 2015) and in the case of the particular Australian case study presented in this paper, the focus is on how can we assess ‘How Well Are We Adapting?’

Over the past years a considerable number of towns and cities joined together in transnational networks, which aim to take action on climate change. With regards to European municipalities this development was supported by two major trends: First, an increased willingness of cities worldwide to tackle major global issues jointly. Secondly, a realignment of spatial policies towards cities and urban areas on the EU level. This chapter focuses on one of the more recent networks: The European mainstream climate initiative Covenant of Mayors. The signatories of this initiative explicitly seek the collaboration with other communities in order to share knowledge and experience, and thus improve their own climate change mitigation and adaptation measures in order to enhance its climate resilience. Implementing a local action plan is often dependent on external funding, wherefore particularly communities from the crisis-ridden Southern European countries struggle in its realization. To facilitate the signatories’ work and to respond to these difficulties, their efforts are complemented by various decision-making support tools and through conceding access to European funding programs.

Urban resilience research has been investigating during the last two decades how to reduce or mitigate disaster risks or climate change related threats. A variety of projects, best practices and networks have emerged from these recent experiences, but the gaps between urban resilience theories, research and practices have been increasing when “city resilience” started to be a policy label fitting any urban challenge. This chapter presents a case study, exploring how the City of Barcelona has framed an integrated governance model for managing different initiatives related to resilience. This is but an institutionalist perspective, along which the chapter discusses Barcelona’s past and current capacities for building resilience. Furthermore, it is discussed how the municipality has framed, through leveraging on a dense international network of collaboration and these local experience in resilience, a new city resilience unit that leads in integrated way a range of projects enhancing urban resilience. Promoted as the Barcelona Resilience Model, this chapter offers some critical reflections on how and why this model has been built, launched and supported from industry partners, stakeholders and multilateral agencies.

Resilience is a new concept in urban planning. Coming from ecology, resilience is continuously evolving in planning. Among several branches, the socio-ecological resilience is mostly emphasized. Measurement methods of resilience are also diverse. Quy Nhon is one of the major cities in South Central Coast of Vietnam with an area of 286 square kilometers and more than 287 thousand people. It is diverse in terms of ecology, land use and economy. Being at the South Central Coast, it faces typhoons and flooding events every year. With the El Nino and La Nina cycles, it also gets extremes temperature and cyclical events of drought. Quy Nhon’s case is an example of how cities build resilience to current and future disasters. As any other city of Vietnam, it follows standard Master Plan approach to guide its growth and to mainstream climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. But there is no systematic assessment of how this approach is leveraging existing urban planning mechanisms of the city and how the Master Plans are considering climate change and other disasters. This paper tries to address these questions. Two different methods will be used: (1) qualitative review of Quy Nhon Master Plans (2015 and 2004) from the perspective of climate change adaptation, (2) Interview with 29 government officials and leaders on their efforts on adaptation measures in the course of land use planning in the city. The major finding is that the level of awareness about climate change impacts is high among government officials and in Master Plan of 2015, assessment of impacts is moderate and actions to address those impacts are limited. Continuous incentives and supports can play a pivotal role to improve assessment and action on climate change impacts in the city.

Risk Reduction policies should be framed in the light of specific building and social capital features, contributing to both the built environment and community resilience. However, sometimes also the most appropriated policy strategies are not effective on the ground, producing unattended consequences and resulting in people dissatisfaction and community resilience losses. This chapter highlights the fallacies of the Iranian Rural Housing Retrofitting Special Plan (RHSP) implementation when it comes to retrofitting rural houses in line with the spatial and cultural local contexts. Through a review of the RHSP, which is the main national disaster risk reduction policy framework, and a fieldwork in the small village of Nater, we assessed the implementation of the policy results (the building of 41 new houses) and demonstrated that not only these new buildings, but also the existing local vernacular architecture was providing the built environment with safety and earthquake resistant performances, while enhancing social capital and community resilience. Results highlight that although the national policy framework does recognize local building architecture resilience attributes, its guiding principles were not applied during the implementation process, resulting in a cascade effect of social capital and vernacular architecture erosion. This chapter contributes to highlighting the importance of the decision making process during policy implementation processes in order to maximize and enhance local available resources, capacities and the embedded resilience of the places.

Resilience is widely recognized as a pre-requisite for achieving sustainability. Despite the wealth of research on urban resilience, no comprehensive work has been published on the association between urban form and resilience. Form of cities can affect their capacity to survive and thrive in the face of adverse events. Better understanding of the concept of ‘resilient urban form’ and ‘resilient urban form typologies’ is, therefore, essential for achieving more advances in urban resilience. It is essential to elucidate the meaning of ‘resilient urban form’ and explain what issues should be considered to achieve resilient urban morphologies. This chapter elaborates on the concept of ‘resilient urban form’ and introduces a conceptual framework that can be used for its assessment. The conceptual framework emphasizes paying attention to the following issues: ‘resilience of what?’, ‘resilience at what geographic and temporal scale?’, ‘resilience to what’, and ‘resilience for what?’. To answer the first question, various underlying components of urban form should be identified. The issue of ‘resilience at what geographic scale?’ implies that dynamics and interactions across various geographic scales need to be considered. Certain urban form components may be relevant to multiple scales and have different and even opposing affects across different scales. The question of ‘resilience at what temporal scale?’ indicates that, for example, certain urban forms may be desirable when the growth speed of the city is high, but detrimental after it reaches its growth limit. The question of ‘resilience to what?’ is important as certain forms may be favorable in terms of resilience to some hazards but undesirable with respect to others. Finally, elaboration on the question ‘resilience for what?’ helps better understand what specific resilience qualities can be improved through promoting favorable urban forms. The conceptual framework can be utilized to further elucidate the nature of relationships between different components of urban form and resilience of cities. It can also be used to assess resilience of different urban forms across different geographical and temporal scales.

Recent attempts to develop resiliency indices for metropolitan areas have relied on coarse aggregate data that has little value in assessing the impacts of hazards on urban life. An examination of literature on three hazards (heat waves, flooding, and fires) reveals that it is essential to consider impacts, and how to mitigate and re-mediate them at multiple scales. The field of urban morphology offers a ready-made framework for the development of new resiliency assessment criteria at multiple-scales. While a few initial steps have been taken in this direction, an immense untapped potential remains.

The need to look at environmental-related problems from a systemic perspective has been increasingly highlighted in current scientific literature. Especially in a context of climate change uncertainty, it is helpful to identify interdependencies and cascading impacts that might happen under certain management or policy scenarios. In the context of resilience management and given the inherent complexity of cities, this becomes especially relevant if one considers potential trade-offs or perverse transformability interventions that may have negative impacts on environmental quality, social equity or well-being. The network perspective in resilience theory has been argued to be useful to assess system’s robustness, connectivity and dependency. Connectivity as a characteristic of the system, has been particularly presented as a determinant of urban resilience in the literature, but, so far and to our knowledge, no study has presented empirical evidence on this regard. To contribute to this debate, this chapter uses a case study on urban energy resilience in the city of Bilbao (Spain) to illustrate the role of connectivity in an urban system and its positive and negative effects on resilience and transformability. Main findings point out the context-specific nature of this property of the system and the difficulty of establishing a normative desirable trend.

Climate resiliency is a key topic for cities across the world especially after the Paris Agreement. By combing socio-economic situations, carbon emission reduction, disaster risk management, and other factors determine sustainability of cities, we need to understand trade-offs among these factors. In other words, wise urban systems design are required in cities in the world. Especially in the developed countries like Japan which are expected to experience unprecedented pollution decrease, we need to achieve “wise shrink” of cities that are desirable from multiple viewpoints. With such a background, we introduce our spatially-explicit urban land-use model (SULM) as a tool to analyze the trade-offs among climate resilient sustainability. The SULM is applied to an analysis in the Tokyo metropolitan area to analyze the implications of Business-As-usual (BAU), Compact city, and Wise shrink land use scenarios. SULM could be a useful tool for assessing urban resiliency against climate extreme events for eco-urbanism oriented land forms.