Understanding Resilience-Related Stresses and Shocks Affecting the Built Environment of a Refugee Host City: The Case of Amman, Jordan

This article aims to understand the relationships between city resilience challenges in a refugee host developing country, taking Amman in Jordan as a relevant case. It aims to investigate its built environment challenges and define which should be given priority over others, given the country’s limited possibilities and current economic, environmental, social and political conditions. Around 200 local professionals, including practitioners, academics and policymakers, responded to a web-based questionnaire that aimed to rank Amman’s most pressing chronic and sudden problems in order of priority, rate their impact on the built environment, and evaluate the level of preparedness to those challenges. Besides identifying a list of problems in order of priority and reflecting on them, findings highlight significant interconnections between stresses and shocks of Jordan’s built environment and visualise them using the Causal Loop Diagrams. Results from this study contributed to a deeper understanding of Amman’s urban challenges and could potentially inform further development of the urban resilience plans in the local case of Amman, beyond in cities experiencing a rapid influx of refugees and perhaps those aiming to understand their challenges to enhance urban resilience.