Urban Resilience: A Systematic Review

Resilience is a flourishing topic in recent years, whose key is to help cities to absorb, recover and adapt after being disturbed. Cities are the main carriers to support human activities, whose resilience appealed numerous experts’ attention, both in theoretical and practical. Therefore, this paper mainly conducted a systematic review on urban resilience, aiming to provide some experiences and understanding in studying urban resilience, and to contribute the development of the area of urban resilience. Specifically, this study starts from the evolution of the concept of “resilience”, which is experienced from engineering resilience to ecological resilience, then developed into socio-economic resilience. According to this, a comparative analysis between these three concepts was conducted and the distinction among them is obtained. Followed by that, a literature review of the definition and framework of urban resilience is conducted. In line with this, an interesting finding is excavated, namely, previous frameworks mainly consider more “urban” and put less attention to “resilience”. However, “dynamic” should be the essence of resilience, and it is necessary in evaluating it. Therefore, this study takes this characteristic that “resilience” embraced, namely “dynamic”, to redefine urban resilience. Finally, concerns to the framework of urban resilience are also given. In this step, mainly two kinds of frameworks are collected, namely framework for urban resilience and community resilience. The reason is that community is commonly recognized as the minuscule unit of a city, whose resilience plays a basic for the urban resilience, it is therefore the literatures about it should be included. Concluded, this paper argues that urban resilience is a new way to guide the sustainable development of modern cities. An accurate understanding of the conceptual connotation, content framework and characteristic standard of urban resilience have important guiding value for enhancing the adaptability of modern cities.