What is urban resilience?
Date: 5 Jul 2023
Urban Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses and systems within a city to survive, adapt and grow in response to many types of chronic stresses and acute shocks.
Indeed, crises and shocks are inevitable. But the way in which a city’s systems respond to them, ultimately determines their future success. Inefficient or incomplete resilience planning can result in delayed recovery post crisis, while the absence of resilience may cause complete failure of socioeconomic systems.
As such, cities need to enhance their systems to be prepared for diverse yet interconnected challenges, instead of just preventing or mitigating loss of assets in the face of specific adversities. Such preparedness combines the responsive capacities of different systems with innovative, risk-aware and robust stress management mechanisms.
The 7 Qualities of Urban Resilience
Local governments should focus their resilience efforts on establishing foundational qualities in programs to prevent, manage and mitigate losses associated with unfavorable conditions. By practicing these qualities, local governments can look at the functioning of their cities through a resilience lens and design strategies well-suited for city growth.
Flexible
Enhance willingness and ability to adopt alternative strategies in response to changing circumstances or sudden crises
Robust
Develop well-conceived systems that aim to make failure predictable, safe, and proportionate to the cause
Inclusive
Prioritize broad consultation and participation to create a sense of shared ownership in decision-making
Reflective
Use experience to inform future decisions and be able to modify standards previously established
Redundant
Build spare capacity to accommodate disruption, with multiple ways to achieve a given need
Integrated
Bring together a range of distinct systems and institutions to allow for the development of additional benefits, as resources are shared
Resourceful
Recognize alternative ways to use resources, particularly in times of crisis, to achieve goals