Abstract
In the era of increasing risks and uncertainties induced by various stressors such as climate change and social and geopolitical conflicts, resilience is high on the agenda of planners, policy makers, and researchers. This is manifested in the increasing number of plans, programs, policies, and frameworks that are developed annually to enhance urban resilience. One potential impediment to the proper design and implementation of resilience plans, programs, policies, and frameworks is the incomplete understanding of the resilience concept itself. This issue becomes even more complicated when considering the fact that resilience is a contested notion and various definitions exist for it depending on the background, field, context, and objectives of the stakeholders. In an effort to better understand different conceptualizations of resilience in the context of urban planning, this chapter elaborates on the genealogy of the resilience concept and its underlying principles and characteristics. It is argued that resilience as a concept has an old history in fields such as physics and psychology but has been introduced to and used in urban studies only since a few decades ago. Urban scholars and practitioners have relied on the vast body of literature from other fields to conceptualize resilience depending on their specific purposes. Three dominant approaches that guide such conceptualizations are, namely, engineering, socio-ecological, and adaptive. The latter one has gained more momentum in the recent years considering the increasing recognition of the concept of living with risk and the need for continuous improvement and evolvement. This chapter concludes by elaborating on various underlying resilience characteristics such as Robustness, redundancy, flexibility, agility, adaptive capacity, modularity, resourcefulness, creativity, equity, foresight capacity, diversity, inclusiveness, connectivity, and efficiency. These characteristics are essential for developing more objective resilience plans, programs, policies, and frameworks. They could also contribute to making the resilience concept more tangible to various stakeholders.
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Singh, N., Sharifi, A. (2022). Resilient Cities: Concepts and Underlying Principles. In: Sharifi, A., Salehi, P. (eds) Resilient Smart Cities. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95037-8_4
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