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Citizens’ perception of the resilience of Australian cities

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Abstract

How well does the general public understand the concept of urban resilience? We address this question via an online survey of 500+ citizens living in three large Australian cities (Sydney, Melbourne and Perth). The majority of respondents claim not to know what urban resilience means. Of the remaining respondents, understanding ranges from poor to sophisticated. To circumvent this stated lack of understanding, we cast the concept of urban resilience into a more familiar framework consisting of risk and ability to cope with threats. This allows us to assess perceptions about what may challenge the resilience of Australian cities. Two concerns clearly emerge: (1) violence and social unrest and (2) environmental threats. Analysing a number of constructs from the social psychology literature reveals that these two concerns hold different cognitive signatures, whose understanding may facilitate discussion and communication within a public engagement process.

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Notes

  1. The panel used is administered by ORU, an online fieldwork company with QSOAP ‘Gold Standard’ and the new Global ISO 26362 standard accreditation. The ORU has a database of over 300,000 individuals from across Australia (http://www.theoru.com/).

  2. Threats were assigned to a specific factor if three different criteria were satisfied: (1) the threat’s loading into a factor is >0.5, (2) the ratio between the loading to this factor and the loading to the second factor is >3 and (3) the threat’s communality is >0.3.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation, Canberra, Australia

    Fabio Boschetti, Magnus Moglia, Iain Walke & Jennifer Price

  2. School of Earth and Geographical Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia

    Fabio Boschetti

  3. AgroParisTech, Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food and Environmental Sciences, Paris, France

    Claire Gaffier

Authors
  1. Fabio Boschetti
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  2. Claire Gaffier
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  3. Magnus Moglia
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  4. Iain Walke
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  5. Jennifer Price
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fabio Boschetti.

Additional information

Handled by Akhilesh Surjan, Charles Darwin University, Australia.

Appendices

Appendix A: The questionnaire

First impressions

figure a
figure b

Myths of the cities

figure c

Myth of the future

figure d

Myth of nature: ductile environment

figure e

Cities resilience

figure f
figure g

Social dominance orientation

figure h

Consideration of future consequences scale: CFC future subscale

figure i

Demographics

figure j

Appendix B: Definitions of resilience and liveability

Resilience: Sample of definitions of resilience provided by responders who chose ‘To my understanding…’ option to the resilience question in Appendix A “First impressions”. Five responders wrote “capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses and systems within a city to survive”, which is likely to be cut and pasted from http://www.100resilientcities.org/resilience the first hit on a Google search for urban resilience in Australia at the time of the survey.

  • Ability to withstand change with little detriment to the inhabitants.

  • Able to accommodate growth with capacity to expand provide essential services at large.

  • Being able to live in a crowded and somewhat selfish environment.

  • Capacity of community to adapt to city.

  • It is the ability to support the people who live there and infrastructure.

  • It means that an urban society can bounce back from negative effects. these negative effects may be the aftermath effects of the destruction of the twin towers in New York USA it also can mean the aftermath effects of natural disasters around the world or the fairly recent disastrous effects of the worldwide financial crisis. It can also refer to the bounce back after other terrorist attacks or the killing of innocent people around the world—such as wars. mass shootings of people.

  • How to deal with urban population.

  • Humans adapting and surviving through anything.

  • The ability for our urban environments to change and adapt to new ideas and social change.

  • The ability for people to adapt to living in the city.

  • The ability of society to continue growing and adapting.

  • The ability to adapt to changed circumstances.

  • The ability to survive major disruptions such as an earthquake or a Muslim terrorist attack.

  • The ability to withstand change. Develop and transform.

  • The capability to prepare for, respond to and recover from significant multi-hazard threats such as natural disasters and such with minimum damage to public safety and health. The economy. and security of a given urban area.

  • The capacity to respond in healthy ways to diversity, adverse incidents and other challenges.

  • To understand and grow with future change.

  • Urban resilience is when the people that live in the urban they can do and are strong to uphold culture.

  • Systems within a city to survive, adapt and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.

  • Referring to the ability of people who live in cities as well as the cities themselves to survive and adapt to changing conditions and to grow in a positive way. Also refers to the ability of cities and people to overcome problems both manmade and natural—this would require forward planning in coping with foreseeable problems

  • It over comes the teething problems and keeps growing.

  • As someone who can adapt to city lifestyle, but does not allow it to consume them.

  • A concept which can benefit the person who specifies it.

  • Not becoming depressed by living in population dense conditions.

  • Abstaining from, or being a part of the culture of the living area of a community.

Liveability: Sample of definitions of liveability provided to responders who chose ‘To my understanding…’ option to the resilience question in...

  • Access to things that make life better such as schools, medical facilities, shopping, sport and recreation, employment opportunities.

  • The ability to live cleanly and have access to services that I require.

  • Access to amenities and resources, inclusionary practices that make an area desirable and safe to live in. A stable economic infrastructure. A visually aesthetic and functional space.

  • A measure of the quality of life available to residents in the urban areas of the city.

  • Place where people can live safely.

  • The ability to exist safely in an area without fear of untoward happenings.

  • Surviving the perils of mass isolation.

  • Being affordable and not having to go outside the community.

  • The essential services are reliable, water, power, transport, being safe, having green space, hospitals, education facilities, health services, sporting facilities, cultural facilities clean air.

  • The human space available in our urban environments. Space to live.

  • Basic access to health and shelter in an urban setting.

  • Culture, resources, quality, innovation.

  • How well the urban environment compliments modern living.

  • Being able to survive urban conditions to an old age.

  • The degree to which people can live safely within an area (suburb/shire, etc.) whilst having access to schools, health care services, recreational facilities/parklands, public transport.

  • Affordable, safe and exciting place to live.

  • The ability to live with adequate food, water, housing, employment and recreation/the arts.

  • Good place to live.

  • The community being able live sustainably.

  • Private space, not overcrowded and retail and shopping available and public transport.

  • To be able to successfully live a life in an urban society—such as being able to afford suitable housing and food, clean safe drinking water and other affordable good quality living requirements like clothing, footwear, medical personnel requirements—such as suitably qualified and experienced doctors, dentists, eye wear, haircutters, etc. and reliable safe public transport systems, reliable safe airports and to ensure that any illegal immigrants are sent back to where they came from.

  • Quality of life—ease of cultural access and transport.

  • Being an affordable place to live. A place full of opportunities, growth and prospects. Where everything is within arm’s reach.

  • Judged by a scale that takes into account how people who live in a city feel about their environment and stress or joy coming from it.

  • Affordable area with good amenities and some nature.

  • The function of the urban area to provide its inhabitants with a place of shelter, employment, recreation, transport and caring services.

  • ensuring there is sufficient amenities and transportation to accommodate residents.

  • The ability to monetarily afford living in a city, affording and accessing activities and infrastructure.

  • The area is good to live in and have good housing facilities.

  • Living in harmony with environment.

  • Excellent infrastructure and supported by hubs of schools, shops, community spaces, green spaces and transport.

  • Natural and friendly environment.

  • How enjoyable, accessible and safe it is to be in an urban area.

  • The quality of lifestyle available in a certain area/suburb including but not limited to the area, surroundings, markets and shops, etc.

  • All aspects of living considered, including economy, society stability, safety, culture.

  • Being able to live within your means in whatever area you are. Being a part of it totally.

  • It is very close to central but enough far away from there.

  • The layout, sense of community and integration of nature into well planned spaces.

  • Power, transport, work, pleasure facilities.

  • The ability to reach all needed facilities, support, recreation, etc. without significant effort or travel.

Appendix C: Factor analysis of perception of resilience

See Table 8.

Table 8 Loading coefficients for all 18 threats on the two factor solution underlying the perception of resilience for three large Australian cities
Full size table

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Boschetti, F., Gaffier, C., Moglia, M. et al. Citizens’ perception of the resilience of Australian cities. Sustain Sci 12, 345–364 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-017-0429-1

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