Keywords

1 The Twenty-First Century: The Age of Planetary Cities of Extremes

Stop calling me resilient. I’m not resilient. Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re resilient’, you can do something else to me. (Tracie Washington, New Orleans-based civil rights attorney 2010)

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed in the words of political ecologist Paul Robbins the structural inequalities of race and class, which are physically inscribed into the seascape, implicated in the ecological transformation of the coastal zone, and inseparably linked to the technologies that govern the flow of water through the Mississippi delta (Robbins 2012, p. vii). Ten years after this disaster, the Rockefeller Foundation, which has played a fundamental role in the popularisation and implementation of urban resilience in many cities through its 100 Resilient cities initiative, published a post called New Orleans & The Birth of Urban resilience.Footnote 1 This post pointed out how, after a decade of interventions focused on building resilience -and where this organisation was a key actor – New Orleans has rightly been called a success story of building urban resilience.

Far from those celebratory narratives on urban resilience in New Orleans and reflecting on Tracie Washington’s clarion call to Stop Calling me resilient, Maria Kaika (2017a) suggests taking her claim seriously. What Tracie calls for is to focus on the things and processes that create the need for her to be resilient in the first place. Living in New Orleans, and surviving both Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Tracie’s comment reflects on the deeply racialised, gendered, and class-based character of the alleged resilient recovery of New Orleans post-Katrina. Urban resilience seems to take a form whereby eco-gentrification paves the way – and not surprisingly so – to a more resilient urbanity.

The counterintuitive claim of Stop calling me resilient serves to point to the antinomies of the resilience argument and situates the question of resilience within the contours of present-day urbanisation. Not surprisingly, urban resilience is high on the political and academic agenda, although not free of contradictions (Elmqvist et al. 2019; Meerow and Neuner 2021). Many cities, especially in the Global North, are positioning themselves as important actors to tackle the climate emergency, thereby demonstrating how cities have shifted from being passive, yet responsible, actors within the climate (and more generally environmental) conundrum to active agents (at least discursively) in tackling the global environmental crisis (Satorras et al. 2020). Cities are both key drivers in the process of combined and uneven socio-ecological transformation and face serious, albeit socially highly triaged, consequences of accelerating socio-ecological disintegration (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2020). This position must be fully endorsed and confronted in any theoretical discussion or practical interventions that articulate the question of resilience. In times of climate emergency and in a context of planetary urbanisation (Brenner 2018), where recurrent socio-environmental disasters, injustices, inequalities, and uneven socio-ecological disintegration are experienced in the urban fabric in both Global North and Global South cities, it is urgent to think about and engage in emancipatory and political socio-ecological transformations (Ernstson and Swyngedouw 2019, p. 3). In the face of these uneven development trends, increasing inequality and power imbalances, it is vital to problematise mainstream socio-environmental discourses and visions that tend to depoliticise the nature of environmental problems, reducing them to technical, managerial, and scientific issues while presenting an undifferentiated humanity that faces those problems.

Almost 20 years ago, one of the key figures in critical geography and social sciences, David Harvey, argued that [e]cological arguments are never socially neutral any more than socio-political arguments are ecologically neutral. Looking more closely at the way ecology and politics interrelate then becomes imperative if we are to get a better handle on how to approach environmental/ecological questions (Harvey 1993, p. 25). Understanding the way policymakers, scientists, or practitioners analyse, problematise, and prefigure solutions for the climate emergency through urban resilience narratives (Meerow and Neuner 2021), which are deeply infused by worldviews and values, and traversed by power relations, is critical to deflect the socio-ecological history of the future in more egalitarian and socially just directions.

The urbanisation process and urban life more generally are shaped by extraordinary and deepening socio-ecological polarisation and forms of exclusion, both within and between cities (Dawson 2017). The combined and uneven socio-ecological dynamics that mark the contemporary urbanisation process demonstrate both the mechanisms that expose a range of people to increasing risk and symptomatically illustrate the highly triaged and unequal exposure of people to socio-ecological risk and uncertainty.

The urbanisation process and sustaining urban life globally is indeed predicated on excessive resource appropriation and transformation, often in the most vulnerable places on earth. Consider, for example, how the urban Information Technology apparatus mobilises all manner of resources, such as Coltan, Lithium, Copper, or rare earth elements, thereby sustaining an extractivist socio-ecological regime with its socio-ecological devastations and increasing vulnerability for those dispossessed from their land or exposed to the hazards that accompany resources extraction (e.g., March 2018; Swyngedouw 2022a). Therefore, the resilience of some places to socio-ecological shocks is often bought at the cost of increasing vulnerability and exposure in some other places and for other disenfranchised groups. In sum, cities are central nodes in sustaining the process of uneven socio-ecological transformation (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2014). Indeed, the urbanisation process intensifies what Marx and others called a metabolic rift (see Foster 2000), that is, the de-territorialisation, socio-metabolic transformation, and re-territorialisation of all manner of non-human material, thereby structuring a kaleidoscopic landscape of differential vulnerabilities, capabilities, and risks (Swyngedouw 2006; Arboleda 2020). The urbanisation process demonstrates how resilience is not only unevenly distributed but fundamentally produced by the various dynamics that underpin the urbanisation process.

Finally, communities within cities are also prone to all manner of risks with uneven capacities to deal with socio-ecological shocks. As the example of New Orleans post-Katrina demonstrates, some social groups exhibit a much greater capacity to absorb shocks than others do. Whether we consider earthquakes, exposure to toxins, floods, heat waves or the spread of disease, resilience is primarily the concern of the poor and disempowered. The recent COVID-19 pandemic and its socio-ecological triaging demonstrated how the poor generally carried a much greater risk than the elite in suffering from the pandemic. For example, in the U.K., BAME (Black, Asian and other minorities) groups were up to four times more likely to become infected and suffer death from COVID-19 compared with whites (Otu et al. 2020). Urban resilience, therefore, is not a disembodied and homogenous process but one that is uneven and shaped by the unequal exposure to risk as structured by the process of urban socio-ecological change. This turns the question of resilience into a political and politicising terrain. It is from this perspective that we consider the question of urban resilience in this chapter.

2 From Mainstreaming Urban Resilience to the Birth of a Critical Scholarship of the Politics of Resilience

The concept of resilience has a long and established history and has been articulated in a range of academic fields, from psychology, through engineering or disaster risk reduction, to the analysis of socio-ecological systems (Gunderson 2000; Matyas and Pelling 2015). Alexander (2013) traces the historical evolution of the concept of resilience, arguing that the notion of resilio or resiliere was present in standard Latin (meaning bounce) and appears in classical texts. Alexander (2013) contends that Francis Bacon was responsible for the first known scientific use in English of the word ‘resilience’ (p. 2709) in his natural history compendium Sylva Sylvarum. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the notion of resiliency was used in the sense of the ability to withstand the effects of earthquake[s] (p. 2709). Around that time, mechanical engineering also began to use the notion of resilience. One century later, in the 1950s, psychology started using the term and popularised it in the final decades of the twentieth century. It would be Crawford Stanley (Buzz) Holling who would bring the concept to ecological sciences (1973), and it was further developed through the work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.Footnote 2 By the late twentieth century, the notion of resilience also moved to the study of human ecology while expanding the very meaning inscribed in the concept to include social resilience.

Contemporary socio-ecological resilience approaches emerged in an optimistic turn by foregrounding the formidable capacities that humans and forms of social organisation possess to deal with problems related to global environmental change. From the early writings of Holling to the re-emergence of the interest in the concept in the early twenty-first century (Gunderson 2000; Carpenter et al. 2001; Folke et al. 2002), resilience has been consolidated as a scientific concept that is concerned with change, dynamics, and uncertainties of complex socio-ecological systems. In this regard, a widespread understanding of resilience relates to the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change but still retaining essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedback loops (Walker et al. 2004). However, such capacities will not necessarily translate into action, raising critical questions as to why, how, to whom, and where they make an impact on real adaptation (to climate change or other socio-environmental hazards) and transformation (Pike et al. 2010; Berrang-Ford et al. 2011; Nelson 2011; Meerow et al. 2016).

The metaphor of urban resilience has evolved in a context of rapidly deepening and complex challenges galvanised by the urbanisation process (Galderisi and Colucci 2018). It has emerged as a buzzword alongside other concepts such as the sustainable city or the smart city (de Jong et al. 2015; March 2022). Early approaches to urban resilience considered how a resilient city could withstand an intense shock event without the outbreak of chaos, disintegration, or permanent deformation. Therefore, those approaches were designed to permit the urban environment to anticipate, endure, and recover from the effects of natural or technological hazards (Godschalk 2003). Since the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, and coinciding with the renewed momentum of the role of cities in shaping the global socio-environmental crisis, and more specifically, the climate emergency (Satorras et al. 2020), a plethora of new definitions of urban resilience has permeated academic and policy debates and practice (Meerow and Neuner 2021). According to the state-of-the-art review by Meerow et al. (2016), conceptualisations of urban resilience differ concerning their characterisation of the urban, the notion of equilibrium, their normative perspective, the possible pathways to resilience, the understanding of adaptation, and the timescale of action.

In sum, urban resilience has gained popularity among academic and policy-making circles in the past few years in light of the international discussions on and concerns with how cities could tackle the effects of the climate emergency. For example, the organisation Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) (2018) considers a resilient development pathway one of the five critical pathways for achieving a sustainable world. Similarly, UN-related agencies and programmes have promoted the idea of resilient cities through SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the UNISDR campaign of Making cities resilient!, or the City Resilience Profiling Programme (CRPP) developed by UN-Habitat.

Indeed, the concept of urban resilience has captured both academic – through grants and projects – and policy makers’ attention – through establishing strategies of urban resilience, partnering with companies/universities to experiment with resilience solutions, or joining global initiatives such as the 100 Resilient Cities organisation (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), which later evolved into the Resilient Cities Network (Bliss 2019).

In light of the overtly over-celebratory and optimistic versions of resiliency, critical scholars have scrutinised the concept and practice during the past few years, opening a critical research agenda through a series of crucial arguments. The first argument, arguably, revolves around the imperious need to scrutinise how the notion is discursively built and articulated in various geographical settings. In 2012, Porter and Davoudi (2012) and Davoudi et al. (2012) wrote a cautionary note on the politics of resilience for planning, underscoring that it was not clear yet what resilience meant by that time. Along similar lines, MacKinnon and Derickson (2012, p. 254) argue that the frequency by which resilience is invoked by progressive activists and movements underlines the need for critical appraisal of both the term itself and the politics it animates. MacKinnon and Derickson argue that, to some extent, resilience has been constitutive of the development of capitalism in the twenty-first century: resilient spaces are precisely what capitalism needs – spaces that are periodically reinvented to meet the changing demands of capital accumulation in an increasingly globalized economy (p. 254). Walker and Cooper (2010, p. 144, cited in MacKinnon and Derickson 2012, p. 254) situate resilience as a pervasive idiom of global governance which is abstract and malleable enough to encompass the worlds of high finance, defence and urban infrastructure. In this sense, resilience chimes well with a culture of (neo)liberal individualism that places the onus on the individual or community to build internal defence structures against a presumably external threat while eschewing concerns of solidarity or public intervention.

Urban resilience might be old wine in new bottles (Kaika 2017a), reproducing apolitical ecological views that are nonetheless shaped by uneven power choreographies, inequalities, and injustices (MacKinnon and Derickson 2012). This echoes what Peck and Tickell (2002) framed as roll-out neoliberalism to describe new technologies of governments and new modes of governance that deepen further the culture of neoliberalisation understood as individual or community self-responsibilisation. With respect to resilience planning, this implies maintaining the status quo and reinforcing the neoliberal fantasy whereby resilience is the domain and responsibility of individual action and local community organisation in the face of external risk (Saurí 2018). Resilient communities, therefore, could also be sidelined in processes of collective solidarity and responsibility. Although not explicitly from a political ecology perspective, Meerow et al. (2016) emphasise the power relations that shape the meaning of urban resilience: who determines what is desirable for an urban system? Whose resilience is prioritized? Who is included (and excluded) from urban systems? Or, what are the underlying motivations for building urban resilience (p. 46). Briefly, urban resilience needs to be considered in the image of what, for whom, why, as well as when and where (see also Chap. 5 for the specific case of Latin America).

In another dimension, critical scholarship has pointed out the lack of understanding of the multiple and interlinked sources of vulnerability, emphasising the need to focus on structural vulnerabilities (Wilbanks and Kates 2010), and thereby avoiding centring resilience on a single stressor (e.g., water, heat) (Ajibade and McBean 2014; Harrison and Chiroro 2017). This again resonates with the question of resilience to what and where, pointing out the importance of considering uneven development. Urban resilience in the Global North may have very different meanings than urban resilience in the Global South, not to mention the vast array of contingencies and pre-existing vulnerability structures different urban geographies may face. It is, therefore, vital to scrutinise the uneven socio-spatial patterning of urban resilience (Sapountzaki 2007; Pike et al. 2010; Suárez et al. 2016). For instance, Elliott and Pais (2006) and Elliott and Sams-Abiodun (2010) focus on the uneven response (and resilience) to hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, as we already pointed out in the introduction to this chapter. Elsewhere, in Barcelona, Marí-Dell’Olmo et al. (2018) have shown that vulnerability to heat-related events is shaped by social and economic characteristics, posing new challenges to designing socially sensible resilience strategies within the city. Therefore, questions such as whose resilience is being addressed have been raised, acknowledging the uneven socio-spatial configuration of urban environments (Vale 2014; see also Meerow et al. 2016).

Finally, we should point out the challenges behind building diverse and inclusive communities active in resilient transformations. Along these lines, scholars have identified contradictory directions between the theory and practice of urban resilience (e.g., Stumpp 2013), especially in what concerns climate adaptation, resulting in socially unjust outcomes (Anguelovski et al. 2016, 2019; Chu et al. 2017; see also Chap. 2 for an in-depth engagement with environmental justice scholarship). Shedding light on the uneven impact of urban resilience while including equity issues in the resilience agenda has long been a demand of those advocating a more socially grounded perspective on resilience (Leichenko 2011; Brown 2014; Matin et al. 2018; Meerow et al. 2019; Mees et al. 2019).

In light of this growing body of critical scholarship that calls for a more situated and nuanced understanding of the politics of resilience, we aim to contribute further to such a critique through the lens of Urban Political Ecology, discussing mainstream resilience approaches as an immune-biopolitical fantasy.

3 Urban Political Ecology As a Lens to Contribute to Critical Scholarship on Urban Resilience

Urban political ecology (UPE) focuses on the socio-ecological inequalities embodied in and shaped by the production and reproduction of capitalist urbanisation itself (Keil 2003, 2005; Heynen et al. 2006). The theoretical objective of UPE is to explore the process of socio-natural assembling through which urban landscapes become constructed as a hybrid enmeshing of both humans and non-human objects and pivoting around the social inequalities that are expressed in and by urban socio-ecological metabolic processes (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). Those metabolic processes render the urbanisation process a highly unequal socio-ecological configuration whose functions (e.g., sustainability, resilience, smartness, competitiveness) are predicated upon geographically and ecologically widening networks of socio-ecological transformation (Heynen et al. 2006; Swyngedouw 2006). In the present context, sustaining urbanisation requires socio-ecological relations and networks (from the extraction of materials and food production to the transformation of energy) that are planetary (Arboleda 2016). Indeed, large scale or planetary urbanisation (Brenner 2018) of all manner of natures constitutes the spatial form of capital accumulation with all sorts of intended and non-intended, but thoroughly unequal, outcomes. The uneven positions that different social groups take within these circuits are symptoms expressing the dynamics of the underlying processes of socio-ecological metabolic circulation.

The production of urban environments and the metabolic vehicles that assure its functioning -such as infrastructures of all kinds, the technical and institutional conditions that permit the flow and metabolisation of energy, water, food, information, bodies, and things as well as their socio-ecological characteristics- are of course mediated by governing arrangements that are often nominally democratic, but are nonetheless necessarily profoundly committed to ensuring the uninterrupted expansion of the capital circulation process. It is precisely this articulation between state, class, and environmental translation that renders urban socio-ecological processes, including the question of sustainability, highly conflictive and subject to intense political and social struggle. This process also exposes individuals and social groups differentially to all manner of anticipated or non-anticipated risks, dangers, and/or vulnerabilities. From this political-ecological perspective, urban socio-ecological conditions and the configurations of their governance are never just local but are attached to processes that operate in and through the widely variegated and diverse ecologies of the world. Such urban political-ecological approaches highlight the political core of environmental change and transformations and insist on the fundamentally political nature of the modes of socio-technically organising the metabolic transformation of nature.

Therefore, UPE is concerned with the democratic political processes through which socio-ecological transformations occur. Thus, rather than invoking a normative notion of environmental justice, political ecology insists on focusing on the realities of the presumed democratic political equality in the decision-making processes that organise socio-ecological transformation and choreograph the management of the commons. In doing so, attention shifts from a techno-managerial to a resolutely political vantage point (articulated around the notion of socio-ecological and political equality) that considers the ecological conundrum to be inexorably associated with democratic political action (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2014).

In sum, UPE challenges apolitical views about socio-ecological relations (Robbins 2012), aiming to illustrate the myriad articulations of how urban environmental and social change co-determine each other (Heynen 2014, p. 598). Through these lenses, the urban is presented as a socio-natural constellation that encapsulates and articulates the power choreographies and relations through which it is constantly being made and remade (Gandy 2002; Heynen et al. 2006; Loftus 2012).

Along these lines, we can conceptualise urban resilience strategies as a set of complex socio-ecological, technological, political, and economic processes, which are not only infused by, but also, reshape social power relations. Resilience, from this perspective, is not about indexing and reorganising the capacity of individuals or social groups to counter adverse effects generated by external intruders that threaten to undermine or destabilise the integrity of the body or the community. On the contrary, it is the internally constituted socio-ecological relations that define relative places of vulnerability and resilience. Improving the socio-ecological integrity of the body or community resides primarily in altering the relational configuration that produces the unevenly triaged urban landscapes of vulnerability.

In a sense, we can argue that mainstream resilience might be driven by an eco-prophylactic objective, whereby techno-managerial adaptations and socio-institutional resilience are promoted to ensure nothing really has to change, i.e., hegemonic socio-ecological relations can be sustained for a while longer without risk of disintegration of vulnerable livelihoods. This is precisely what we turn to in the next section.

4 Urban Resilience As an Immuno-Biopolitical Fantasy

In light of the above critical interventions, the signifier resilience refers to a potentially almost infinite set of signified, rendering the concept relatively empty in terms of content or, in other words, its content can be filled with a wide range of competing and occasionally contradictory meanings. It is precisely this emptiness that turns resilience into a flexible fantasy notion that exerts an irresistible ideological pull. Here perhaps resides the key attraction and power of resilience as a metaphor and diverse set of practices. Together with sustainability, adaptation, and mitigation, resilience arguments have become dominant discourses in the debate over socio-ecological transformations.

The phantasmagorical promise of urban resilience provides a seemingly immunological prophylactic against the threats and dangers posed by the often unpredictable and complex acting of an assumedly external Nature. The key objective of much of urban sustainability, resilience, smart technologies and adaptive eco-managerial policies and practices that dominate urban ecological policies and interventions are indeed precisely aimed at re-enforcing the immunological capabilities of the individual or social immune system against dangerous or threatening intruding things and processes so that life as we know it can continue. Is this not an extension of the process of cordoning off and sequestration when infectious diseases threaten to spatialise in manners that could harm or negatively influence the immuno-engineered sustainable or resilient bubbles of the elite’s local life (see also Kaika 2017a; Swyngedouw and Ernstson 2018)?

Resilience, therefore, adds to the arsenal of discourses and practices that Roberto Esposito (2011) identifies as constituting an integral part of what he calls a neoliberal immuno-biopolitical governance regime. With this conceptualisation, Esposito expands on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitical governmentality. While Foucault insisted on the processes by which states became concerned with the physical and social health of the population, Esposito argues that, as a result of globalisation and the destabilising threats emanating from this process, biopolitical governance has now been extended to include an immunological desire. The latter refers to the increasing concern of governments with protecting objects of government (the population) from possibly harmful intruders and threatening, risky, or destabilising outsiders that might undermine the integrity and socio-ecological coherence, if not sheer survival, of the population. In doing so, immuno-biopolitics aims at assuring that life-as-we-know-it can continue to be lived (Esposito 2011).

Immunological, in this context, refers to the suspension of the obligation of communal gift-giving. It constitutes a form of asylum that suspends the obligation to be concerned with the commons or with the polity beyond the confines of the individual body or local community. The (neo)liberal credo to enjoy individual freedom and choice is precisely the founding gesture of such an immunological bio-politics, i.e. the relative isolation or sequestration of the body from its insertion in the obligations and violence that bonds (global) community life (Swyngedouw and Ernstson 2018). Alain Brossat (2014) refers to this as a fantasy of immunitary democracy. He argues that the immunitary dispositive runs the danger of destroying a sense of community and, therefore, inaugurates the end of politics. Indeed, the immuno-biopolitical frame produces simultaneously the exposed and the exiled (the non-immunised) as the flipside of the immunised body. The immuno-biopolitical gesture turns into a necropolitics for the exposed. In other words, resilience for some implies vulnerability for others. This is clearly illustrated by MacKinnon and Derickson (2012, p. 254) when they argue that the resilience of capitalism is achieved at the expense of certain social groups and regions that bear the costs of periodic waves of adaptation and restructuring (p. 254). As Swyngedouw (2022b, p. 63), building on Kaika (2017b), puts it, such immunological sanctity space offers only the affective politics of either hate or compassion for the threatening intruder as flipsides of the same coin, while sustaining their expulsion into the peripheral zones of socio-ecological disintegration and enclaves of poverty where life remains bare. It is precisely the climate emergency that provokes extreme vulnerability for some, while others can sustain their lives in zones of resilience.

As Roberto Esposito (2011) argues further, the immunological biopolitical drive turns indeed into a thanatopolitics or a necropolitics, centring on the question of who should live and who should die. In the excessive acting of the immunological drive, the dispositive turns against what it should protect. It becomes self-destructive in a process of auto-immunisation. The construction of resilient and sustainable urban enclaves for the privileged is paralleled by the making of the unprotected exiles and by intensifying socio-ecological disintegration elsewhere. This is eco-gentrification at its best. In other words, the mechanisms that promise to secure the future of life in some places end up undermining life elsewhere, at all geographical scales. Becoming resilient is indeed the ultimate hysterical act that promises to protect the self, often at a cost to the Other. The only sane response to this is indeed Stop calling me resilient! (Kaika 2017a). This phantasmagoric staging of resilience as panacea depoliticises the matter of nature. We can survive and do so without the necessity of facing political actions and radically different political choices. Therefore, the critical challenge is to recover and foreground the political substance of resilience. Furthermore, this requires both to cut through the fantasy that underpins the indelible lure of resilience and to chart trajectories for a politicising conceptualisation and practice of resilience.

5 Politicising Urban Resilience: Traversing the Fantasy

Notwithstanding the above critical account of mainstream notions of urban resilience as an immuno-biopolitical fantasy that depoliticises nature, and in light of the nascent critical scholarship on urban resilience pointed out in the second section of the chapter, we argue that there is still a potential transformative power in considering and pursuing alternatives modes of urban resilience (see Chap. 2 for a review of resilience and transformation and Chap. 10 for a synthesis of the limitations and potentials of institutional and grassroots climate resilience initiatives to build transformational processes). To move towards a politically engaged form of resilience, more attention should be paid to social and distributive matters, addressing questions such as whose resilience or who counts for the governance of urban resilience. Although we can identify in the early 2000s attempts to link political ecology with ecological resilience (see, for instance, Peterson 2000), the terrain has been more productive in the past few years in light of increasing critical research on resilience. For example, Matthew Turner (2014) interrogates the possibilities of an alliance between political ecology and resilience thinking, showing some common features in the intellectual trajectories of both fields and pointing out significant divergences in terms of normative commitments. Ingalls and Stedman (2016) further contribute to finding shared intellectual spaces between critical approaches to resilience and political ecology. They depart from the premise that power relations have been systematically neglected (or at most played a very marginal role) by mainstream resilience frameworks and approaches.

It is crucial to discursively foreground and excavate the power imbalances that infuse resilience practices if a more grounded and emancipatory urban resilience is to be pursued and implemented. The inclusive engagement of stakeholders remains a crucial challenge to democratise and even politicise urban resilience decision-making (a question that is centrally taken up in Chaps. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9). Alternatives to top-down governance include participatory/collaborative forms of governance such as, for example, the co-production of resilience (Borquez et al. 2016; Fagan-Watson and Burchell 2016; Muñoz-Erickson et al. 2017) and bottom-up initiatives such as neighbourhood resilience (Stevenson and Petrescu 2016) and community resilience practices (Norris et al. 2008; Magis 2010; Ruiz-Mallén and Corbera 2013; Delgado-Serrano et al. 2018).

MacKinnon and Derickson (2012, p. 254), through their work with grassroots movements in Glasgow and more generally in Britain, recognise that the notion of resilience has helped to frame particular forms of activism, some of which are anti-capitalist in nature. Some scholars argue that resilience may enable transformative avenues to address socio-environmental problems when grassroots movements lead those resilience plans or strategies or when community groups are deeply involved (see Camps-Calvet et al. 2015; Bródy et al. 2018). Along those lines, Satorras et al. (2020) show the possibilities that the co-production of urban sustainability policies, including urban resilience, may bring to transformative adaptation. In other words, while there is the risk to be co-opted by mainstream resilience approaches, we still discern possibilities within politically engaged and progressive forms of resilience that shift focus towards questions articulated around equality and socio-ecological distribution.

The call for a more politicised approach to the question of resilience requires, therefore, several shifts in the discursive and praxis-based approaches invoked under the banner of resilience. The anthropomorphism that transfigured the notion of resilience from a particular natural science view of ecosystems development to include human-nature relations has to be rejected entirely. Indeed, the naturalisation of complexity theory and the dynamic autopoietic self-organisation of panarchic systems that ecologists and other natural scientists uphold as the key model to explain ecological stability and transformations cannot and should not be extended uncritically to the human world. While ecological resilience marks the intrinsic capacity of a complex ecological configuration to withstand shock and crisis, the move to also considering socio-ecological systems takes the problem from the domain of natural dynamics to an assemblage in which social power, political positions, and individual preferences play a crucial role. Anthropomorphising resilience invariably leads to a naturalisation of the social and its particular embedding within socio-ecological processes and disavows the historically and geographically contingent socio-ecological power relations that shape differential vulnerabilities, capacities, and exposure to risks.

Much of the natural science perspective on resilience is based on the consolidation of non-linear ecological complexity theory that centres on emergence, resilience, continuous experimentation, the indeterminacy of nature, and radical openness (Holling 1973; Folke 2006), but does not pay explicit attention to social power relations, differential cultures, social change, and exclusions/inclusions choreographed by governance arrangements (see Nadasdy 2007; Hornborg 2009; Cote and Nightingale 2012). As Bruce Braun (2015) argues, drawing on Sara Nelson (2015), we need to acknowledge the historically parallel ways through which non-deterministic geosciences (including complexity science and resilience theory) emerged in the 1970s alongside the rising prominence of the phantasmagorical promise of neoliberalism (see Protevi 2013; Pellizzoni 2015). Both rose to prominence during the structural crisis of capitalism in the 1970s and the parallel attempts to search for a fix to the subsequent socio-economic decline (see Walker and Cooper 2010; Nelson 2015). Indeed, complexity theory and related perspectives have played an essential part in the rise to prominence of neoliberal socio-ecological relations. This, in turn, permitted approaching resilience as an assemblage of activities (and associated actors) that held the promise of the existing socio-ecological frame to continue as communities become more resilient against the successive and inevitable shocks and crises produced by the combined and uneven development of the neoliberal socio-ecological order.

Foregrounding the politicisation of resilience requires, therefore, re-centring the unequal power relations and socio-ecological positions in the relational networks of the socio-ecological constellation, with an eye towards identifying how political equality and democratisation can be enhanced. Enhancing resilience, therefore, necessitates taking sides with those who are most vulnerable and re-structuring socio-ecological relations such that vulnerabilities and risks are not only lowered but also distributed more widely and evenly. The politicisation of resilience requires politicising urban movements that seek to transform both procedures of environmental governance and the unequal socio-ecological relations that sustain present-day urbanisation. Considering the possibilities and potentialities of such moves is precisely what this book seeks to explore.