2012/05/17 by Lorenzo Chelleri · 163 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Engineering · Environmental Science · #Civil engineering #Computer science #Engineering #Environmental ethics #Environmental planning #Geography #Land Use and Ecosystem Services #Perspective (graphical) #Philosophy #Regional resilience and development #Resilience (materials science) #Sociology #Urban Planning and Valuation #Urban planning #Urban resilience
paper · pdf · doi:10.5565/rev/dag.175
published in Documents d Anàlisi Geogràfica 58(2), 287-306 (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Geografia)
crossref issued 2012/05/17 · crossref published 2012/05/17 · crossref published-online 2012/05/17 · openalex publication_date 2012/05/17 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · crossref created 2016/07/25 · crossref deposited 2024/09/04 · crossref indexed 2026/08/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Resilience appears to have become a buzz word since the ecological, psychological, social and economic sciences began to use it to refer, respectively, to the capacity of ecosystems, people, societies, the economy, and more recently even urban systems to cope with disturbance. In fact, it is unclear exactly what the catchword «resilient city» means. Based on these assumptions, this article reviews resilience perspectives and their possible application to urban systems. In the first part of the paper, the concept of resilience, its evolution and perspectives (from engineering to social ecology) are analyzed with reference to ecosystems, societies and complex systems. In the second part we try to shed light on this panacea of concepts applied to cities. Important insights of this review are that certain resilience engineering perspectives (such as recovery and persistence views) can lead to unsustainable patterns of development in cities, while from complex systems resilience perspectives the principles of sustainability and transformability emerge as the consequent and necessary trajectory. While the term «resilient cities» often refers only to the capacity to maintain functions and structures, we argue that urban resilience should be framed within the resilience (system persistence), transition (system incremental change) and transformation (system reconfiguration) views.