The concept of urban resilience has so far been related mainly to climate change adaptation and disaster management perspectives. Here we aim to broaden the discussion by showing how the framework of urban resilience should be related to wider sustainability challenges, including i) climate change and natural hazard threats, ii) unsustainable urban metabolism patterns and iii) increasing social inequalities in cities. Using three case studies (flood risk management in the Dutch polders, urban-rural teleconnections driving the Bolivian quinoa market, and spatial diversity in the adaptive capacity of Kampala slums), (1) we draw out significant insights related to scales and sustainability, which will push urban resilience research forward. The key "move" is to consider both spatial and temporal interactions, in order to shift from the mainstreaming of the resilience-building paradigm toward a critical understanding and management of resilience trade-offs. While urban resilience emerges not necessarily as a normatively positive concept anymore, we argue that addressing multi-scale and temporal aspects of urban resilience will allow greater understanding of global sustainability challenges.
Campus greening is often the first step universities take towards sustainability. However, the diffusion of sustainability reporting methodologies and rankings is still at an early stage, and is biased in mainly measuring energy efficiency indicators while omitting basic features enabling meaningful comparisons among centers or addressing social (users) aspects related to long term sustainability transitions. This paper aims to introduce a critical perspective on sustainability university frameworks through: (i) a review of current Campus Sustainability Assessments (CSAs); (ii) performing and comparing the results obtained from the application of two internationally recognized CSAs (namely, Green Metric and ISCN) to two case studies (the Politecnico di Torino, in Italy, and the Hokkaido University, In Japan) and, finally, (iii) proposing a new CSA approach that encompasses clusters of homogeneous campus typologies for meaningful comparisons and university rankings. The proposed clusters regard universities' morphological structures (campuses nested within city centers versus outside of a city compact ones), climatic zones and functions. At the micro scale, the paper introduces the need for indicators beyond measuring pure energy efficiency, but which are attentive to local and societal constraints and provide long-term tracking of outcomes. This, better than a sheer record of sustainability priority actions, can help in building homogenous university case studies to find similar and scalable success strategies and practices, and also in self-monitoring progress toward achieving truly sustainable university campuses.
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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.