Governing urban resilience: Organisational structures and coordination strategies in 20 North American city governments

Abstract

This paper describes how urban resilience governance is structured and coordinated in 20 North American cities (19 US and one Canadian) based on interviews with city officials. This co-produced research evolved out of conversations with city officials in Portland, Oregon, who were interested to learn how other cities were organising resilience work. Interviews focused on emerging definitions, organisational structures, internal and external coordination efforts, and practitioners’ insights. The paper includes a descriptive summary of how cities are structuring and coordinating resilience efforts. Additionally, we discuss how current trends in resilience coordination can inform future directions for urban resilience scholarship. We compare what practitioners view as key success factors against six commonly theorised characteristics for effective resilience governance. Overall, we find considerable overlap in lessons from theory and practice, including the benefits of a systems approach, the need for a clear definition of resilience, strong leadership, and stakeholder engagement. Practitioners use resilience to diagnose the overall health of their cities. Additionally, practice tends to emphasise limitations such as political turnover, trade-offs between centralised and dispersed organisation, and the need to carefully diagnose and scope resilience work, whereas the academic literature calls for multi-level and cross-scale governance and feedbacks and more transformative action. Given these insights, we highlight opportunities for new resilience scholarship, including analysing the benefits of the diagnostic phase of resilience planning, evaluating resilience goals to determine the best departmental fit, and understanding local barriers and trade-offs to adopting a broad systems approach.

What determines city’s resilience against epidemic outbreak: evidence from China’s COVID-19 experience

“…Thus, comparative studies of COVID-19 situation across cities can add knowledge to resilience framework regarding pandemic mitigation measures. Such evaluations would help city planners, policy-makers, and managers to understand better the current resilience level of cities against pandemic disasters ( Fastiggi, Meerow, & Miller, 2020 ; Hernantes, Maraña, Gimenez, Sarriegi, & Labaka, 2019 ; Scott, 2020 ).…”

A spatiotemporal analysis of urban resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Yangtze River Delta

“…It has seven characteristics: reflexivity, inclusiveness, comprehensiveness, robustness, redundancy, flexibility, and resourcefulness (Paidakaki and Moulaert 2018 ). Urban resilience exists when the different subjects in the complex socioecological system of urban areas can successfully confront the various chronic and acute pressures that exist locally, such as natural disasters, economic crises, and social and political turbulence, through reasonable preparation and optimal coordination among system components (Fastiggi et al 2020 ). Thus, resilience includes the prevention, response, recovery, and long-term adaptation necessary to protect the public security, social order, and economic construction of urban areas from being affected.…”

Enhancing urban and infrastructure resilience

“…However, to better understand or even support the institutionalisation of adaptive and networked governance strategies, both seem necessary. On the one hand, there is an ongoing thirst for knowledge about how exactly and under what circumstances different cities address the challenge of institutionalising urban and infrastructure resilience, thereby demanding qualitative and explorative case study research such as that reported in this thesis (Fastiggi et al, 2020). On the other hand, this study confirms other research findings that there is the need to somehow measure resilience (e.g.…”

“…From a governance perspective, urban and infrastructure resilience stresses the need for collaboration and learning in multi-level, multi-sector, multi-actor and cross-territorial governance networks (Boyd and Juhola, 2015;Duit et al, 2010;Fastiggi et al, 2020;Goldstein, 2012;Goldstein and Butler, 2012;Ingold et al, 2018). This study provides an institutional perspective on the governance of urban and infrastructure resilience.…”

“…For instance, Johnson and Blackburn (2014) analysed data from 50 cities taking part in the UNISDR's Making Cities Resilient Campaign and the Urban Institute evaluated 22 participants in 100RC (Urban Institute, 2018). Fastiggi et al (2020) fill a gap in academic literature by examining how 19 diverse cities in North America participating in different resilience programmes are approaching the challenge to institutional resilience. While their results largely coincide with the findings of this study, they also revealed some differences between the cities analysed: for instance, they found that larger cities tend to incorporate different policy fields and challenges into their resilience work, whilst smaller cities tend to concentrate on narrowly defined challenges.…”