The Rise of Resilience in Spatial Planning: A Journey through Disciplinary Boundaries and Contested Practices

Abstract

Resilience has become a popular term in spatial planning, often replacing sustainability as a reference frame. However, different concepts and understandings are embedded within it, which calls for keeping a critical stance about its widespread use. In this paper, we engage with the resilience turn in spatial planning and we dwell on the relation between resilience and sustainability from a planning perspective. Building on insights from ecology, complex system theory and epistemology, we question whether resilience can effectively act as a ‘boundary object’, i.e., a concept plastic enough to foster cooperation between different research fields and yet robust enough to maintain a common identity. Whilst we do not predicate a dichotomy between resilience and sustainability, we argue that the shift in the dominant understanding of resilience from a descriptive concept, to a broader conceptual and normative framework, is bound to generate some remarkable tensions. These can be associated with three central aspects in resilience thinking: (i) the unknowability and unpredictability of the future, whence a different focus of sustainability and resilience on outcomes vs. processes, respectively, ensue; (ii) the ontological separation between the internal components of a system and an external shock; (iii) the limited consideration given by resilience to inter- and intra-generational equity. Empirical evidence on actual instances of planning for resilience from different contexts seems to confirm these trends. We advocate that resilience should be used as a descriptive concept in planning within a sustainability framework, which entails a normative and transformative component that resonates with the very raison d’être of planning.

Who Has Benefited? A Socio-Ecological Chronology of Urban Resilience in the Early Reconstruction of Talca after the 27-F Earthquake, Chile 2010–2012

“…Transformative conditions entrenching sprawl and uncontrolled growth, whilst developing urban exclusionary phenomena-in the form of maladaptive niches-may escalate their impact towards the rest of the socio-ecological panarchy. The concerning role of urban planning in understanding these evolutionary patterns indeed requires methodological and empirical attention [79,80].…”

Knowledge Map of Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development: A Visual Analysis Using CiteSpace

“…From an urban perspective, such as accessibility optimization [77], commute time reduction [78,79], land mismatch for building a compact city [80,81], as well as enhancing the quality of urban life, fostering urban growth, facilitating contraction, reducing edge problems [82], establishing ventilated corridors [83], fostering regional resilience and flexibility [84][85][86], and promoting city resource circulation [87,88], scientific spatial planning is required. In many studies, we can see that various institutions or researchers try to use spatial planning to coordinate urban population [10], land [89,90], and industry to achieve ecological optimization of land use [91,92].…”

Migration and Resilience in Urban Canada: Why Social Resilience, Why Now?

“…While adaptive capacities imply survival and recovery from adversity by either bouncing back to a previous state or renewing and retaining somewhat similar structures and functions through preventive measures, transformative capacities entail resistance and proactive measures. They imply change in existing structures and practices to thrive and attain a better state, where a better state may well be a more equitable one that serves the interests of the vulnerable, the marginalized, and the broader collective (DeVerteuil & Golubchikov, 2016 ; Meerow & Newell, 2016 ; Rega & Bonifazi, 2020 ).…”