Urban Sustainability and Resilience: From Theory to Practice

Abstract

Urbanization and urban areas are profoundly altering the relationship between society and the environment, and affecting cities' sustainability and resilience in complex ways at alarming rates. Over the last decades, sustainability and resilience have become key concepts aimed at understanding existing urban dynamics and responding to the challenges of creating livable urban futures. Sustainability and resilience have also moved and are now core analytic and normative concepts for many scholars, transnational networks and urban communities of practice. Yet, even with this elevated scholarly attention, strategies for bridging between research and practice remain elusive, and efforts to understand and affect change towards more sustainable and resilient urban centers have often fallen short. This paper seeks to synthesize, from this issue's papers and other strands of literature, the knowledge, theory and practice of urban sustainability and resilience. Specifically, we focus on what capacities urban actors draw on to create sustainability and resilience and how different definitions of these concepts intersect, complement, or contradict each other. We then examine the implications of those intersections and differences in the efforts by urban actors to enhance the capacity to change unsustainable trajectories and transform themselves, their communities, and their cities toward sustainable and resilient relationships with the environment.

Selecting Indicators for Assessing Community Sustainable Resilience

“…Indicators often characterize capital sources (e.g., air, water, energy, land, ecosystems, etc. ), the impacts of human development on sources (e.g., levels of quality or degradation via pollution or overuse), and resulting impacts to society (human health, prosperity, and equity), thereby indicating an overall capacity to adequately support current and future growth (Romero-Lankao, Gnatz, Wilhelmi, & Hayden, 2016). Community sustainability indicators are particularly challenged by the difficulty in establishing meaningful ranges of performance thresholds for constrained processes (e.g., physical limits on natural and built systems, and limits on social and economic equity) without which assessment or comparison is made less meaningful (Berkes & Folke, 1998;Hiremath et al, 2013;Mori & Christodoulou, 2012;Mori & Yamashita, 2015).…”

“…Communities face a daunting task in terms of prioritizing allocation of sustainability capital to meet both current and future challenges. There are no universally accepted sets of indicators used by any single assessment concept (vulnerability, sustainability, or resilience), much less an integrated assessment concept for communities to reference (Parris & Kates, 2003;Romero-Lankao et al, 2016). Rationales for development of a universal set of indicators from a sustainability perspective that are easily translated to vulnerability and resilience include (i) ambiguity in concepts, (ii) plurality of purpose in application of concepts, and (iii) confusion regarding key terms, relationships, data, and means of measurement (Parris & Kates, 2003).…”

Planning Emergency Shelters for Urban Disaster Resilience: An Integrated Location-Allocation Modeling Approach

“…Meerow et al [4] review the various definitions of urban resilience found in both resilience theory and urban theory, and identify six conceptual tensions fundamental to urban resilience. Romero-Lankao et al [5] synthesize the concept of urban sustainability and resilience from theory and practice, and examine the implications of their intersections and differences. Bozza et al [6] discuss the resilience of urban environments to natural hazards from a civil engineering perspective and seek to quantify urban resilience.…”

Challenges for the Resilience Capacity of Romanian Shrinking Cities

“…Analysing the paths/trajectories of different cities reveals the "natural" connections between resilience thinking and sustainability as being both conditioned by the capability to maintain natural and social resources, while effectively responding to stresses and shocks [34].…”