Urban Resilience

A Methodological Approach

Abstract

This article discusses a methodological proposal for the elaboration of urban resilience plans, which is one of the most important issues involving cities nowadays. The etymological concept of “resilience” needs to be rescued because Urban Resilience is the exact application of the original concept applied to cities, regardless of their scale. Bausista-Puig (2022, p.1) had examined 1014 publications during the period 1998–2020 and concluded that urban resilience literature has grown since 2009 until today and this reveals the great international interest in this topic during the last decade.Cities, due to their complexity and locus of living for a large part of the global population and with a rising tendency, need to guarantee their conditions of habitability. Considering the improvement of extreme weather events and the consequences for cities, resilience plans have become urgent and fundamental elements in this whole process. As demonstrated in this article, it is not only climate change that impacts urban life, but there are other elements such as infrastructure failures, strikes by essential professional services and the issue of refugees, which can also destabilize the urban balance. On the other hand, resilience plans that aim to return cities to their initial operational conditions need to contain all the elements that guarantee their execution. Plans with only diagnoses and actions of what should be done, will not guarantee their execution. Another important issue discussed in this article is the structuring axes which means, what are the priority areas and the themes that should be present in an urban resilience plan. Are they just those related to climate change or are there others with a high potential to destabilize our cities around the globe?