Lorenzo Chelleri is Director of the International Master Degree in City Resilience Design and Management, and Senior Researcher at the Barcelona Universitat Internatiocional de Catalunya (UIC). He is also the Chair of the Urban Resilience Research Network (URNet) and part of the UN group for launching the International Urban Resilience Institute (UN URI).
Resilience is an overly broad and even “metaphorical” concept, standing for “being adaptive to challenges”. When translated to cities, it first referred to the capacities of adapting and reducing impacts of natural hazards.The first UN campaign to “make your city resilient” got hundreds of mayors signing it. But what did this imply? Scholars found surprising results when they explored the definitions, understandings, and programs launched to make cities resilient. In 2016, Sara Meerow et al. found that across the US, practitioners referred to resilience as the ability to resist and recover from hazards and as a characteristic of robust systems, something far from scholars and academics theories. By contrast, in academia, resilience is generally something associated with both recovery but also long term transformational capacities, not related to any specific hazard. These gaps between theory and practice were validated by Chelleri et al. across European practitioners in 2021, which showed that cities usually ‘get’ the generic meaning of resilience, but struggle to understand how to consistently implement it. They hadn’t left behind the conventional ‘hazard risks reduction only’ perspective, nor embraced the transformative resilience characteristics or agree on how to measure it.
If you understand resilience mainly as the capacity to cope with risks and hazards, a city building dykes to cope with sea level rise, or desalination plants to survive droughts, could be defined as resilient (against those threats). However, these resilience actions could impact sustainability, increase exposure to higher risks in future, or make safety dependent on some specific infrastructure. For example, see fossil-fuel intensive desalination plants or dykes protecting against a historically determined level of possible flooding while sea level is rising. On the contrary, if you understand resilience as the systemic set of capacities (to react, to recover, but also to transform and evolve in order to embed the risks into the daily life and routines), then you won’t invest in dykes or desalination plants in response to flooding or droughts.
Instead, you would look into “how to live with water’, through floodable parks and adapted buildings and mobility. Or on the other hand, you would consider how to adapt life within arid environments, requiring to work on behaviour change to recycle and reuse water. Thus, “a resilient city is a city able to politically choose a long term transformative pathway of development to mitigate risks; supporting the resilience capacities of actors, economies and infrastructures contributing to that pathway, while actively eroding the capacities of those still pursuing unsustainable and business as usual pathways”. Everybody has some embedded resilience capacity to adapt to challenges (from corrupt politicians to plastic industries to community-based initiatives) and we therefore need to carefully choose whose resilience we feed, or erode. We cannot enhance the resilience of everybody and every sector. This is why a definition of resilient city should consider which and whose resilience to support.
These are two very different things. Mitigation is about lowering emissions, while adaptation means working on hazards and risks reduction. However, there is increasing evidence on how there could be trade-offs between these approaches, with adaptive measures negatively effecting mitigation efforts (such as air conditioning to cope with heat-waves) and vice versa (solar power plants in the desert using dramatic quantities of water).
Since 2008, the IPCC has been calling for integrated adaptation and mitigation approaches, showing the potential of synergistic approaches, or co-benefits of adaptation and mitigation. However, the European Union, and others, are unfortunately still working in silos, through an EU Adaptation Mission, and a EU Mitigation Mission, both calling for integrated approaches. However, where does resilience fit within these two approaches? The debates and perceptions among experts are still confusing. The mainstream understanding, unfortunately, is that resilience means adaptation and climate mitigation is about sustainability.
“a resilient city is a city able to politically choose a long term transformative pathway of development to mitigate risks; supporting the resilience capacities of actors, economies and infrastructures contributing to that pathway, while actively eroding the capacities of those still pursuing unsustainable and business as usual pathways”.
However, to many others, resilience means adapting to risks as well as adapting our systems to longer term challenges in order to mitigate those risks. But “mitigating those risks” means getting rid of the sources of climate change impacts; so, is this mitigation? If you agree on this, could we not say that our mainstream understanding is that we refer to adaptation when talking about ‘short-term resilience’, while “resilience in the long term” is referring to mitigation, or sustainability?
There is a pandora’s box of literature exploring the nexus between sustainability and resilience, and calling for integrated approaches where resilience is a paramount overall concept embedding sustainability (in terms of mitigation). So, in respect to “climate resilience”, it is a matter of whether we think it should be grounded to the adaptation agenda only, or whether we should go beyond it.
Urban planners are definitely equipped with tons of tools, methods and tutorials which can be accessed free from the EU, international agencies and projects. The problem lies with cities’ administrations. Cities and especially small and medium size towns lack resources to hire more planners and practitioners. I often face practitioners (1 or 2 people working for a city of half a million inhabitants) claiming they are “alone” with unfeasible lists of tasks, and no time to even think nor look around for scrolling the available tools. The real issue thus is not tools availability, but knowledge transfer.