Territories that are ready to tackle the climatic, social and economic challenges of our time, because they are not only resilient, but anti-fragile, to employ the term favoured by Nassim Taleb. According to this mathematician, author of Black Swan and a specialist on uncertainty, chaos and disorder, anti-fragility is a property that complex and living systems show when they have the capacity to become stronger when exposed to stress factors, shocks, errors, failures‌ and emerge better than before. The resilient absorbs shocks and remains the same. The anti-fragile become stronger the more unstable the environment is. Just like human beings who can only walk by accepting perpetual disequilibrium, I would like to see all Living Cities adopt anti-fragility as their mode of interaction with the World. It is only in this way that they will be able to be enriched by the increasingly unstable and uncertain texture of their future conditions, to achieve their maximum potential while respecting the complexity of the interactions that they experience with this Living World to which they genuinely belong.
Sonia Lavadinho Urban anthropologist and founder of Bfluid, an appraisal and forward research practice specialising in territorial development
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