Figure 3: Perspective of stakeholders of Resilience

1.4 Classifying Urban Resilience

The term “resilience” has a great significance in the urban planning paradigm, especially when global cities are reeling with the perils of rapid urbanization. The term ‘resilience’ first appeared in history in the first century B.C. However, it was popularized in 1960 by prominent theoretical ecologist C.S Holling, who coined the phrase while studying the behavior of an ecological system subjected to external disturbance. Resilience has gained it’s popularity in a variety of disciplines ever since, including environmental and climaterelated disruptions. It is also popular in the domain of social and human geography. It is a city’s ability to withstand any unavoidable shock and stress in the context of urban development.

Holling defined resilience as, A measure of the persistence o systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables (Holling, 1973: 14).

The notion of resilience was first introduced in the subject of ecology, and it quickly expanded throughout the world in the paradigms of

Table 1 Analysis of Resilience in Systems Thinking numerous specialties, ranging from ecology to psychology to economics. Overall, if we look at the evolution of resilience, we may categorise it into three groups depending on its ability to adapt to the complexity of the system. 1. Engineering resilience - it talks about the ability of a system to bounce back to it’s single equilibrium state after any disturbance. This engineering perspective understands resilience as a measure of the ‘speed of return’ to equilibrium (Pimm, 1991). 2. Ecological resilience - it deals with advanced and more complex ecological system which believes in multiple equilibrium state. A typical definition of ecological resilience is “the magnitude of the disturbance that can be absorbed before the system changes its structure” (Holling, C. 1996). 3. Evolutionary resilience - It refers to a complex socio-ecological system’s ability to get accustomed and transform in order to withstand any stress. According to this theory, the system is constantly changing internally, hence there is no such thing as an equilibrium state. Table 1 gives a brief overview of classification of urban resilience.

Both Engineering and Ecological Resilience are applicable to describe natural ecological system, but when it comes to a city which is such a complex socioecological system, we refer to Evolutionary Resilience