Figure 2: Pillars of Urban Resilience

The phrase “urban resilience” has become popular in a range of fields, including environmental studies, disaster avoidance, and climate change mitigation techniques. It’s a catchphrase in the urban planning paradigm that has attracted a lot of attention from academics and professionals for research and policymaking to determine how cities, or any complex socio-ecological system, adapt and transform in the face of environmental stress. From an equilibristic viewpoint, urban resilience is frequently mistaken as a system’s ability to absorb damage and restore to its predisaster state, but it is also a primary duty to facilitate post-disaster recovery and the ability to come back to normal life in practice. Resilience is not just the ability to bounce back, but also the ability to change, adjust, and transform, for a dynamic socio-ecological framework. Despite the ubiquity of the term Resilience in the domain of Urban Planning, it lacks precise definition. Resilience has a fuzziness in its definition that can be used to its advantage by treating it as a common object, which allows the definition to be reshaped numerous times accordingly and encourages multilevel stakeholder interaction. However, because of its ambiguity, it is equally difficult to operationalize in spatial planning. When doing a scholarly review of urban resilience, several definitions are identified based on how individuals perceive it. Definition of resilience as per SaraMeerow, Joshua P.Newell, MelissaStults in their Defining urban resilience: A review paper is,

So broadly if we see, urban resilience is the ability of a city to absorb any shock and stress (natural, man made or both) and ability to transform accordingly. It is not only the ability of bouncing back; in the case of urban planning, it more concerned about the ability of bouncing forth.

Definition as per UNISDR terminology on disaster risk reduction (2009), “The ability of a system, community, or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to, and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions”.

Figure 2 Pillars of Urban Resilience

Social Resilience

relates to a sense of belonging, a group’s adaptability, and a sense of integrity to a place.

Addresses to the vulnerability of man-made infrastructure on land such as buildings, and transportation networks.

Refers to an indicator that assesses a community’s economic diversity, including overall employment, the number of industries, and its ability to rebound from a disaster.

refers to the governmental and non-governmental systems in charge of the management of a community.

Infrastructure Resilience

Econimic Resilience

“Urban resilience refers to the ability of an urban system-and all its constituent socio-ecological and socio technical networks across temporal and spatial scales-to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity.”

Institutional Resilience