1. Introduction

Since human beings have evolved from a nomad lifestyle to living in settlements, one of our main challenges has been dealing with the unpredictability of the sites we chose to live. The history of mankind is full of reports of floods, fires and other types of so-called disasters, and much effort has been put into working on dealing with, as well as preventing these kinds of events.In the last decades, there is a perception that the recurrence of disasters as well as the scale of such events has risen. This can be explained by some factors, like the current processes of climate change due to the excessive amount of greenhouse effect gas in our atmosphere. Inequality also plays a significant role in increasing the susceptibility to significant damage caused by hazards.

Together with this rise, came the interest of identifying what the factors are that make a city less vulnerable to hazards, that is, what made a city more resilient. In a broader sense, 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” (Meerow et al., 2015). With the intention of systematizing the evaluation of urban resilience, the City Resilience Index was developed. The twelve goals defined in the framework are an attempt to assess to what extend a city can be considered resilient or not. These goals are divided into the four categories: “Health and wellbeing”, “Economy and society”, “Infrastructure and environment” and “Leadership and management”. Each of these covers four goals, each with a multitude of indicators.

Although enjoying relatively high levels of human development and low inequality, the city of Trondheim in Norway is not exempt from the possibility of different stressful or threatening events, which can also be called hazards. This report intends to discuss what are the challenges for Trondheim regarding achieving two of the resilience goals defined by the City Resilience Framework developed by Arup and the Rockefeller Foundation, which are the “Comprehensive Security and Rule of Law” and the “Effective Leadership and Management”. These goals pose challenges for the government on the national, but also on the local level. Local security as well as hazard and risk assessment lie in the responsibility of local authorities since these issues need to be handled contextspecific and not on an overarching level. At a local level, communities are able to interact with the authorities and design plans for risk reduction for their area (Hardoy, 2010).

Linking these two goals to a resilient urban system, that is a “complex, adaptive [and emergent ecosystem[ ” (Meerow et al., 2016) that consists of the four subsystems “governance networks, networked material and energy flows, urban infrastructure and form, and socioeconomic dynamics” (Meerow et al., 2016) shows that security and government management are only a fraction of the whole system. However, effective leadership of a community plays a crucial role in the implementation of strategies to prevent disasters. Analyzing potential threats and stresses with a long-term focus is the basis for adaptation to future shocks that the city can face.