Resilience is a subset of urban sustainability. In this context; urban resilience is understood as a normative concept and is a subset of urban sustainability.[1] The assessment framework does not include all measures which create a sustainable successful urban settlement; rather it focuses on those characteristics which enable settlements to be highly adaptive and more specifically to be adaptive to possible climate change and peak oil impacts.
The assessment provides a holistic scan of an urban settlement. It covers urban functions that will be most affected by climate change and peak oil (e.g. transport, energy) and elements which can most facilitate adaptations (e.g. institutional and community). This holistic form of assessment also reflects sustainable development planning guidelines[2] for integrated assessment across social, built and economic domains to help identify tradeoffs and synergies between functions and outcomes[3].
Resilience can be broken down into adaptation characteristics and adaptive capacity characteristics[4].
- Adaptation characteristics enable a settlement to withstand, bounce back from or adapt to a specific threat e.g. flooding, where examples would include planning restrictions on building on flood zones, creating flood banks and citizen education on responding to floods.
- Adaptive capacity characteristics increase a settlement’s ability respond to a range of pressures including unexpected shocks and are found within different settlement domains (see table 1). Community and institutional characteristics including foresight, learning, community competency and institutional flexibility. They are of particular importance, because they enable urban populations to systematically assess long term risks to their well being[5], innovate, build a constituency of support and resources to implement urban adaptations[6] and cope better with uncertainty and surprise. Community and institutional characteristics can therefore be seen as the generic building blocks of resilient settlements and are prominently featured in the assessment framework.
The assessment framework distinguishes between adaptation and adaptive capacity characteristics. The adaptive capacity questions and indicators are drawn from table 1 .The impacts of climate change and peak oil outlined in section 3 are summarized in figure 2. These impacts inform the specified resilience questions and indicators in the framework.
The process of collaborative risk assessment and mitigation helps build institutional and community adaptive capacity. Community resilience literature indicates that collaborative risk assessment and decision-making across agencies and in partnership with the affected community helps build community competency.[7] The framework design enables multi agency assessment as it spans the outcome areas of the different agencies involved in urban decision-making (including local government and central government agencies). The design is based upon a set of questions in order to for the assessment to more assessable to non-experts and for suited to a multi-disciplinary planning process.
The tension between efficiency and resilience. Ecological Resilience research indicates that building redundancy into a system buffers it from shocks while building diversity into a system provides it with more options for adaptation. Redundancy and diversity can often be in conflict with notions of economic efficiency however. For example economic efficiency strategies often seek to minimize redundancies and increase specialization within economic activity. A reorientation to long-term resilience may require, what Handmer and Dovers (1996[8]) describe as, ‘the adoption of new basic operating assumptions’ and this might apply to economic policy, infrastructure design and even policy criteria.
Table 1; Characteristics of adaptive capacity across different urban domains
Next section; Current Assessment Tools
[1] Ecological resilience tends to describe resilience as a system property versus a normative state while almost all other disciplines understand it as a normative state reflecting some desired goals of society. http://transitionculture.org/2010/03/26/an-interview-with-neil-adger-resilience-adaptability-localisation-and-transition/
[2] OECD 2001. The DAC Guidelines Strategies for Sustainable Development: Guidance for Development Co-operation; European Council 2005. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/eussd/ Retrieved September 2010,
[3] ibid
[4] Socio ecological resilience categorize these as general and specified resilience www.resalliance.org
[5] Canadian Centre for Community Renewal www.cedworks.com/ accessed March 2010
[6] See: Canadian Centre for Community Renewal www.cedworks.com/ accessed March 2010; Norris, F., S. Stevens, et al. (2008). “Community resilience as a metaphor, theory, set of capacities and strategy for disaster readiness.” American Journal of Community Psychology 41( Numbers 1-2 / March, 2008): 127 – 150; Paton, D. 2006. Community resilience integrating individual, community and societal perspectives. In : Disaster resilience. (Ed) D. Paton, and Johnston D. pp305 – 316. Charles C Thomas Publisher, Illinois, USA.
[7] Norris et al 2008 op. sit
[8] Handmer J W & Dovers S R 1996 . A typography of resilience: Rethinking Institutions for sustainable development. Industrial and environmental Crisis Quarterly, Vol. 9 , No 4. 1996 482-511