Advances in Building Energy Research
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Toward resilient cities – a review of definitions,
challenges and prospects
Constantinos Cartalis
To cite this article: Constantinos Cartalis (2014) Toward resilient cities – a review of definitions,
challenges and prospects, Advances in Building Energy Research, 8:2, 259-266, DOI:
10.1080/17512549.2014.890533
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17512549.2014.890533
Published online: 16 Apr 2014.
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Advances in Building Energy Research, 2014
Vol. 8, No. 2, 259–266, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17512549.2014.890533
Toward resilient cities – a review of definitions, challenges and prospects
Constantinos Cartalis*
Department of Environmental Physics, University of Athens, Panepistimopolis, Athens 15125, Greece
This paper provides a review of the definitions, challenges and prospects toward resilient cities.
It refers to the definitions provided by several researchers for resilience, links resilience to
sustainability, discusses the role of spatial planning in strengthening urban resilience,
identifies barriers to resilience, summarizes the requirements for creating resilient cities and
exemplifies on cities, climate change and resilience. The paper concludes that the concept of
resilience adds a new perspective to the issue of sustainability in the sense that resilience is
needed for a sustainable environment. Finally, it refers to the link between climate change
adaptation and mitigation plans for cities on the one hand and plans for resilient cities on
the other.
Keywords: resilience; sustainability; cities; climate change
Introduction
Several publications have been made regarding resilient cities, especially in light of new challenges
for cities such as climate change (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI),
2011, 2012, 2013; Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), 2007, 2012, 2013). In particular, ICLEI speaks about the urgent need to build resilient cities to natural hazards and prioritizes
the development of resilience plans by local authorities, especially with respect to climate change
and the associated impacts to local societies (ICLEI, 2013). In the same wavelength, IPCC (2013)
refers to the increasing burden to local societies due to climate change and claims that the occurrence of extreme weather events, with the potential to affect cities, has not only increased since
its latest assessment (IPCC, 2007), but is also estimated to further increase in the following
years. IPCC (2013) also refers to the impacts of climate change to cities, mostly in terms of the
increase in temperature, as well as of the occurrence of tropical days and heat waves. The European
Environment Agency (EEA) in its publication on the impacts of climate change (EEA, 2012) also
refers to the impact of climate change in the European continent and combines the increase in heat
waves in Europe and the spatial and temporal enhancements of thermal heat islands in several European cities, to the urbanization trend in Europe (90% of the population is expected to live in cities by
2020) and to the vulnerability of the population, especially elderly people.
Defining resilience
The quest for resilient cities is not new. Pickett, Parker, and Fiedler. (1992) and Pickett, Cadenasso, and Grove (2003) discuss about the meaning of resilient cities and examine in particular
*Corresponding author. Email: ckartali@phys.uoa.gr
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
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the difference between definitions relating to the equilibrium and non-equilibrium views of resilience. In the first view, resilience is regarded as the ability of systems to return to their stable equilibrium point after disruption, whereas in the second view, resilience is the capacity of a system to
adapt and adjust to changing internal or external processes.
Holling (1973) and Gunderson, Holling, and Light. (1995) have supported the non-equilibrium view, in the sense that an urban system is dynamic and should be appropriately designed
so as to allow the interaction of processes as well as the definition of critical limits of each process.
An examination of climate change adaptation and mitigation plans for modern megacities demonstrates clearly the differences between the two views. In the first view (equilibrium), the city needs
to be designed and planned so as to avoid reaching a terminal point. In the second view (non-equilibrium), the city needs to define multiple (internal) states and secure that the interaction of processes will facilitate their stability.
The recent event of hurricane Sandy has demonstrated that New York complied with the equilibrium view; although the terminal point was exceeded, the city managed to “bounce back”
despite the fact that significant time, effort and resources had to be provided. A close examination
of the state of urban environment in New York for the same extreme weather event showed that
the urban system had limited capacity to adapt and adjust. In other words, New York failed to
comply with the non-equilibrium view. In another example, the impact of the increasing temperatures in the urban agglomeration of Athens is taken into consideration (Santamouris et al., 2007,
2013). Results show gradually higher percentages of the urban population facing “energy
poverty”, a fact which clearly demonstrates that the city cannot comply with neither of the two
views of resilience (equilibrium and non-equilibrium). Similar examples may be examined for
the vast majority of world cities, with more negative assessments recognized in fast growing
cities, mostly in the developing world (UNISDR, 2013).
Yet the question remains open: which of the views is to be favored? According to Pickett et al.
(2001), the non-equilibrium view allows ecological systems to be open, to be externally regulated,
to have multiple stable states and to consider humans as part of the ecosystems. On the contrary,
the equilibrium view is characterized by the opposite cases of each of the points above. In practical terms, a city which promotes the non-equilibrium view for its design and planning accepts
that city processes are dynamic, interdependent and interactive. Such approach facilitates the definition of internal stable states for each of the processes as well as the preconditions to be met so as
the terminal points of each stable state not to be reached. In the event that a terminal point is
reached, the effort to ameliorate the situation is carried not only by adjustments or adaptation
within the disrupted process but within other processes as well. In such a case, the city operates
as a “living organism”, with its components dynamically influencing each other as well as controlling the final state of the city.
Vale and Campanula (2005) also discuss how modern cities recover from disasters, whereas in
another, yet similar, approach, Polese (2010) defines resilience as either the ability to survive
shocks (called as a-Resilience) or alternatively the ability to change in the event of outside
shocks (called as b-Resilience). He exemplified his definitions for the City of New Orleans
with respect to the impacts of Hurricane Katrina and attempted to explain the inability of a
panel of experts to answer the question “Is New Orleans a resilient city?” Polese claimed that
New Orleans managed to rebuild and thus it can meet the definition of a-Resilience. However,
the shock did not result in a turnaround of the urban patterns which would allow a break out
of the city from its long-term decline. To this end, the city did not meet the definition of b-Resilience. In terms of the inability of the panel of experts to answer the question on the resilience of
New Orleans, a possible explanation was that the inability was due to the fact that no firm definition on resilience was agreed and used. It should be mentioned that if the definition by Polese
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(2010) was applied for New York in terms of hurricane Sandy, the conclusion may have been that
the city met both a-Resilience and b-Resilience.
Henstra, Kovacs, McBean, and Sweeting. (2004) show that resilience has been given different
definitions since the 1970s. They suggest that resilience is “the capacity to adapt to stress from
hazards and the ability to recover quickly from the impacts”. It yields that they practically
merge the equilibrium and non-equilibrium views of Pickett et al. (2001) as well as the a-Resilience and b-Resilience definitions as provided by Polese (2010). Godschalk (2002) provides a
more detailed definition for resilient cities:
Such cities are capable of withstanding severe shock without either immediate chaos or permanent
deformation or rupture. Designed in advanced to anticipate and recover from the impacts of natural
or technological hazards, resilient cities are based on principles derived from past experience with disasters in urban areas
Holling (2001) states that resilience is the “capacity of a system to survive, adapt, and grow in the
face of unforeseen changes, even catastrophic events”. Berkes and Folke (1998) support the view
that resilience reflects not only how well environments respond to shocks (for instance those related
to climate change), but also how they capitalize opportunities. ICLEI (2013) considers that: “A resilient city is low risk to natural and man-made disasters. It reduces its vulnerability by building on its
capacity to respond to climate change challenges, disasters and economic shocks.”
In addition to the above, Berkowitz, Nilom, and Hollweg. (2003) consider that people are
by definition a part of the city system as they are individually and institutionally responsive
and reactive components of the metropolitan ecosystem. The inclusion of people in the city
system, results in a number of “new” needs to be considered for an integrated plan toward
a resilient city. These include, among others, health as related to air pollution and thermal
comfort as influenced by excessive temperatures and heat waves. To this end, the integration
of the “human” dimension reflects a major improvement in drafting a plan toward a resilient
city. Grove, Hinson, & Northrop (2003) claimed that monitoring and evaluating societal interventions within cities are an underutilized, although powerful, tool for city planning. To this
end, plans for resilient cities need to take into consideration societal changes and balances, as
these relate to the city development or influence the type and extent of interventions. Stathopoulou, Iccovides, and Cartalis. (2009) have defined a set of environmental, economic and
social indicators which may be applied at the city level for defining, at an aggregate level,
the quality of life in different parts of the urban agglomeration. Although the scope of the
study was not directly related to the resilience of the city of Athens, the study did demonstrate
the need, as well as the importance, to incorporate social and societal changes in city planning,
especially in view of sustainable urbanization.
Resilience and sustainability
As discussed before, resilience reflects not only how well environments respond to shocks such as
those related to climate change, but also how they can be re-organized so as to take advantage of
new perspectives and comply to emerging needs. Sustainability on the other hand is defined as
development than meets the needs of the present without jeopardizing the ability of the next generations to meet their own needs (report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). It yields that the concept of resilience adds a new perspective to the issue of
sustainability in the sense that resilience is needed for a sustainable environment. Speaking
about cities, it is important that plans for sustainable urbanization also consider resilient design
and planning.
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The role of spatial planning in strengthening urban resilience
Resilience is associated with spatial planning as the latter gives geographical expression to the
economic, social and environmental policies of local societies. Therefore, spatial planning is
one of the fields which provide the infrastructures that are necessary for resilient cities. Spatial
planning systems in Europe are fragmented, a fact which weakens the potential for a uniform
plan toward urban resilience at the regional scale. This implies that urban resilience needs to
be built by means of a wide set of interventions at the city scale. Such interventions have to be
closely related so as to maximize their potential and allow for synergies to be developed. To
this end, the role of spatial planning is considered essential as it focuses to a particular spatial
area (where the sum of risks, hazards and vulnerabilities is considered) and not to a particular
object (Fleischhauer, 2006a). The Council of Europe (1983) has long recognized the role of
spatial planning in risk assessment and management as well as in urban and rural developments.
At a later phase, the European Commission (2013) linked spatial planning to climate change adaptation strategy in terms of the measures to be taken for land use/land cover, control of urban
sprawl, flood management, etc.
Barriers to resilience
According to the United Nations (UN, 2011), urban areas with weak governance systems – as a
result of political instability, immature local government structures, lack of services of metropolitan character, limited coordination between the public and private sectors, exclusion of climate
change from the local or central government political agenda, favoring of short term, over long
term, planning, etc. – demonstrate limited capacity to introduce resilience in urban planning. In
addition, the UN report on Cities and Climate Change (2011) states that urban resilience may
not be met if coordination between local governments and local economic institutions is not
achieved. The same report emphasizes the need to develop urban development models which
will be inclusive for all parts of the population, thus promoting equity. This is considerably important as the globalization patterns developed in the last two decades shift power from the state to
the private sector, a fact which may result in spatial segregation in the event that private interest is
concentrated in some parts of the city only. To this end, a potential barrier to resilience may be the
reduction of the range and extent of state policies for the poorest and the most vulnerable ones.
Tyler, Reed, Maclune, & Chopde. (2010) speaks about the incapacity of cities to integrate in
their resilience plans, the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized in the urban community.
Santamouris et al. (2013) have shown the increasing rates of households experiencing energy
poverty in the western suburbs of Athens, whereas Stathopoulou et al. (2009) have proved that
Athens is a dichotomized city, in the sense that a NW to SE axis traverses the urban agglomeration, separating municipalities and neighborhoods in two main categories (in terms of their gross
domestic product, the prevailing environmental conditions, the jobs opportunities, etc.): those
which rank high in environmental, economic and social parameters and those which rank low.
In this case, the plan for urban resilience should include measures supporting convergence and
cohesion. In the event that the plan is only concentrated in environmental measures, its potential
to last in time is considered limited due to the social and economic drawbacks.
Creating resilient cities
According to Henstra et al. (2004), cities must be designed with the strength to resist natural and
technological hazards, the flexibility to accommodate extremes without failure and the capacity to
recover quickly from disaster impacts. Godschalk (2002) sets a number of principles of resilient
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systems that need to be taken into account for the design and planning of cities. He refers in particular to such principles as redundancy, diversity, efficiency, autonomy, strength, interdependence, adaptability and collaboration. Special weight needs to be given to redundancy and
interdependence. The former is associated with a system design with multiple nodes so as to
ensure that failure of one element or component of the system does not result in the entire
system to fail. The latter is linked to an integrated system with its components supporting each
other. A referral to the definitions provided for resilience in the introduction of this paper, demonstrates the importance of redundancy and interdependence for both the non-equilibrium view of
resilience (Pickett et al. 2001) and the b-Resilience (Polese, 2010).
In line to the above, city administrators need to record and assess city operations and define
the multiple subsystems as well as their stable states and their respective terminal points. They
also need to define the “communication corridors” between the subsystems, in an obvious
effort to recognize the parameters and factors which by controlling or affecting the stability or
instability of a subsystem, may also influence the state of another subsystem. To this end, the recognition of the internal (interaction) patterns and processes within the city system is considered a
major precondition for designing a system capable to adapt and adjust to changing internal or
external processes. In most cases, cities are approached as collection of structures that is with
limited consideration to the internal patterns and processes from social, economic, ecological,
environmental and development points of view.
In summary, a brief set of guidelines for creating resilient cities could well be the following:
(1) Organize and coordinate to understand risks related to the resilience of the city.
(2) Ensure that all departments understand their role in resilience planning and disaster risk
reduction. Avoid overlaps in roles/responsibilities.
(3) Assign a budget for resilience planning as well as for risk reduction.
(4) Assess risks (e.g. due to climate change) at both spatial and temporal scales. Prioritize
the assessment of risks for the poorest segments of the population.
(5) Integrate risk assessments in urban planning. Prepare contingency plans in the event that
risks exceed estimates or projections or in the event that the resilience of the city/area is
exceeded.
(6) Define infrastructure which reduces risk and enhances resilience.
(7) Develop and operate early warning systems for risks in an effort to support timely
decision-making.
(8) Link spatial planning (especially land use planning) and building regulations to resilience planning. Prioritize actions and interventions in areas reflecting high risks.
(9) Define mitigation plans (e.g. protect natural buffers to mitigate storm surges) and integrate them to medium- and long-term resilience planning.
(10) Promote education and training on resilience planning as well as on disaster risk reduction.
(11) Develop post-disaster urban management plans with the potential to support the rapid
recovery of the city from the social and economic points of view. Place affected population at the center of the reconstruction.
(12) Integrate requirements for long-term resilience planning in post-disaster urban planning.
Cities, climate change and resilience
In recent years, widespread attention is given in developing plans for climate change adaptation
and mitigation (EEA, 2013; Commission European Communities, 2009) as well as for plans for
resilient cities. Plans need to be interrelated so as to describe the three-fold relationship between
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climate change and cities: (1) Cities are major contributors to CO2 emissions; (2) Climate change
poses key threats to urban infrastructure and quality of life and (3) How cities grow and operate
matters for energy demand and thus for greenhouse gas emissions. The understanding of the
elements and factors which control this relationship is considered essential for developing
climate change resilient cities as well as for supporting sustainable urban planning.
In particular, plans for climate change resilient cities demand up-to-date and area-wide information on the characteristics and development of the urban system, both regionally and locally.
Key information in this context is the detailed assessment of such urban parameters as (a) land
use/land cover changes, including changes in urban green (b) air temperature and land surface temperature and (c) presence and strength of the urban heat island and heat waves. It should be mentioned that the role of land in resilience, climate change and the mitigation of greenhouse gases
has received less attention than energy systems (EEA, 2013). This is despite the fact that evidence
from urbanized regions, where land use activities have resulted in significant changes to land cover,
suggest land use to be a significant and measurable driver of climate change as well as one that operates through a physical mechanism independent of emissions of greenhouse gases. To this end, a
precise knowledge of the spatial and temporal variations of the parameters mentioned above is considered essential so as to thorough understand urban processes and to also detect urban changes
which enhance or ameliorate impacts due to climate change. In light of the above, a plan for
climate resilient city should increase the ability of a city to survive a climate change related
shock as well as to change in the event of outside shocks which are due to climate change.
Plans for resilient cities need to include actions that touch on awareness raising, capacity
building, infrastructure, ecosystems and development of knowledge and institutions (Tyler
et al., 2010). An important question in urban resilience will be how to plan robust infrastructural
solutions in the face of climate change and how to use available information and projections on
climate change for disaster risk reduction.
Plans for climate change resilient cities need to also identify vulnerable social groups and deal
with the disproportionate exposure to climate risk of vulnerable groups (Baccini et al., 2008; Confalonieri et al., 2007; Hemon & Jugla, 2004; Laurent et al., 2006; Santamouris et al., 2007). Such
exposure may be due to such factors as poor quality building stock, lack of risk reducing housing,
poor infrastructure at the neighborhood scale, low income households, poor spatial planning, etc.
Conclusions
This paper presented a review of definitions, challenges and prospects for resilient cities. In terms
of the definition for resilience, it may be concluded that resilience should not be confined to the
ability of a system to return to its stable state after disruption, but to also adapt and adjust to changing internal or external processes. Plans for resilient cities need to take into consideration societal
changes and balances, as these relate to city development or influence the type and extent of the
needed interventions. It is important to note that the concept of resilience adds a new perspective
to the issue of sustainability in the sense that resilience is needed for a sustainable environment.
Speaking about cities, it is also important that plans for sustainable urbanization consider resilient
design and planning. Barriers for resilient cities are weak governance systems, as a result of political instability, immature local government structures, lack of services of metropolitan character,
limited coordination between the public and private sectors, exclusion of climate change from the
local or central government political agenda and favoring of short term, over long term, planning.
Climate change adaptation and mitigation plans should be developed in relation, and not independently, to plans for climate change resilient cities. Finally, plans for climate change resilient cities
need to also identify vulnerable social groups and deal with the disproportionate exposure to
climate risk of vulnerable groups.
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