Exploring the User-Driven Implications in Building Urban Resilience for Sustainability Transitions: Lessons From OURS CITIES Global Network Study Cases

Smart, green and resilient city paradigms have been mainly promoted through top-down practices and hard infrastructures solutions. However, social networks and community actions have been strengthening the effectiveness of resilience from the ground in many cases. This paper brings at light the key relevance of such socially-driven urban resilience building through bottom up processes by i) situating urban resilience in relation to urban sustainability ii) defining user-driven resilience within urban resilience building frameworks, and iii) highlighting the perceptions and communities roles in building urban user-driven resilience. In order to offer empirical evidences supporting such conceptualization, the paper presents a range of global study cases from OURS CITIES network. The main insights of the paper are that user-driven resilience is still poorly understood and that the same “enablers” for socially-driven urban transition do not work effectively for all the places, but should be framed accordingly to the place cultural values and behaviors.