Cities must grapple with rapid changes and an array of risks and hazards. For decades, academics and policymakers have been developing plans and policies to cope with these challenges. These efforts have been couched in terms of building sustainability, hazard mitigation, disaster risk reduction, reducing vulnerability, adaptation, and more recently as a need to build resilience. One common explanation for the concept’s growing popularity is that resilience has a better social connotation and is more positive than related concepts. Empirical evidence supporting this claim is lacking. Moreover, there is no consensus on how to define resilience. Previous work revealed that definitions differ significantly within the academic literature and among practitioners, but it is still unclear how these ‘expert’ conceptualizations compare with the broader public’s. This study uses three survey experiments to test 1) the widely stated, but largely unsubstantiated claim that resilience has a more positive connotation than other concepts; 2) whether the public is more likely to support policies when they are framed in terms of ‘resilience;’ and 3) how the public conceptualizes resilience. Specifically, we test support for policies and conceptualization of four terms that are commonly used in the literature: making cities “more resilient,” “less vulnerable,” “more adaptive,” and “more sustainable.” Survey 1 was conducted on a convenience sample (n=500) of US-based adults drawn from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform. Surveys 2 and 3 were conducted on broad national samples of US adults (n=1000) fielded by Survey Sampling International (SSI). Overall, we find significant differences in policy support and perceived importance, which we trace back to variations in how the concepts are interpreted. The study confirms that framing likely affects public support for policies, but complicates claims that resilience is inherently a more appealing frame.

The concept of community disaster resilience is an increasingly important discourse on environmental changes and has been under debate on international academic and policy circles over the past decade. While conceptualizing disaster resilience is increasingly seen as a significant and requisite undertaking in hazard mitigation, reduction, and planning, there exist only a few number of frameworks in the literature presenting systematic methodology and guideline for empirical measurement of the concept. In addition, the question of whether such a measurement can adequately address the ongoing or emerging needs of local stakeholders and governments remains in agenda.

To tackle this challenge, this study first intends to synthesis the needs of local stakeholders in community resilience measurement to serve both as a shared vison of resilience measurement missions and as a basis for developing a technical procedure for operationalizing community disaster resilience. Next, based on the defined needs, we propose a synthesized procedure that highlights how the needs of local stakeholders can be translated in measurement process. Finally, the developed framework is applied in order to perform a quality assessment of the 10 most well-known and related measurement frameworks.

This synthesized approach, therefore, can bridge the gap between the visions and actions in resilience measurement and provide a measurement that is need-based, proactive rather than reactive, and action-oriented. Furthermore, it can predispose local stakeholders, leaders, and planners to prioritize those actions that are needed more to build and sustain resilience. The quality assessment demonstrates in-depth information regarding the characteristics of each measurement framework, which can be used to identify weaknesses and limitations of current disaster resilience measures and to improve them where needed, in order to meet the risk preparation and planning needs of stakeholders, decision makers, and urban planners.

This contribution provides theoretical and operational hints for reframing current approach and tools to counterbalance climate change, aiming to better guide planners and decision makers in building up effective climate sensitive urban development processes.

To achieve this goal, we will firstly explore commonalities and peculiarities of three Urban Metaphors - Smart City, Resilient City and Transition Towns – that are gaining an increasing attention by planners and decision-makers, to better understand their roles in supporting climate strategies, their potential synergies and conflicting aspects, and above all their potential in promoting integrated approaches to climate issues.

Then, based on a comparison among different case studies within and outside Europe, we will highlight strengths and weaknesses of current institutional-led initiatives as well as ‘transition’ practices (community-led) addressed to deal with climate change at local scale. In detail, strengths and weaknesses of current practices will be presented according to different research questions: if and how the three considered urban metaphors (Smart City, Resilient City, Transition Towns) effectively frame current practices; current level of integration among mitigation and adaptation practices; mainstreaming of mitigation and adaptation practices into urban planning processes; emerging governance models and, above all, factors currently hindering the paths towards effective climate policies in cities.

Finally, based on the lessons learnt from both theoretical debate and current practices, some key principles to reframe current approaches to climate issues and to overcome barriers and criticalities hindering effectiveness of current strategies and measures, will be provided. These key principles will be mainly addressed to promote cross-sectorial strategies and measures to counterbalance climate change; to enhance the capacity to take into account synergies and trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation strategies and measures; and to promote the mutual capacitation and contamination among different actors and stakeholders.

The urban village is a phenomenon arising in modern China, whose rapid urbanization is characterized by its urban sprawl and accelerated growth of urban population. Due to the dual urban-rural land system, local villagers have the right to make extensions on their homesteads to the existing houses, which they rent out to migrant population. In recent years, the mechanisms of developing urban villages and redevelopment strategies have been widely discussed. However, scholars (Tong and Feng, 2009; Wang et al., 2009; Herrle et al., 2014) rather focus on the interest of local villagers and the profit of government and developers. The interest and contribution of migrant stakeholders, the largest and most vulnerable group in urban villages, are often neglected. Borrowing Gilbert’s (2007) insight, if the word “slum” has to be adopted there, these villages are “slums of hope” to large extent thanks to the migrant community. Contrary to common perception, neighborhood attachment among migrants is stronger than assumed (Wu, 2014). This paper aims to study and describe how the migrant community shapes urban villages in Beijing through space production (Lefebvre, 1991). It is hypothesized that migrant population not only passively adopts the space, but also actively builds relationships with and within particular spaces, and gives these spaces certain identities. In this way, the community within urban villages is stabilized and social cohesion is increased. Migrants are trying to create an unfamiliar rootedness and promote resilience in the new social and physical environment and affect the social-spatial transformation of urban villages. Extensive field research was conducted adopting qualitative methodologies. Comparison study was made between two case villages, Shigezhuang and Dongxindian, representing two kinds of urban villages in terms of the groups of migrant population they accommodate. Shigezhuang holds migrants who are mostly low-skilled and are clustering based on home origins, while Dongxindian holds more middle-skilled migrants who do not necessarily share a place bond.

This panel is intended to promote broad-based discussion of key approaches to conceptualizing urban resilience, to compare insights in how to engage with practitioners from a network of cities at all stages of research and implementation, to refine new approaches to co-producing urban resilience to extreme events, and to evaluate cross-cultural differences of perspective on urban resilience and sustainability.

This paper examines urban resilience theory and practice under authoritarian urban governance. Urban resilience is framed as a unifying translocal concept for governing cities worldwide. However, urban resilience research expresses largely democratic ideals. This tendency is expressed through the assumption of data-driven decision-making and popular participation in practice and the validity and integrity of data sets, access to formal government proceedings, and elite interviews in scholarship. However, authoritarianism is presently on the rise worldwide. Therefore, it would be wise to evaluate closely the ways in which authoritarianism influences urban resilience.

In this paper, I aim to open a discussion about the relationship between urban resilience and urban authoritarian governance. I characterize the ways in which regime types are relevant to theories, planning, and implementation of urban resilience through a discussion of Singapore and Tianjin, China as models of authoritarian urban environmental governance. I evaluate the controversial claim that authoritarianism is more capable of responding to the complex, multi-scale, socio-ecological problems associated with environmental degradation and climate change. In other words, greater concentration of political economic power and corresponding restriction on individual liberties may be needed to transition toward resilient futures. Then I discuss the practical and methodological challenges that rising authoritarianism raises for the planning and implementation of resilient cities. I conclude by posing a series of questions and challenges for urban resilience scholarship in an increasingly authoritarian era.

What are the futures we hope to create? And, how can we guide the development of these futures? Positive future visioning and scenario development are important tools for guiding urban sustainability and resilience planning. Sustainability and resilience pathways for the long-term future are often difficult to envision and may often be different or even be incompatible. The co-development of future scenarios with local practitioners allows for the exploration of diverse plausible, desirable futures while examining potential solutions, conflicts, and tradeoffs. In particular, the co-production of scenarios frees both practitioners and researchers from the typically problem-oriented focus on the short-term future and allows for positive long-term visions, innovations, and transformational changes.

The Tunjuelo River is one of the most important tributaries of the Bogota River, it is a highly populated territory on which different realities converge. Approximately three million people inhabits the Tunjuelo watershed. The watershed was urbanized in less than 100 years, mostly by informal settlers that occupied areas with landslide risk and progressively encroached the floodplain.

The modernization of Bogotá after 1930s displaced industry to the outskirts of the city and demanded a constant supply of building materials. Since then the extraction of clay and gravels focused on the Tunjuelo River due to its geological configuration. This drastically changed the course of the river and its ecology. Small industries for tannery and other activities also found a place in the Tunjuelo River, in the edge between the countryside and the city.

The river is one of the main elements of the city’s ecological structure. However, the sewerage system is the poorest in the city. The river receives wastewater from most of the surrounding residential areas, chemical pollution from small industries and discharged pollutants from the main city’s landfill. In addition, communities settled in the watershed suffer from lack of accessibility to public spaces while the area defined as ecological corridor is a narrow strip.

Until recently, Bogota’s city planning was disassociated from watershed planning. Mining, industrial activities, landfills, informal settlements, expansion areas, rural settlements and natural reserves coexist in a conflictive manner. This paper presents a cartographic investigation of this contested territory that highlight also the potentialities of the landscape. It also critically analyzes existing projects of informal upgrading and mobility infrastructure. Through this revision the article reflects on the principles of contemporary urban design. It also presents strategies for increasing landscape resilience while addressing the socio-economic challenges of the watershed.

Positive future visioning and scenario development are important tools for guiding urban sustainability and resilience planning. Sustainability and resilience pathways for the long-term future are often difficult to envision and may often be different or even be incompatible. The co-development of future scenarios with local practitioners allows for the exploration of diverse plausible and desirable futures, while examiningpotential social-ecological-technological solutions, conflicts, and tradeoffs. In particular, the co-production of scenarios frees both practitioners and researchers from the typically problem-oriented focus on the short-term future and allows for positivelong-term visions, social-ecological-technological innovation, and transformational changes. We present a framework for co-developing sustainability-based future scenarios with local stakeholders to explore alternative plausible, desirable, and resilient urban futures. Through a series of workshops with local partners in cities across North and Latin America, we co-develop scenarios to address urban sustainability and resilience challenges, such as extreme climatic events, changing resource availability, and equity concerns. Through the scenarios co-development process, we develop tangible future visions with temporally and spatially explicit social-ecological-technological strategies, pathways, and targets to address the scenario challenges. Finally, we evaluate tradeoffs among the scenarios based on qualitative and quantitative sustainability and resilience assessments of each scenario. We present examples from the scenario development process in diverse cities with diverse challenges and future visions, including San Juan Puerto Rico, Valdivia Chile, New York City New York, and Phoenix Arizona. We highlight how visioning of coherent future scenarios and the co-production process can link anticipatory knowledge and visions to action and enhance capacity in cities for long-term planning.

The challenge of ensuring that urban resilience agendas do not compromise sustainability and equity goals demands that our cities be capable of envisioning future pathways and anticipating trade-offs of resilience strategies and solutions. While future-thinking is a common practice in urban planning, cities will need to get more ambitious about how they factor in foresight and unintended consequences of actions at very distant temporal scales into the knowledge systems that underpin their planning and decision-making. We ask, to what extent is the knowledge coming to bear on urban resilience planning and strategies inclusive of sustainability and equity goals? What kinds of upgrades or innovations are needed to make city knowledge systems more anticipatory? We draw upon the knowledge-action systems analysis (KASA) currently implemented in multiple US and Latin America cities to explore the types and networks of knowledge shaping urban resilience in different context and how conducive they are to moving beyond risk-based knowledge systems to enhancing anticipatory capacities for cities.