Conventional urban governance has largely focused on protecting critical infrastructure (CI) from specific threats and tends to manifest in silo-based practices that frequently overlook interdependencies and socio-political factors shaping local adaptive capacity (Coaffee & Clarke, 2016). Recent urban planning models (e.g. SDG11, 100 Resilient Cities) call for a transformation of governance to stimulate resilience-building and sectoral integration. It is of equal importance for planning and monitoring systems to be relevant to the local context – especially concerning vulnerable residents – and to account for the extent to which the above factors vary across neighbourhoods and cities.

We therefore argue that a key feature of these models is their ability to draw on new stakeholders. The focus is on communities, as their contextual and diverse knowledge can be instrumental for identifying synergies at the local level. Regarding reframing resilience, embracing uncertainty then is about the ability to align heterogenous perceptions of criticality, to reduce the possibility of exposure and flexibly mobilise networks for mitigation. Thus, this research explores the potential of aligning of heterogenous perceptions to resilience-building and contextualisation of global planning models.

We propose a framework to analyse changes of governance processes in terms of their adaptiveness based on three components: (1) changes in networks, which refers to the diversity of institutional and individual actors represented; (2) in discourses, such as the framing of issues in policies and proposals for interventions; and (3) in evaluation practices, such as the sectoral integration of targets for CI provision. Based on our ongoing research in one of Nairobi’s informal settlements, we apply this framework to analyse the extent to which the introduction of community-based participatory data generation for healthcare service provision triggers adaptive governance processes.

To conclude, we will highlight the potential advantages of, and illuminate the barriers to, mainstreaming transformation towards resilient urban governance.

While scholars skepticism about urban resilience has been growing during the last decade, city practitioners just started to approach the complexity of the concept. Recently a paper published by Meerow and Stults explored the different perceptions about urban resilience from the academic literature and US cities practitioners. Results highlighted that practitioners are still interpreting resilience as a concept linked to "bounce back", robustness and endurance characteristics. Herewith we explores European perspectives around the meanings and principles associated to urban resilience. We gathered more than 150 answers to a questionnaire proposed to scholars from different disciplines. Before discussing the results, we also interviewed a dozen of city practitioners, to get their point of view, and offering thus a comprehensive discussion from this research. This presentation contributes to the advances in the understanding of how the evolution of the interpretation of the concept is held by scholars and practitioners in Europe, and how this differs from other contexts.

According to the United Nations (2017) “Already in 2014, 30 per cent of the urban population lived in slum-like conditions“. Those living in informal settlements face significant threats to their livelihoods due in part to climate change related extreme events such as drought, and flooding. These individuals’ vulnerability to climate related extreme events is exacerbated by other risk factors such as insecure land tenure, poor housing, precarious settlement locations and little to no access to government services. In all cases the services that are provided are inadequate, leading individuals and communities to help themselves.Given the self-help nature of these environments, our project utilized action research to explore examples of citizen-led community infrastructure projects in urban informal settlements in Manila, the Philippines. Our research illustrates how, through self-initiated upgrading efforts, communities are defining for themselves and taking action in support of “climate resilience”. Given continuing socio-economic vulnerabilities, a key challenge is to find the ways and means of linking informal self-help actions to formal policy and programs in support of sustainable, resilient and inclusive urban spaces.

The emergence of urban housing crises and responses by local authorities represent a complex, dynamic process involving various drivers. Among these drivers, demographic change (e.g. population growth or shrinkage) is a slow-burning but prominent catalyst to urban housing markets. As population shifts are hardly predictable, especially at the local level, they can be considered as a shock to a city’s inert housing supply. While the resilience of social-ecological systems seems to be a well-developed approach in research related to urban resilience, community resilience and regional economic resilience, few attempts have been made to apply this approach explicitly to housing market problems. Yet, policy makers already employ the notion of “resilient housing policy”, though its theoretical and empirical essentials remain unclear.

In order to conduct empirical research on the conditions of transforming housing markets and policy from a resilience perspective, we seek to analyze existent resilience frameworks and indicator sets which already include housing aspects or can be linked to this issue. Some useful indicators can be drawn from these frameworks, while others are considered inappropriate for understanding resilience in housing policy from an evolutionary perspective. The structural potential, institutional capabilities as well as the interlacing of civic sector, public sector and private market actors have to be studied thoroughly. Proceeding from these basics, we present a preliminary set of factors that could promote housing market resilience in regard to demographic shocks. The overall aim is to provide a framework for a qualitative case study on housing policy in the city of Leipzig. Leipzig has seen extreme demographic changes over the past 30 years: urban shrinkage and severe housing vacancy, as well as unexpected rapid growth leading to a constricted housing market today.

Besides the theoretic proposal, we can provide first-hand insights from the ongoing empirical study.

Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) (i.e. green corridors and raingardens) is one of the most promising solutions for increasing urban resilience (Ghofrani, 2017). BGI can achieve flood-reducing performance of 30% by connecting hydrological functions with urban nature (green) and water (blue). BGI is especially promising because of its multiple benefits such as improved liveability of cities, increased biodiversity, carbon sequestration, heat reduction and water purification. Despite numerous benefits, wide scale implementation of BGI is hampered due to financial and governance barriers. BGI projects have higher upfront costs, benefits from BGI are dispersed and hard to monetise and consolidating long term citizen buy-in is challenging. Making the business case for BGI is essential to overcome these challenges. This includes using tools to generate monetary valuations of BGI (i.e. TEEB, BEST) and crafting a carefully designed brand and specific communication messages for different audiences. Strategically framing and presenting the relevant benefits for specific stakeholders is key in successfully pitching BGI.

BEGIN is a European collaborative project that brings together 10 cities (Antwerp, Ghent, Aberdeen, London Enfield, Bradford, Kent, Dordrecht, Hamburg, Gothenburg, Bergen) with 6 leading research institutes (CIRIA, UNESCO-IHE, University of Sheffield, TUHH, Royal College of Arts and Erasmus University), which are frontrunners on the project´s thematic areas. BEGIN focuses on overcoming implementation barriers to BGI via Social Innovation (SI) and city to city learning. SI empowers multiple stakeholders to contribute (in kind, funds) to the design, construction and maintenance of BGIs. Transnational collaboration within BEGIN is done via a unique transnational city-to-city learning exchange programme with transnational expert teams that facilitate joint implementation of BGI projects.

The panel relates to the topics Climate Resilience Governance and Planning and Community Resilience by sharing expertise and lessons-learned within BEGIN on BGI, SI, city to city learning and overcoming implementation barriers related to BGI.

Flood risk is a significant challenge for cities across Europe. Policies and management schemes developed to support risk reduction and to enhance preparedness increasingly refer to urban resilience, defining it as an inherently positive guiding principle. Limited attention, however, is paid to the mechanisms through which this resilience is (possibly) built and co-produced in practice by actors embedded in more or less formalised relational networks.

The paper presents the preliminary results of a review of activities carried out in selected European cities that have been recently affected by flood events. This exploratory mapping exercise aims at inductively identifying relevant governance and knowledge-related dynamics that affect the capacity of local actors to (co-)design and implement context-aware risk reduction strategies and measures.

Through the review of post-flood reorganisation strategies, measures, and practices, this explorative analysis identifies institutional, political and organizational factors that trigger or hinder the ability of cities (and citizens) to resist, respond and reorganise in order to reduce risk, support governance innovation and enhance social and institutional capacity building in the contexts observed. Results are discussed to identify dimensions that may support the analysis of urban resilience building to floods also in different contexts.

This paper, therefore, provides a methodological contribution to the urban resilience debate by laying the ground for the development of an observation framework to be used to support a situated understanding of barriers/enablers that affect the capacity of social and institutional actors to learn, decide and act in the face of wicked risk-related problems. Also, it provides insights into the policy debate on urban resilience, questioning the appropriateness of procedural approaches based on scientific and institutional panaceas.

In recent years, in Montesilvano, the frequency of urban flooding resulting from extreme weather events is increasing. This is the reason why the Research Convention between the Department of Architecture of Pescara and the Municipality of Montesilvano wants to verify if the cycle networks can help solve this problem. Legislation, guidelines and good practices do not provide useful information because their priority is the realization of the greatest number of kilometers of cycle paths where safety, functionality of the route and intermodality are guaranteed.

To find operational references, it is necessary to consider plans to combat climate changes that include the integration of the relationship between cycling networks and rainwater management. As it happens in:

• Plan Melbourne (2017/2050) with the La Trobe Street bicycle lane
• Philadelphia Citywide Vision (2011/2050) with the Green Street Design Manual
• Copenaghen Climate Adaptation Plan (2011/2025) with The Copenhagenize Current -Stormwater Management and Cycle Tracks

The comparison shows that the relationship between cycling networks and rainwater management can contribute to urban resilience if the project involves at least three main actions: get out of the logic of the sector, work on the space of the network and on its associated space and give importance to the relationship with the context.

In Montesilvano, within the two north-south parallel roads (Strada parco and Lungomare) and the five perpendicular east-west (Great hotels, via Strasburgo, via Marinelli, via Torrente Piomba, Palaroma), it is necessary to identify where it is possible to plan a cycle network which is not only an infrastructure for slow mobility but also an equipment that contributes to urban resilience.

Community resilience can be defined as the ability of complex socio-ecological systems to adapt and continually transform in order to overcome the strains and disturbances faced within the system. In recent decades, resilience implementation measures and their outcomes have increasingly demonstrated that in order to foster such an ability, they must be founded upon an understanding of the context-specific social dimensions of vulnerability—understanding the needs, the contexts, the social capital and the interests at play within communities. Contemporary literature has illustrated the short-sightedness and disastrous results that come from risk assessments and conceptions of vulnerability that have failed to take into account social context and local knowledge. In order to develop resilience strategies that support and sustain thriving communities, local knowledge must be integrated into decision-making processes, giving voice to multiple stakeholders and building towards a more equitable and inclusive social support system.

This paper explores how urban resilience strategies can pursue the fullest representation of diverse communities. Two participatory research methods are presented as tools for mobilizing community knowledge in the development of resilience capacity. Here we argue for the potential of photovoice and PGIS (participatory global information systems) as methods for investigating community knowledge and experience, in order to most effectively capture and integrate this knowledge into context-specific resilience policies and plans. By exploring the principles and practices of these two qualitative methods, their successes and challenges, and their particular aptitude for gaining unique community perspectives, this paper demonstrates the potential of participatory research methods for informing urban resilience strategies to bridge the gap between broader development agendas and social need.

Contemporary environmental problems, such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, and resource depletion (quantity and quality of water, energy, etc.) present formidable challenges for 21^st century resilience. Transition to resilience is a particularly salient idea for cities, which are often conceptualized as complex socio-environmental adaptive systems. Making cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable will require a conceptualization of urban resilience that connects knowledge production to implementation action. Resilience, both general and specified, depends on the ability for cities to create and diffuse innovative sustainable solutions to complex social and environmental challenges. Research and development of urban resilience theory and knowledge is burgeoning, yet the uptake to policy has been slow. To bridge data gaps and improve information availability, urban indicators have played a key role connecting knowledge to policy at least since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Combining data on indicators, including lessons learned from urban indicator projects, with new urban data streams (both designed and organic) new pathways are created for data-driven approaches to resilience planning, policy, and theory. Beyond data issues, an integrative and holistic approach is necessary to develop effective sustainability science that synthesizes different sources of knowledge, relevant disciplines, multi-sectoral alliances, connections to policy-makers and to the public. This paper emerges from an effort to develop an interoperable, networked infrastructure of urban observatories to generate a baseline of standardized long-term, large-scale datasets about human and natural dimensions of metropolitan systems in the state of Texas. Informed by and informing resilience theory, we conceptualize an “observatory” of urban data that allows for strategic research and decision-making oriented towards the mitigation of the consequences of urbanization and climate change. The Texas Urban Observatory project is part of Planet Texas 2050, a University of Texas-Austin grand challenges initiative.

Nowadays, gentrification insinuates in the historical urban corridors and produces strong repercussions on the right to the city, pushing up the purchase and use prices and forcing the residents to move away. This process interlaces with other global phenomena, such as the turistification, urbanization and brandification, and dramatically accentuates its consequences which contribute to endanger sustainability and livability of cities. From this background, the goal of a gentrification-resilient city is to re-orientate policies towards a more sustainable model. We describe an operational framework for recognizing, prefiguring and intervening in the landscapes of gentrification that affect urban quality with anti-gentrification and livability indicators in different fields of action. It starts from the analysis and representation of the phenomenon in the city of Barcelona. This framework looks towards the elements that mark a change in the growth horizon of urban opportunities, by indentifying specific areas of interest, parameters and guidelines to cope with the phenomenon coming from sectoral policies, tools and practices under two points of view: (1) the social innovation practices, that play a key role in the implementation of a consistent policy for improving urban resilience and livability, more stable over time; (2) the socially-oriented urban models with anti-gentrification measures, by guaranteeing basic services with homogeneous methods of interaction and stable quality levels. Each area of interest is identified by characters, operational objectives and project attentions, aimed at planning interventions that guarantee a minimum level of basic goods and services in the organization of urban contexts according to a gentrification-resilient and livable city scenario. The implementation of the operational tool in the district of Sant Antoni clarifies how project attentions can address strategies to remain resilient to gentrification, by recognizing the propulsive role of cohesion forms and by supporting decisionmakers towards a common policy for improving cities and social life.