The Indian Himalayan region is considered as one of the global hotspots for Climate change. The climate change impact poses additional stress on these cities and its residents and exacerbates the existing challenges on such as Water scarcity, drainage and solid waste management. This article represents a case example from three cities in the Indian Himalayan region (Shimla, Kurseong, Gangtok) and their resilience strategy formulation using ICLEI ACCCRN Process (IAP) toolkit and the process of laying the path to move from developing climate resilience strategies to project implementation through an active stakeholder engagement. Shimla and Kurseong brought forth water supply systems as one of the most fragile urban systems. Whereas, Gangtok recognized the essential need to adopt a proper Solid Waste Management system, especially to avoid clogging of open drains and natural streams in order to reduce the threat of landslide incidences that result in infrastructural, financial and human loss. This case study also focuses on innovative financing mechanism by linking the projects with the Small Grants Fund to create success stories which can further be upscale through convergence with existing federal government schemes.

Natural and man-made disasters and conflicts occur constantly around the world, leaving displaced and vulnerable people every year, especially in the developing countries. Among other urgent necessities, this population needs to rebuild their houses. Due to the scarcity of resources in these disaster contexts, many of them opt for self-build or community-based construction of simple houses. Community-based construction can be a solution in these situations, maybe the only one available, but arises other problems such as a scarce awareness and prevention of the labour risks and scarce construction knowledge and skills. Taking into account all the factors, a possible solution to this, proposed by the authors, could be an ‘assisted self-build construction’. That is to say, a self-construction by a community, in which the members have been specifically trained in the labour risk prevention and construction materials and techniques they are going to use. This involve a previous analysis with the following steps: (1) study of the local and traditional materials and construction techniques of vernacular houses; (2) study of how they could be improved by incorporating new current construction knowledge; (3) design of different low-tech but high-knowledge housing appropriate for self-building; (4) evaluation of the sustainability of the alternative designs, including the labour risks during construction, and selection of the best one; and (5) definition of the teaching content and plan. The selected design should integrate the local and traditional construction materials and knowledge, which are usually available and sustainable, with the current knowledge, in order to improve the traditional design and make it more resistant to natural hazards such as earthquakes and, at the same time, create a more comfortable house. The labour risks during self-construction should be evaluated, the construction process adapted in order to minimise the risks, and preventive measure defined.

Mass migration in the face of natural and human-induced disasters has grown into one of the major urban resilience challenges of the 21^st century. We examine forced displaced communities and look at migration as a powerful opportunity for building community resilience using two case studies — Beirut, Lebanon and Vancouver, Canada. Both cities offer different approaches and responses to some of the most challenging urban resilience issues: forced displacement from home communities and respect for their cultural needs, mass migration and city response plans (shelter, work, play), acceptance, and assimilation.

In Lebanon the flood of refugees across a shared border has created a displaced and marginalized Syrian community that is surviving through informal coping mechanisms and strategies that sustain livelihoods despite being spatially confined and atypically clustered in informal and temporary living spaces with little sensitivity to cultural customs.

In far-distant Vancouver, several thousand Syrian refugees arrived between 2015 and 2018 under a federal government assisted resettlement (GAR) program strongly supported by the Canadian people. Immigration plays a key role in Canadian culture. Upon arrival, most Syrian GAR families desired, and were placed in neighbourhoods of similar ethnic backgrounds and languages with shared cultural customs and experiences.

In both Beirut and Vancouver, the emphasis on place as a cultural resilience mechanism implies that one central component of the experience of migration is the role of the physical environment or landscape. Syrians forced to migrate to both neighboring and distant countries are building relationships with the new places they live in by shaping new spaces and landscapes that embody both past memories and new emotional experiences. There is much to learn from Syrian mass migration that can inform building community resilience for disaster risk reduction – whether human-induced disasters such as economic meltdowns and climate change, or natural disasters of all types.

As resilience strategies have become a prominent orthodoxy in city planning, green infrastructure (GI) is much heralded as a win-win solution for enhanced social-ecological protection from climate risks and impacts. In this paper, we aim to understand whether “green” and “resilient” interventions protect and secure social groups traditionally most at risk of climate impacts and/or least able to adapt to them – or, if they result in maladaptive and inequitable outcomes (i.e, displacement or climate gentrification). Neighborhoods with a higher proportion of lower-income and minority residents have already shown trends of gentrification when benefiting from new green amenities – a process known as green gentrification – but much remains to be understood about the role of resilience, or climate adapted GI, in climate gentrification. Philadelphia, USA, a forerunner and model city in the implementation of green stormwater infrastructure, is used as a case study to examine resilience in relation to urban systems of neighborhood change and historic conditions of uneven development through processes of dis-/re-investment, suburbanization and re-urbanization. Our study uses a quantitative and spatial analytical approach to identify sites of omission and sites of commission in GI plans and interventions, assessing overlapping landscapes of GI, social and ecological vulnerability. Next, we empirically test possible pathways involved in climate gentrification, and further assess differential levels of vulnerability to gentrification. Our findings point to an association between change in poverty levels and racial composition of census tracts in relation to areas of higher concentrations of climate-adapted GI. The paper contributes to reframing resilience research and practices to integrate a deeper understanding of social-ecological insecurities and inequities than currently considered in urban climate adaptation planning. The blog references additional cases where green and resilient infrastructure in the US, Canada and Europe may generate similar outcomes.

Green areas in and around the city have often been used by urban inhabitants as a source of food and timber, for recreation, cultural and aesthetic purposes, or as a source of fresh air and other health benefits. More recently, their hazard regulating functions are increasingly valued and acknowledged as a desirable strategy goal to reduce risk to climatic and hydro-meteorological hazards. However, this often generate tradeoffs. Most of the literature on ecosystem services’ tradeoffs has concentrated on provisioning versus cultural and regulating services. The potential tradeoffs arising between managing nature for recreational, spiritual, mental benefits and for hazard regulating functions in urban and peri-urban areas have rarely been explored. In this paper we assess cultural and regulating services in the Carmel peri-urban forest of Haifa (Israel) using participatory mapping GIS-based methods. We interview local stakeholders and users of the Carmel peri-urban forest area. We explore tradeoffs between cultural and regulating services (in particular for fire mitigation) and we link these tradeoffs to different understanding and uses of nature. We find that the stakeholders preferences for cultural purposes and the preservation of the forest often clashes and increases hazard and fire risk. The idea of a cultivated forest landscape has in fact emerged as a strong cultural ecosystem service in Israel, while the transformation of the forest from a less cultivated type improves regulating services, reduces especially fire risk. We conclude that the tradeoffs between cultural and regulating services are a potential measure of hazard risk.

Considering socio-spatial cohesion a primary factor for the sustainable and resilient development of cities, this paper explores the implications of the changing nature of relationality networks in our advanced digital age. It focuses on problems caused by growing urban fragmentation, polarisation, and inequality, as well as opportunities emerging from expanding diversity, complexity, and networkability. By acknowledging the effects of the pervasion of digitally augmented networking processes, it explores the spatial production of key common urban assets in contested central urban spaces.

The working hypothesis is that a revised approach to the interpretation of urban commons – particularly public space – as a premier collective asset with “more-than-spatial” properties grounded in their performative nature and transductive relationality, enhances the contribution of the disciplines of architecture and urbanism to the sustainable development of cities. This approach would provide a better understanding of the characteristics of the civic infrastructure needed to support relationality and collaboration, and illuminate the identification of new pathways to address problems caused by a growing urban socio-spatial fragmentation, deprivation and alienation.

For the analysis of such associations, a theoretical framework inspired by the notion of the right to the city is proposed, and a multidimensional socio-spatial perspective that identifies key mechanisms triggering public engagement is delineated. A comparative urbanism framework, informed by direct hands-on experience in Asian and Australasian contexts, is used to provide empirical grounding and validate the theoretical construct. Evidence is gained form case-studies of recent conspicuous urban transformation processes with situated high impact on material, social, cultural and emotional spheres. Discussion and conclusion contribute to the understanding of the socio-spatial impact of radical on-going changes in the role and function of the public sphere and call for an important redefinition of the approach to urban commons towards a resilient and sustainable urbanism.

This talk revolves around critical perspectives on the smart city digitalization and its repercussions for a resilient urban society. The talk will deal with issues regarding who will benefit from implementing the smart city model and the talk will also cover how the smart city model may interact with transformations of human behavior linked to both climate mitigation and to the resilience of intertwined infrastructure-Internet systems of the smart city whilst global warming. While applying a critical perspective, I plan also to address the potentials that may open up by the digital city revolution. For instance, it is already a fast development of using smart technologies as new planning practices and simultaneously as novel research methods. For instance ‘citizens as sensors approaches’ are now being developed rapidly. The talk will cover both what kind of new understanding of urban sustainability and resilience such technologies may bring as well as its ethical implications, including environmental justice perspectives, and how smart city technologies may affect social health and human-nature connections

We investigate policy design as a foundation for urban resilience implementation, on two aspects: 1) implications of the resilience paradigm for urban governance, and 2) mechanisms to strengthen urban administrative capacity to integrate resilience principles into urban governance.

Policy design is defined as an “activity conducted by a number of policy actors in the hope of improving policy making and policy outcomes through the accurate anticipation of the consequences of government actions and the articulation of specific courses of action to be followed”. For resilience policy, practitioners are struggling to translate and enact the meaning of resilience within the governance of urban networks. Lack of goal clarity is particularly present in transverse public issues such as resilience and crisis management, because they are complex, fragmented, and lack coordination mechanisms. As such, they require shared governance and a multiorganizational, transjuridictional, polycentric response network.

Changes introduced by the resilience paradigm in urban governance make it important to assess whether and how adopting resilience as a policy priority leads to any significant differences in how cities are organized and how urban governments conduct their policy-making activities. By comparing changes in key organizational and policy making parameters of cities it could possible to systematically assess the extent to which a resilience perspective actually presents a new mode of governance, or if it is largely a rhetorical commitment with few material impacts. On the one hand, resilience as a policy paradigm can be seen as a radical break with a traditional Weberian approach to governance. On the other hand, the resilience paradigm’s reference to ideal values such as “flexibility” and “responsiveness” of public administration might actually require little in terms of concrete changes to policies, procedures, and structures. Our paper will present the conceptual elements underlying these two aspects.

Within an evolutionary process that has been more intense since the middle of the 20^th century, retail has changed dramatically and new retail concepts have been putting into question the stability of urban retail systems. Using the adaptive resilience perspective, some recent studies have been discussing how the retail structure of some urban districts and neighbourhoods has adapted to changes in the respective retail systems. Within these studies, retail resilience is broadly understood as the ability of a certain retail system to adapt to shocks and disturbances and be able to supply the population. Currently, some of the main changes in retail are related with the rehabilitation of some retail stores and precincts that transformed them into gentrified retail spaces. Nowadays, retail gentrification has been gaining prominence in a great degree due to the global increase in world tourism, putting added pressure on old stores that still serve local residents and traditional passersby.

This presentation arises from an ongoing investigation. Using a case study methodology, we will focus on Campo de Ourique, a Lisbon traditional neighbourhood. Although located outside the main tourist routes of the city, at the beginning of this decade, its enclosed traditional retail market was rehabilitated, which eventually culminated in its gentrification. Following an intervention model seen in other countries of Europe and Latin America, Campo de Ourique traditional retail market is currently a medium and high class leisure and consumption destination. Based on theoretical considerations on retail resilience and retail gentrification, in this presentation we aim to examine the impacts that are produced by the gentrification of that retail precinct in the commercial fabric of the district and in what way these impacts questioned the stability of the neighbourhood’s retail system and its resilience ability, thereby threatening the ability to supply the local community.

This paper examines the Rockerfeller Foundations 100 Resilient Cities initiative in Melbourne and frames this as an experiment in urban resilience governance and planning. Drawing on sustainability transitions and urban low carbon experimentation literature (Bulkeley et al 2011; Evans et al 2016; Sengers et al 2016), the necessity to foreground the politics of urban transitioning is highlighted (Luque-Ayala et al 2018). This draws attention to questions of: what it means to be low carbon (and resilient); what and who is involved in the transition; how does the transition unfold and how would we recognise a transition when we see it? Melbourne is one of the first wave of 32 cities involved in 100RC and the release of the Resilient Melbourne Strategy (2016) is the first attempt at resilience planning in this city which is seen as “a starting point that brings together individuals and organisations critical to the resilience of Melbourne and its diverse communities (www.resilientmelbourne.com.au). We examine its role in mobilizing ‘urban resilience transitions’ reflecting on the what, who and how of this as a governance experiment. With no metropolitan mandate and located in the City of Melbourne office, we examine the relationship between the 100RC Melbourne initiative and other key local, metropolitan and state climate change policies and planning strategies. Through this analysis we reveal the extent to which resilience thinking is influencing (and transforming) mainstream planning, how urban resilience has been framed and adapted as the 100RC Melbourne initiative has evolved and the prospects for a more integrated and inclusive mode of urban governance and resilience planning.