Deconstructing urban flood resilience building: toward a tentative observation framework

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.