Improving the Conditions for Urban Resilience through Collaborative Learning of Parisian Urban Services
Publication: Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 141, Issue 4
Abstract
The concept of urban resilience has taken a leading edge by incorporating the multiscalar interactions within an urban system, revealing the short- and long-term impacts, spatial dependencies, and inequalities. The issue now is to enable local authorities and urban stakeholders to grasp and apply the resilience approach. Technical networks and urban services supporting urban development (drinking water supply, public transportation, etc.) are an interesting case study to apply the resilience concept. The urban resilience approach, tested with the managers of service provision in the City of Paris, demonstrates the effectiveness of integration and collaboration. First, an autodiagnosis realized with each manager identifies the service dependencies and its capacity for continuous operation in case of disturbance. Then workshops raise manager awareness of their interdependencies and feed the discussion toward technical and organizational solutions in an integrated approach. This macroscopic analysis is then completed by a territorial assessment of urban service resilience. In doing so, the spatial and temporal dimensions emphasize gaps but also margins of manoeuver in managing resilient urban services. Our results show that manager strategies can be focused on protection, adaptation, or recovery of their service. However, these are sometimes contradictory and threaten the resilience of the whole system. Indeed, in highlighting the different strategies set up by managers, the region’s resilience can be discussed at different scales: the urban service, the system of urban services, the City of Paris, and the Parisian metropolis. Then we emphasize the difficulties in applying the resilience concept and suggest solutions to improve the conditions for urban resilience and sustainability.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer and editors for their helpful comments. We are also grateful to IGN for authorizing the use of BD TOPO geographical data (authorization n°80-1456). This research is part of Project RESILIS, led by Egis with EIVP as scientific coordinator (www.resilis.fr). It was funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR Sustainable Cities 2009, reference ANR-09-VILL-0010-VILL). We also wish to thank all the Parisian managers who accepted to share their knowledge to feed this research and particularly the City of Paris which funded the project Paris Résiliente, within the Paris 2030 program.
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Published In
Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 141 • Issue 4 • December 2015
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 24, 2013
Accepted: Apr 29, 2014
Published online: Jul 22, 2014
Discussion open until: Dec 22, 2014
Published in print: Dec 1, 2015
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