Establishing Conceptual Components for Urban Resilience: Taking Clues from Urbanization through a Planner’s Lens
Abstract
This paper aims to establish inherent concepts associated with urban resilience theorizing, which lacks the links to urban planning in a way useful to enhance the urban resilience of existing settlements, through a multidisciplinary approach and acceptance of the complex structure of urban resilience. Moreover, most of the literature addressing the subject refer to it through bland and perplexing terminology, making the subject of urban resilience difficult to practice in a contemporary urban planning scenario. This literature study-based paper reviews the concept of resilience and identifies its key components and its application to disaster and urban planning nexus while exploring the links between the 5 W’s of urban resilience literature, namely, What, Where, When, Why, and Who. Based on this, the paper intends to establish the synthesized urban resilience characteristic concepts to lay out the directions for cities to move toward resiliency with a link to urban planning by working on the suggested linked attributes. Hence, the concept of urban planning is explored as a means of engaging and embedding urban resilience in a transdisciplinary process. The concepts of vulnerability and adaptive coping capacities are presented, interlinking the concepts of urban planning and urban resilience and supporting the suggestive attributes through past literature. Furthermore, the paper discusses the suggestive elements connecting the theory of resilience and urban planning and suggests the components encompassing vulnerability, urban planning, coping and adaptation, and urban governance as key factors for the urban resilience framework. Urban planning and governance have the potential to reduce vulnerability and enhance coping and adaptive capacities, thereby impacting urban resilience positively. The various attributes of urban planning can be explored to assess, impact, and influence the urban resilience levels (/ or correspondingly vulnerability and adaptive/coping capacities); hence, urban planning can be a potent tool to influence, affect, and strengthen the resilience of the urban system.
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Data Availability Statement
No data, models, or code were generated or used during the study.
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Natural Hazards Review
Volume 24 • Issue 1 • February 2023
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© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Sep 15, 2021
Accepted: Sep 1, 2022
Published online: Oct 28, 2022
Published in print: Feb 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Mar 28, 2023
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