Practitioner Perspectives, Equity, and Tradeoffs: A Critical Look at Urban Resiliency

Abstract

Urban resilience is becoming increasingly relevant for urban planners due to the rising impacts of extreme weather events and climate change. Planners’ and practitioners’ conceptions of urban resilience have powerful effects on adaptation to climate change, actions to build resilience of urban systems, and the operationalization of resilience. The academic literature conceptualizes urban resilience as a characteristic of an urban system that maintains its intended functions and allows it to adapt to change or transform to a better state in the face of an event. In contrast, practitioners often apply a conceptualization of urban resilience that imagines the system bouncing back to its previous state after an event rather than transforming to an improved state. As a result, current approaches to urban resilience have tradeoffs, often with unintended consequences for communities on the margins. Planners and practitioners must critically evaluate how they conceptualize and actualize urban resilience; otherwise they may continue to perpetuate systems that cause inequities and undermine longterm resilience. They must frame and apply a conceptualization of urban resilience that focuses on bouncing forward, seeks to minimize or at least acknowledge tradeoffs, and considers questions of power and equity.