Resilient Urban Futures
If one were to imagine that each time a disaster or stress strikes people on the earth, a strong beacon would illuminate like an alert board but extended across the globe then the cities of the world would frequently light up. Cities would give such a strong signal because they are often the places most vulnerable to disasters. Cities concentrate people and infrastructure. They are often located along coasts or river sand are thus exposed to floods or tropical storms, and are susceptible to drought, fire, and heat. This exposure combined with poor infrastructural and in situtional adaptation can mean the difference between a hazard and a disaster. Further more, the frequency, intensity, and impact of such events are increasing as human cause demissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to rise, spurring changes in the earth’s climate system. The coupling of a major demo graphic transition to urban living with climate change, especially the increase in frequency and intensity of extreme events, presents an increasingly urgent challenge to urban society and decision makers. In the context of climate risk for cities, interest in the concept of resilience and its application to urban systems has exploded. Resilience has many definitions (Meerowet al.2016), but for our purposes we open with one that comes from ecology. Resilience is the capacity of a system to maintain its basic structure, function, and identity while undergoing change in the face of shocks and stresses (Walker et al.2004; Folke et al.2010). In this definition, resilience is seen as a property of a dynamic system (Elmqvist et al.2019). Other definitions point to resilience as an outcome or process (Moser et al.2019). The processes and outcomes that define resilience in an urban social–ecological–technological system (SETS) have to do with deliberate management of that system to build or promote its resilience through adaptation and transformation (Pelling2010; Biggs et al.2012).