Resilience thinking in

urban settlements

Claire Mortimer

Is 21st Century change

different from the past?

Change Ahead

Years

Natu

ral R

eso

urc

es

0

Margin for action

30

Non linier effects

Cascading impacts

Structural changes required

Time running out

= uncertainty and shocks

E.g. Declining Oil availability

….. the world has never faced a problem like this. Without

massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact,

the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.

Previous energy transitions were gradual and

evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and

revolutionary.

Hirsch Report 2005

B. Increased inter-dependencies

Global trade = > efficiency < self sufficiency

C. Urbanisation is a global force of change

Urban population increased almost ten-fold over 20th century

Over 50% people now urban dwellers

Almost 180,000 people added to the world urban population each day.

Can concepts of resilience help?

1. Engineering resilience

Speed of return to a single equilibrium

Disturbance

Strengths for urban• Built environment resistant

to shocks

Limitations for urban• Doesn’t desribe

communities, economies,

ecologies

• Built environment needs to

be adaptive over longer

time frames

2. Socio-ecological resilience

Gunderson and Hollings 2002

Resilience Alliance accessed 2010

Socio-ecological resilience cont.

• GENERAL resilience – diversity (functional / response

(flexibility, keeping your options open), modularity, the

tightness of feedbacks

• SPECIFIED resilience – of what, to what; emphasis on

appreciating specific threats, managing for specific

variables and specific disturbances

Strengths for urban ?

1. The city as a dynamic system

2. Need for both stability and adaptability

3. Stretching out timescales

4. Interdependencies across spatial scales

5. Enhancing ecosystem services

City as a dynamic system

..a city, however perfect its initial shape, is never

complete, never at rest. Thousands of witting

and unwitting acts every day alter its lines in

ways that are perceptible only over a certain

stretch of time.

Kostof, 1991

Species

Biosphere

Community

Family

Individual

ClimaxForest

Biome

SuccessionPatches

Fungi

Mammals

Birds

Insects

Infrastructure(and Open Space)

Place

Buildings

Management Systems

Design /Procurement

Built Environment

Days Years Decades Centuries MillenniaMillennia Centuries Decades YearsDays

Balancing stability and adaptability

Moffat and Kohler (2008)

PresentPast Future

100 100010 1030 30- Years -

Stretching our thinking in timescales

Source; Moffatt 2009

PresentPast

100 1030

Stretching our thinking back

1. What were the critical

events, processes

shaped today's

settlement?

2. What is the long term

behavior of the urban

system (stocks and

flows)?

3. What’s therefore the

settlement current

trajectory?

Present Future

10010 30

Stretching our thinking forward

1. What are the forces

of change coming

up and when?

2. What might the

combined impact of

those forces be?

3. Settlement

vulnerabilities?

Settlement

resources?

4. Systemic solutions,

treating the systems

or mal-adaptations?

Coastal

inundation

Aging

population

Oil $600

US barrel

Thinking across spatial scales

Global city

systems

City/region

Community

Household

..and thinking across domains

Global city

systems

Scales

DomainsBuilt Ecological Social Economic

Enhancing ecosystem services

Adapted from McGranahan, 2007, p. 22)

Limitations for urban

1. Urban systems too complex?

2. Insights into how humans

behave, and social change

occurs

3. Community resilience

Strengths for urban

• What are the social and

institutional factors which

enables some

people/communities

recognise and minimise

potential risk?

• How might communities

respond in times of crisis

and shock?

•

Resilience can only be understood by integrating

factors at individual, community and institutional

levels of analysis Paton 2008

1. Often excludes ecological considerations

2. 21st Century change – persistent and

pervasive and cascading

3. These require structural changes to

cities and settlements

Limitations for urban

‘Change at the margins’ versus

‘Openness and adaptability’ Handmer and Dovers1996

• Stabilising effects of institutions and social

structures (sociological institutionalism)

• Public institutions poorly equipped for

uncertainty (Handmer and Dovers1996)

• Strong belief in technology solutions

• ‘Lock-in’ in technology trajectories (Arthur 1994)

• Resilience at odds with economic efficiency

Complexity of sustainability transitions

Mal-adaptation/Adaptation

Oil based urban

regime

Transitioned regime20 yrs Bio fuels

investment

20 yrs transition in

transport/food production

systems

Forced regime

Global

food, water

and energy

crisis

Is urban resilience any different from

urban sustainability?

• Just an alternative (more politically salient) word for

sustainability?

• Strongly linked to the narrative of exponential and

uncertain change

• Component of urban sustainability

• Focuses on question; is it possible to design urban

systems that mitigate threats, and that are inherently

more capable of responding to surprise, shocks and

system change?

Focuses on the question;

Is it possible to design urban systems that

are inherently more capable of responding

to surprise and shocks and adapting to

significant change?