Alpermann, H., Fürst, M., Hedayatifard, M., Ince Keller, I., Ruegg, J., & Yip, M. (2024). Urban Resilience. In R. Dilworth (Ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Urban Studies. Oxford University Press.
The concept of urban resilience has gained increasing attention not only among academic researchers, but also among urban practitioners and policymakers since the 2010s, after its initial emergence in the 2000s, a time when cities faced different types of urban disturbances and felt the urgent need to address them with encompassing policies. Over the years, urban resilience has been embedded in the global urban landscape through various urban policies, programs, and practices. Today, urban governance incorporates elements of urban resilience by improving infrastructure, making urban and territorial plans, and formulating risk management strategies. Urban resilience has close intellectual ties with some earlier work dating back to the second half of the 20th century in other fields of study, such as the conceptions of resilience in ecological studies, science and technology studies, development studies, and sustainability studies. But it is the urban dimension that distinguishes the idea and practices of urban resilience from other notions of resilience. Based on the understanding that cities are complex networks, recent studies draw attention to key factors in operationalizing urban resilience, such as spatial and temporal scales, different urban systems and their multi-scalar networks, historical background, and local specificities. This annotated bibliography organizes the burgeoning publications on urban resilience into three parts: the basics, the practices, and the critique. The basics part contains four sections: General Overviews and Definitions presents the debates over definitions of urban resilience; Conceptual Foundations considers groundbreaking works on urban resilience since the 2000s; Urban Shocks and Stresses introduces the works that clarify what counts as the disturbance that concerns scholars of urban resilience; the works presented in Urban Materialities and Specificities address an often overlooked, yet important, conceptual question about the meaning of the urban that makes urban resilience different from other forms of resilience. The four sections of the second part focus on how scholars have studied resilient practices in cities and how these practices inform, and are informed by, academic work: beginning with Implementation and Governance of Urban Resilience, this part goes through different arenas of urban resilience, including Infrastructure, Risk Management, Planning Theory, and Planning Practices. The third part, The Critique of Urban Resilience, presents the academic literature that challenges the conceptualization of urban resilience, questions the real-world consequences of urban resilience practices, and addresses the limitation of urban resilience in Western-centric urban studies scholarship.