Lorenzo Chelleri

Resilience trade-offs: addressing multiple scales and temporal aspects of urban resilience

The concept of urban resilience has so far been related mainly to climate change adaptation and disaster management perspectives. Here we aim to broaden the discussion by showing how the framework of urban resilience should be related to wider sustainability challenges, including i) climate change and natural hazard threats, ii) unsustainable urban metabolism patterns and iii) increasing social inequalities in cities. Using three case studies (flood risk management in the Dutch polders, urban–rural teleconnections driving the Bolivian quinoa market, and spatial diversity in the adaptive capacity of Kampala slums),(1) we draw out significant insights related to scales and sustainability, which will push urban resilience research forward. The key “move” is to consider both spatial and temporal interactions, in order to shift from the mainstreaming of the resilience-building paradigm toward a critical understanding and management of resilience trade-offs. While urban resilience emerges not necessarily as a normatively positive concept anymore, we argue that addressing multi-scale and temporal aspects of urban resilience will allow greater understanding of global sustainability challenges.

Are People Responsive to a More Sustainable, Decentralized, and User-Driven Management of Urban Metabolism?

Smart, green, and resilient city paradigms have been mainly promoted through top-down and technocratic approaches. However, based on the notion to return to “the right to the city”, emerging community-driven initiatives are providing self-managed infrastructures contributing to urban sustainability transitions. This paper explores the relevance of the behavioral aspects of people-centered approaches in dealing with two different facets of urban metabolism: physical infrastructure (involvement with the management of decentralized infrastructures) and consumption patterns (involvement in proactive reduction of resources used). In the first case we assessed community perceptions about the roles, benefits, and willingness to proactively engage in the management of decentralized green infrastructures in Bogota City, Colombia. For the second facet, we measured the effectiveness of change agents in re-shaping energy consumption decisions within urban social networks in South Africa and Saudi Arabia. This paper’s results show that pre-determined and standardized strategies do not guarantee positive, nor homogeneous, results in terms of meeting sustainability targets, or promoting community involvement. Hence, a better integration of people-centered and top-down approaches is needed through context-dependent policies, for enhancing both users’ appreciation of and commitment to urban metabolism participative management.

Does community resilience decrease social–ecological vulnerability? Adaptation pathways trade-off in the Bolivian Altiplano

Worsening climate change impacts and environmental degradation are increasingly supporting policies and plans in framing a linear understanding of resilience building and vulnerability reduction. However, adaptations to different but interacting drivers of change are unclear in the mix of opportunities and threats related to increasing connections, emerging technologies, new patterns of dependency and possible lock-in effects. This paper discusses a more open-ended understanding of the relationship between resilience and vulnerability, highlighting emerging trade-offs among adaptive capacities and exposures to different (and new) threats as they relate to social–ecological sustainability. The transition of the Southern Bolivian Altiplano, from being a remote rural area of subsistence farming to a global leader in quinoa production and exportation, has been taken as a study case. Results from 18 workshops organised within different communities provide insights about a range of trade-offs between community resilience attributes and social–ecological vulnerability induced from land use changes, livestock strategies, communities’ behavioural change and institutions’ emerging policies. The main theoretical advances of the paper relate to the need for critically framing multiple threat exposures and adaptive capacity trade-offs, contributing to arguing the usually positive meaning of resilience, and taking into account “to whom or to what is positive which adaptation” and “which trade-off should be accepted, and why”. Framing adaptive pathways through these questions would serve as a tool for addressing sustainable development goals, while avoiding lock-ins or unsustainable path dependencies.

Is Connectivity a Desirable Property in Urban Resilience Assessments

The need to look at environmental-related problems from a systemic perspective has been increasingly highlighted in current scientific literature. Especially in a context of climate change uncertainty, it is helpful to identify interdependencies and cascading impacts that might happen under certain management or policy scenarios. In the context of resilience management and given the inherent complexity of cities, this becomes especially relevant if one considers potential trade-offs or perverse transformability interventions that may have negative impacts on environmental quality, social equity or well-being. The network perspective in resilience theory has been argued to be useful to assess system’s robustness, connectivity and dependency. Connectivity as a characteristic of the system, has been particularly presented as a determinant of urban resilience in the literature, but, so far and to our knowledge, no study has presented empirical evidence on this regard. To contribute to this debate, this chapter uses a case study on urban energy resilience in the city of Bilbao (Spain) to illustrate the role of connectivity in an urban system and its positive and negative effects on resilience and transformability. Main findings point out the context-specific nature of this property of the system and the difficulty of establishing a normative desirable trend.

Is There a Place for Resilience Within Sustainable University Transition Management

The implementation of sustainability standards in university campuses is a global trend. Yet, very few institutions are leading the way after systemic perspectives for campus sustainability, being often stuck in technocratic targets set around the regnant energy efficiency paradigms. This paper builds on a broader definition of what being a “Sustainable University” should mean, integrating four propeller blades for a sustainable transition: (i) the built-environment quality improvement, (ii) the civil society engagement (iii) the industry partners’ involvement and (iv) the public institutions support and collaboration in policies implementation. The paper aims at highlighting how resilience thinking could boost such holistic definition and its operationalisation. After un-packing the resilience metaphor through different management approaches in universities, sustainability strategies implemented in different case studies (in Italy, Mexico, the UK and Japan) are collected via focus groups and stakeholders interviews, and then framed along an integrated sustainability-resilience approach from literature reviews and innovative proposals.