Linking Sustainability and Resilience of Future Cities

Abstract

Resilience and sustainability are now primary goals for future cities. On one hand, the extreme natural and man-made events that have recently hit urban systems (earthquakes, tsunamis, terroristic attacks) makes resilience a principal challenge of our society. On the other hand, the high environmental, social and economic burden that cities have today, combined with the high exposure of the world population in cities, makes sustainability as well a main objective for future development. However, how the two concepts are linked and how we should imagine future cities in terms of resilience and sustainability, represent an issue for scientific debate. An approach aimed at hinging the concept of resilience within a sustainability-based framework is being proposed here, where safety of city inhabitants is considered as a main requirement for sustainability of future cities. Here, the city is seen as a complex and dynamic organism for which sustainability should be ensured at each stage of the urban development. The proposed approach moves from the point that, for the city, an extreme event and the resulting changes moving the city to a new point of dynamic equilibrium, represent a stage in the life cycle, i.e. the Hazardous Event Occurrence phase; hence, it is stated that resilience represents the sustainability of this phase, from the economic, social and environmental point of view, for all the present and future actors, directly and indirectly involved in the recovery process. Furthermore, since urban systems are interconnected with each other by a complex network of relationships, it is also stated that city resilience must be sought on a “glocal” scale, as it also happens for sustainability; that is, the objective of city resilience must be pursued both on a local scale, referring to the physical and social systems within cities, and on the global scale, referring to the system of relationships which connects cities to each other.