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Resilient Cities and Regions: Planning, Initiatives, and Perspectives

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Climate Action

Definition

Resiliency signifies the capability of systems – like cities and regions – to withstand a shock and adapt to it by gradually returning to the normal state or by evolving into a better one.

In recent years, the popularity of resilience has become a mainstream topic in both academic and policy discourse (Brown 2014). This word has particularly emerged as an appealing perspective on cities, which are often theorized as highly complex, adaptive systems (Meerow et al. 2016). The etymological roots of “resilience” stem from the Latin word resilire, which means “to bounce back,” and refer to the ability of an organism or a system to recover a position after a disturbance (Klein et al. 2003; Oliva and Lazzeretti 2017). The word originally featured in metallurgy: It indicates a metal’s ability to resist the forces applied to it. In the 1960s it entered the field of ecology, which defined resilience as “the magnitude of the disturbance that can be absorbed before the system changes...

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Acuti, D., Bellucci, M. (2019). Resilient Cities and Regions: Planning, Initiatives, and Perspectives. In: Leal Filho, W., Azeiteiro, U., Azul, A., Brandli, L., Özuyar, P., Wall, T. (eds) Climate Action. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71063-1_21-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71063-1_21-1

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