The Routledge Handbook of Urban Resilience

Michael A. Burayidi, Adriana Allen, John Twigg, Christine Wamsler, Michael A. Burayidi, Adriana Allen, John Twigg, Christine Wamsler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429014994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume provides a comprehensive discussion and overview of urban resilience, including socio-ecological and economic hazard and disaster resilience. It provides a summary of state of the art thinking on resilience, the different approaches, tools and methodologies for understanding the subject in urban contexts, and brings together related reflections and initiatives.

Throughout the different chapters, the handbook critically examines and reviews the resilience concept from various disciplinary and professional perspectives. It also discusses major urban crises, past and recent, and the generic lessons they provide for resilience. In this context, the authors provide case studies from different places and times, including historical material and contemporary examples, and studies that offer concrete guidance on how to approach urban resilience. Other chapters focus on how current understanding of urban systems – such as shrinking cities, green infrastructure, disaster volunteerism, and urban energy systems – are affecting the capacity of urban citizens, settlements and nation-states to respond to different forms and levels of stressors and shocks. The handbook concludes with a synthesis of the state of the art knowledge on resilience and points the way forward in refining the conceptualization and application of urban resilience.

The book is intended for scholars and graduate students in urban studies, environmental and sustainability studies, geography, planning, architecture, urban design, political science and sociology, for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current approaches across these disciplines that converge in the study of urban resilience. The book also provides important direction to practitioners and civic leaders who are engaged in supporting cities and regions to position themselves for resilience in the face of climate change, unpredictable socioenvironmental shocks and incremental risk accumulation.

1

Introduction

Rethinking Urban Resilience

Michael A. Burayidi, John Twigg, Christine Wamsler, and Adriana Allen

Tom and Arlette Stuip were enjoying breakfast and relaxing on a terrace overlooking the beach and the Andaman Sea in Khao Lak, Thailand when the Tsunami hit in 2004. The couple observed the ocean begin to recede, which at first created a spectacular site for the sunbathing tourists. Instinctively, however, Tom remembered there was an earthquake earlier in the day and realized this forebode of a disaster about to unfold, so he took Arlette’s hand and they sought higher ground. Within minutes a wall of water was coming at them at a speed of 50 miles an hour. When it was all over many of their friends were either swept away, dead or wounded, and the hotel and beachfront buildings were destroyed (Ryder and Dafedjaiye 2014).

Alice Jackson is a reporter who for 30 years lived on the coast of Mississippi. Until the advent of hurricane Katrina in 2005, she had weathered five hurricanes and numerous tropical storms. When the weather forecast warned of a hurricane that one night, she boarded up her house and gathered her family to safer ground at a friend’s house. Only later did she realize the eye of the hurricane was heading their way. Late that night, strong winds walloped the house they were staying in and woke up the family. When the radio reported that all emergency operation centers in the area were washed away, the gravity of the storm began to sink in. Suddenly and without warning, a giant pine tree in a neighbor’s yard crashed through the house, giving way to the strong winds (Jackson and Lang 2005).

As day broke, what the family saw was worse than they had imagined. Streets and parking lots were turned into lakes, houses were blown off their basements, dead bodies were strewn on the streets, and destruction was everywhere they looked. Debris and waterlogged streets prevented them from getting to her mother’s house to check on its condition. From afar, they could see what remained of the house, a concrete slab. Reflecting on her experience, Alice remarked; “I no longer want to live in Mississippi. I no longer want to go to sleep at night in a graveyard. You know you’ve seen it all when you’ve watched deputies taking ice chests from the local Winn-Dixie to store bodies” (Jackson and Lang 2005).

Typhoon Haima hit the Phillippines in 2016 and disrupted the lives of close to a million people. It is said to have been the third most intense tropical cyclone in the world. As World Vision communicator, Joy Malujo recounts, Jonas Pagcanlungan, a farmer, lost his farm and investment following the disaster. He was counting on raising $300 from his rice farm that year to help pay his medical bills and the education of his two children. Now he has no farm and no money to pay his bills. Elena, whose house was also destroyed by typhoon Haima, had to live in a tarp shelter on the side of the road with ten other families but was grateful she made it out alive with her children (Malujo 2016).

Tropical storm Vinta struck Mindanao, the Philippines in 2017 claiming 30 lives and causing massive flooding. ABS-CBN News reported that it caused landslides that killed 47 people in Zamboanga del Norte, and 17 people in Barangay Panganuran in the town of Gutalac, and floods that drowned 18 people in the municipality of Sibuco (ABS-CBN News 2017). Maulana Malunay, a 75-year-old elder from the village of Panganan counted herself lucky. She survived the floods and was able to salvage her favorite necklace and a few belongings. Maulana is a member of the Matigsalug tribe who had lived along the Salug river for generations but have had to evacuate when the flood inundated their farms and washed away their homes.

Zlata Filipovic´, Kon Kelei, Grace Akallo, Shena A. Gacu, and Emmanuel Jal are all former child soldiers from different continents of the world, forced to fight in wars they did not understand. They chronicled their harrowing stories in books and through artistic performances. Zlata was doing his homework in the evening when he heard the first gunshots in his native Bosnia. That gunshot interrupted his schooling and took his innocence. His school in Sarajevo was bombed and eventually closed. Zlata recollects how wars affect the lives of children like him:

We know what emergencies are: we have felt them on our skin, they crept into our lives, blew them away, sliced them, fragmented them. They stole our innocence, humanity, childhood, families, our right to education.

One day our pens were dropped, notebooks abandoned, benches deserted. Rooms that were once covered with our drawings, lingering with giggles and passed notes became empty. The fear of being called up to the board to solve a math problem and the excitement of discovering the magic of writing were gone. Learning how to play, how to pull a pen across paper and how to leave a permanent mark in this world was snatched from us. Instead, our schools became shelters, places where humanitarian aid was distributed. Schools transformed into bombed-out ghost buildings, vandalized spaces, storerooms for weapons, demarcations of enemy zones and front lines.

(Filipović 2009)

These stories speak of the catastrophic events that cause hazards and disasters and disrupt lives. Many others are just as disastrous although they may be less traumatic in nature. Sea level rise for example is a slow-burn phenomenon that may not cause the type of sudden chaotic events recounted in the vignettes of lives shared above but it is just as pernicious in the long run. Every day stressors such as extreme urban heat, drought that leads to low crop production, and lack of access to potable water and adequate sanitation in urban areas eventually build up to a crisis if they are not recognized and attended to in their incipient stages.

This book is about these and many other types of hazards and disasters that confront urban residents on a daily basis. Some such as earthquakes are fast-burn, high impact disasters, while others, such as fuel poverty and air pollution, are chronic stressors that impact the everyday lives of urban residents (Allen et al, 2017).

This book also recognizes resilience in its various forms – such as engineering, ecological, and evolutionary resilience. The contributing authors therefore discuss urban resilience not only as the ability to “bounce back” but also to “bounce forward” and adapt, reconstituting themselves into functional units, as well as their ability to withstand unpredictable catastrophes.

Several international organizations track the number and severity of hazards and disasters. The data tell us that we should expect more disasters in the future due to climate change. But we already have far too many hazards and disasters in the world. As we have seen in the vignette of people stories narrated above, disasters disrupt livelihoods, destroy property, maim and kill people. Disasters flip people’s lives upside downtown, turn thriving communities into places of despair, wreak havoc on urban and rural environments, destabilize lifestyles, and create humanitarian crisis. The problem is not a lack of information about disasters and their severity but about how urban areas can more appropriately mitigate disasters and adapt to their new environments following a disaster. Moreover, there is limited guidance for civic leaders on how cities can avert both fast burn and slow burn disasters and adapt to both acute shocks and chronic stressors. The goal of The Routledge Handbook of Urban Resilience is to fill this gap.

Urban development and disasters

Hazards and disasters, being induced by a combination of natural and human factors, continue to pose a problem to the health and lives of urban residents where the majority (54 per cent) of the world’s population now reside. The United Nations projects that the proportion of urban residents will grow to 68 per cent of the world’s 6.4 billion population by 2050, adding 2.5 billion people to the urban population. North America currently has the largest proportion of urban residents (82 per cent) but the fastest growing urban population is occurring in sub Saharan Africa and Asia, where 90 per cent of the urban population growth will take place between now and 2050 (United Nations 2018).

Urban areas are especially affected by disasters. There are many ways in which urban development can increase disaster risk. Examples are the increasing concentration of people on vulnerable urban lands that are prone to disasters. In developing countries, rural to urban migration continues unabated as inequity in resource distribution, job opportunities (real and perceived), and infrastructure investment favors cities over rural areas. The most vulnerable populations are usually but not exclusively concentrated in areas that are of high density and poorly planned. Other reasons are the expansion of hard surfaces on open spaces and farm land that makes them impermeable to runoff, thereby increasing the risks of flash flooding and pronouncing the urban heat island effect, high densities that make it easier for communicable diseases such as Ebola and cholera to spread easily in the population, and weak political systems that are unable or unwilling to enforce building regulations (Wamsler 2014).

The problem is not confined to the less developed countries. In the developed countries, the flight of the middle class from central cities in the United States for example has led to a high concentration of poverty in these areas. Legacy cities such as Detroit are still reeling from the effects of deindustrialization and are searching for the coping mechanisms needed to address the effects of economic restructuring. With limited resources and weak political influence, poor neighborhoods may be unable to marshal the resources needed to recover from disasters when they occur. Yet, because residents in these neighborhoods develop strong social networks and coping mechanisms, they may have the potential to capitalize on these traits to quickly recover from crisis. Understanding how poor urban residents survive and sometimes thrive in unforgiving environments is useful to developing and scaling up such support systems to enable urban residents to withstand crisis situations (Wamsler 2007).

By contrast, since the Second World War, suburban development in the United States has increasingly encroached on open spaces and dissected the migration path of wildlife habitats. The effects of such urban intrusion on flora and fauna in its natural setting has contributed to changes in wildland vegetation and landscapes and made them less resilient to environmental stress. Suburban development has also proliferated on fire prone land and exacerbated the “wildland-urban interface” that has made residents in such communities vulnerable to wild fires. It is estimated that 32 per cent of housing units in the United States are in the wildland–urban interface (Radeloff et al. 2005) and this is projected to grow. The result is that wildfires have become more ferocious, difficult to fight, and deadly when they erupt as was the case of the Yarnell Hill wildfire that took the lives of 19 elite fire fighters in Prescott, Arizona in 2013. In 2018, the wildfire in Paradise, California was the most destructive and deadliest in California history, consuming a total of 1.9 million acres and costing close to $4 billion in damages.

The World Bank estimates that by 2050 some 680 million people in urban areas will be exposed to cyclones and that 870 million will face earthquake risks, up from 310 million and 370 million respectively in 2013 (Lall and Deichmann 2009). With climate change, urban risk and disasters are projected to increase, particularly in the coastal regions of the world. It is estimated that already 87 per cent of disasters are climate related as opposed to geophysical in nature. At the same time, urban settlements contribute to climate change through profligate use of fossil fuels: “With more than 50 per cent of the world’s population, cities account for between 60 and 80 per cent of energy consumption, and generate as much as 70 per cent of the human-induced greenhouse gas emissions primarily through the consumption of fossil fuels for energy supply and transportation” (UN Habitat, p. 16).

The Routledge Handbook of Urban Resilience is conceived to be a reference manual that will provide guidance to postgraduates, academics and practitioners looking to get a synoptic overview of the state of the art of the field and its trajectory. The book will also be beneficial to civic leaders and organizations seeking information on how to pursue urban development that is environmentally friendly, reduces the risk of urban residents to vulnerabilities, show them ways to the root causes of such vulnerabilities, and the steps needed to respond and recover, should they be affected by a disaster.

Scope of the book

There are multiple discourses of resilience and from many disciplinary frameworks. This book takes a broad scope in its treatment of urban resilience. It includes chapters on hazard and disaster resilience and socio-ecological and economic resilience. Because urban politics and governance is critical to the response to disasters and urban crisis, this subject also takes a prominent role in the discussions in the book.

The book is intended to provide a synoptic overview of the state of the art of the field and its trajectory. It provides the tools and methodologies for understanding the subject and brings together current reflections and initiatives on the concept. Contributors to the book include researchers and reflective practitioners from all over the world, ranging from academic pieces to case studies. The discussions cover all kinds of urban settlements, large and small, and both permanent and semi-permanent settlements.

Organization of the book

The handbook is organized into four parts including this introduction and a concluding chapter. Each part addresses a particular aspect of urban resilience. Part I of the book provides a critical review and discussion of the concept of resilience from different disciplinary perspectives. Contributors discuss resilience theories and their problems by providing a state-of-the art review of the resilience debate, its relationship with urban development, and environmental and social justice. This includes chapters addressing the resilient city (resilience theory as applied specifically to urban contexts), and the convergence and divergence of theories on urban resilience and sustainability. In doing so, the authors point out the void and the need for a more comprehensive approach to understanding resilience in the urban context.

In urban systems under stress, Part II, contributing authors discuss major urban crises, past and recent, with the generic lessons they provide for resilience. The authors include case study discussions from different places and times, including historical material as well as more contemporary examples. The urban heat island effects on the elderly, the effects of climate change on the provision of urban infrastructure, the distribution of urban utilities under extreme weather conditions and socio-economic inequities, the effects of deindustrialization in the creation of urban blight and how cities are building the capacities and the governance systems to address these problems, are the subjects of discussion in this part of the book.

Part III is devoted to a discussion of the many dimensions of resilience (social, ecological, and technological). Specific examples and reviews of how urban settlements have been affected by and/or adapted to particular shocks and stresses are provided in this section of the book. Included in this section are contributions that discuss how current understanding of urban systems such as shrinking cities, green infrastructure, disaster volunteerism, and urban energy systems, is affecting the capacity of urban settlements and nation-states to respond to different forms and levels of stressors and shocks.

Part IV provides lessons on resilience building in practice from different countries of the world. Examples of local, national, and international initiatives and approaches to promote urban resilience or tackle particular risks and the lessons learned are discussed. Specific examples and reviews of how urban settlements have been affected by and/or adapted to particular shocks and stresses are also provided in Part IV.

Part I: Critical review from different disciplinary perspectives

The book begins with an exploration of the concept of resilience and its significance to the development of urban areas and cities. In Chapter 2 “Urban resilience and urban sustainability” Christian Kuhlicke, Sigrun Kabisch, and Dieter Rink acknowledge the significance of the leading concepts governing planning thought and practice in urban de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Rethinking Urban Resilience
• Part I Critical review from different disciplinary perspectives
• Part II Urban systems under stress
• Part III Dimensions of resilience
• Part IV Resilience building in practice
• Index