Resilience and Urban Governance

Securing Cities

Katarína Svitková

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000413083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

This book challenges the concept of 'urban resilience' by exploring its impact and limitations in three cities.

Resilience has become a buzzword in science, industry, and policy, and this volume offers a fresh perspective on urban resilience as a regulatory and constitutive principle of governance in cities. Cities constitute an extremely relevant playground for resilience, as they are exposed to various disruptions, from natural disasters and pandemics to political conflicts and terrorism. This book traces the evolution of urban resilience, from international development organizations to local governments and communities. It explores how this concept was adopted and mobilized by different actors for different purposes, and analyses the resulting resilience momentum in Barcelona, San Francisco, and Santiago. The book outlines the extent to which resilience has become a universal policy tool and a desired end-state, despite its clearly problematic definition. It also contributes to the discussion about contemporary governance, safety and security in times when their very nature and feasibility are being questioned.

This book will be of much interest to students of resilience studies, urban studies, development studies, human geography and international relations.

1
Resilience and its discontents

Introduction

The year 2016 was devastating for urban communities around the world. Thousands were displaced from Syrian towns and cities due to armed violence; Hurricane Matthew ripped through Haiti, killing 500 people and devastating infrastructure; China was hit by historic floods; and central Italy devastated by an earthquake. November 2016 also marked a landmark event of the UN-HABITAT III Conference titled The New Urban Agenda held in Quito, Ecuador. The high-level event brought together thousands of delegates from public administration, policy makers, NGOs, and private sector, pledging to ‘empower’ urban communities around the world. Their message to the world was simple: we need to build urban resilience. Making cities resilient to crises and disruptions was declared as a top priority and the only way forward in the increasingly unstable – and urbanized – world.

Resilience has become the next big thing, while society, governance, and politics have become increasingly urban. The past decade in which the term ‘urban resilience’ proliferated without precedent, was also a period of an enormous environmental devastation, social conflicts, continuous climate change, and – more recently – pandemics. Extreme weather events claimed thousands of lives and left millions of poor urban dwellers in a state of precariousness. Yet the dominant political and economic model, as well as institutions and practices upon which it is based, have gone unchanged. Risks have been embraced as an inherent part of the contemporary life, and governments have tried to come up with universal solutions for complex and unpredictable threats and contingencies. In this context, resilience of everything and everyone became the new policy buzzword. This book argues that the concept’s overuse must be accompanied by problematizing the material and intersubjective effects of the governmental transformation for which resilience has served as a convenient label. Resilience has been introduced and promoted as an objective quality of individuals and systems in a sense of adaptability. This book, however, aims to discuss this concept in the context of its material and ideational impacts, as well as its political economy. More specifically, reflecting its epistemological focus, the book poses critical questions about constructing and promoting the regulatory processes and networks informed by resilience which have had important material consequences. At the same time, it problematizes the related process of constituting ‘resilient urban subjects’, that is, the internalization of resilience as a self-governance technique, imposed on and by citizens on their own behalf.

Among the objectives of this book is an attempt to take a step back to examine and problematize what urban resilience means and to what ends and by whom it has been used. The sheer overuse of this term in public policy and business throughout the past decade has been staggering. With this inflation of resilience, it is difficult to come up with a universally acceptable definition of the term. Crucially, however, resilience and its ‘objective’ meaning have been taken as a given, understood as a capacity to withstand conditions of adversity, a quality that is inherent to people, communities, and systems. This conception is hereby challenged by opening up resilience, using a framework of Foucault-inspired governmentality, in a sense of governing through subjects and their everyday conduct. In other words, I understand resilience as means of governance through society, built on a set of governmental rationalities and practices that aim to ‘empower’ urban populations. Their declared objective is rather noble: to make cities resilient, safe, and inclusive for all. However, a closer look exposes a stark contrast between the dominant discourses and the actual practices of urban resilience informed by post-liberal governmentality. Behind the empowering language deployed by governmental and non-state institutions lies a construction of resilient subjects that are capable, responsible, and reliable to take care of themselves, whatever the conditions they find themselves in. Needless to say that if they do not, it is due to their own incompetence and inadaptability. This process is complemented by enabling a vast network of organizations, institutions, and practices to ‘implement’ resilience on the ground.

Instead of focusing on entities, I look at processes through which power and governance is enacted and deployed, and subjectivities that are thereby constituted. This perspective is consistent with the aforementioned theoretical approach inspired by the work of Michael Foucault. Most notably, I draw on Mitchell Dean’s concept of analytics of government (Dean, 2010), and the concept of governmentality as understood by Barbara Cruikshank (1999). The theoretical framework builds upon the Foucauldian genealogical perspectives of resilience, such as the one developed by Chris Zebrowski (2016). Many valuable post-structuralist contributions have portrayed the transformation of power and governance along similar lines. The contribution of this book lies primarily in its attempt to theorize and expose the regulatory and constitutive effects of resilience and its enablers. While the focus is explicitly urban, the objective is to offer a broader perspective which can inform further research on different levels and scales, while problematizing the dominant and widely accepted meaning of resilience. In short, the book aims to explore how the material and ideational expressions of resilience have played out within and among cities, and with what consequences for urban populations.

A unique set of case studies reflects the global scope and local impacts of the practices and technologies of urban resilience. The case studies explore the rationalities that have mobilized the concept of urban resilience in order to design, shape, and implement a range of ‘resilience’ practices in cities across the world. Urban areas are argued to be increasingly vulnerable to various disruptions – from natural and human-induced disasters and extreme weather events to political conflicts and terrorism. Urban resilience has emerged as a proposed solution to these problems – in the view of governments, science and academia, non-governmental organizations, civil society, and private sector. This remarkable growth of resilience-labelled practices, designed and implemented by networks of bureaucracies and private sector, has come under intense scrutiny by many critical scholars. Resilience is seen by some of its critics as means used by governing actors to maintain their legitimacy, relevance, and power, as well as to enable the emergence of disciplined and ‘resilient’ urban subjects. It is the purpose of the case studies to highlight the material and ideational techniques of ‘building resilience’ and thereby shaping both the material and intersubjective processes on the urban level.

The concept of resilience is at the core of an extremely powerful academic, scientific, and political discourse, and thus attracts unprecedented policy attention and considerable funding. It has effectively become a buzzword in city governance around the world – from urban development and climate change adaptation, all the way to crisis response to civil emergencies. Given the enormous breadth and depth of ‘resilience’ and its applications, one of the objectives of this book is to challenge and problematize the concept and the ways it has been deployed as a universal solution to govern and secure cities.

The critique of ‘governance of subjects through resilience’ aligns the book with the aforementioned Foucault-inspired constructivist and post-structuralist perspectives. However, as will be discussed in the following sections, the theoretical framework is rather eclectic, linking and contrasting it to other perspectives. In order to capture the multiplicities of connections and networks which constitute the current forms of urban governance, I refer to the concept of assemblages. The concept has been used as a theoretical, ontological, and methodological principle, building on complexity, interconnectedness, and multiplicity. The principle of assemblages reflects both the networks of knowledge and power that are to be problematized, as well as the material constitution of the studied empirical terrain.

The book consists of nine chapters and a conclusion. As a part of the first chapter, the principal questions that the book aims to address are formulated later. Following is the debate about the ‘agency of cities’ in the context of the transformation of power and governance, with its far-reaching consequences on the conduct of states, non-governmental organizations, and individuals. In the chapters that follow, the theoretical framework and conceptualization are discussed. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with the emergence and evolution of urban resilience knowledge and policy networks throughout the past decade. Specifically, the role of two major policy-producing actors on the global level is discussed. The first is the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, also known as the UN-Habitat, which has produced the majority of the global expertise on urban development and resilience to date. Reflecting the nature of governance and the political economy of global resilience on urban level, the book then focuses on the philanthropic initiative 100 Resilient Cities founded and sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation between 2013 and 2019. The degree to which this initiative and its legacy programmes have been able to permeate 100 city administrations worldwide has gone unmatched by any other philanthropic endeavour focused on urban development. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 offer a deeper look into three cities that have become significant ‘playgrounds’ of urban resilience policies in the past decade. All of these cities have had their resilience policies significantly shaped by the UN policy, on the one hand, and the 100 Resilient Cities, on the other, while their local attributes widely differ. The analysis traces the forms in which urban resilience has become the way to ‘colonize’ the urban spaces through policies, programmes, and campaigns. Although the economic, political, and social realities of the cases are markedly different, the type of actors and the governmental techniques deployed are remarkably similar.

The final part of the book brings together and contrasts the insights from the three cities in a condensed manner and discusses the outcomes in the context of urban resilience as a set of technologies of governance. The relevance and usefulness of resilience in tackling problems of urban development and security are fundamentally questioned. Attention is paid to resilience as an intersubjective mobilizer with its biopolitical and disciplinary effects. In this regard, urban resilience is reexamined against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on cities.

Questions about urban resilience

In line with the epistemological position of the author, this book does not aim to formulate hypotheses to be subsequently validated or refuted nor to establish causal relations between the studied phenomena. Rather, several open-ended questions are formulated in order to explore the following:

• What are the problems/challenges to which urban resilience is posed as a solution?
  • Objective ‘nature-induced’ risks on one hand, and a lack of resilience on the other hand (exposure to risk and inability to withstand adversity).
• What are the strategies that the stakeholders have proposed to address these challenges? How is resilience ‘achieved’ through technology and governance in cities? That is, how does it work through spaces and individuals?
  • Discussing the novel forms and strategies of regulatory power and bio-power (knowledge, funding, and technology of resilience).
• What does the previous question suggest about the governmental transformation reflected on the material and intersubjective level?
  • How is the relationship between states, organizations, companies, and citizens reconstituted along these lines? Is resilience the key to this transformation, or merely a concept overused to label its local effects? If so, what are the limits of resilience in terms of its relevance and usefulness?

Before these questions are explored, the following section discusses the role that cities come to play vis-à-vis states in the context of networked global governance. The relevance of this phenomenon for the purposes of this book becomes evident in the following chapters. Starting on the international level of city diplomacy, a question is posed whether the agency of cities is challenging the established power structures and the existing forms of governmentality, or whether it is, in fact, reinforcing them.

The role of cities on the global stage

In contextualizing the topic and purpose of the book in the field of International relations, one needs to ask about the kind of agency that cities, as opposed to (or in addition to) states, have in international politics. Before this question is explored, it is imperative to emphasize that states, as ‘traditional’ units of analysis in IR, by no means become ‘obsolete’ when other (non-state, private, local, transnational, hybrid, etc.) actors enter the IR playing field. What is indeed happening is a certain reconstitution of the rules of the game, in terms of networked power, authority, and agency – both within nation-states and internationally. This reconstitution has to do with the organization of the global economy, which is made possible and, at the same time, contributes to a substantial concentration of wealth, investment, influence, and power in the hands of organizations and actors concentrated in urban areas. Indeed, an impressive body of literature has evolved around the notion of global cities (see Sassen, 1991, 2002) as hubs of the global economic system as we know it. Curtis goes as far as to suggest that the growing importance of cities as players in global politics is indicative of a significant shift in the structure of the international society itself (Curtis, 2016, p. 455).

At the same time, states and their established organizations maintain most of their institutional and executive power, capable of setting and enforcing rules and standards for governing many aspects of contemporary social (and urban) life. Therefore, when talking about the networked and global governance led by cities, one cannot disregard nor underestimate the states-dominated international context from which these networks have emerged. Indeed, some scholars argue that the networks of global governance can actually be seen as outcomes of the state power (see Curtis, 2014). In this regard, neoliberal forms of organization, such as responsibilizing of individuals, rolling-back of the state, technocratic language, or partnerships with private companies, have come to define many of the global governance issues – from their rhetorical framing, all the way to proposing and implementing ‘solutions’. This is undoubtedly the case of city-centred global governance networks discussed in the following chapters. As argued by Acuto (2014), one can see a clash of two fundamental perspectives of these networks: on the one hand, a neoliberal-inspired approach which ties urban governance with actions and purposes of the private sector and on the other hand, the emancipa-tory approach that aims for ‘empowering’ formerly marginalized and powerless (urban) actors. Despite its declarations, the latter approach is also innately connected to the logic of privatization and other basic tenets of neoliberal governance, hence the question about the challenge or reinforcement of the established power structures and institutions. Taking off where Michael Acuto ended with juxtaposing the neoliberal and emancipatory understanding of resilience, it can be argued that these two views are not necessarily contradictory. Resilience is used for both neoliberal and ‘emancipatory’ ends – oftentimes blending the two together. That said, with some careful scrutiny of its underlying logic, the emancipatory nature of resilience is put into question. It becomes evident that resilience has been dominantly used as a technology of government, enabling a proliferation of a vast regulatory mechanism on the one hand, while being deployed intersubjectively on the other. The following chapters will reveal how, despite its regulatory and governmentalist nature, resilience has managed to survive and thrive, posing as an emancipatory and empowering tool for urban populations.

The book focuses on resilience of cities, given the growing significance of urban centres in the global economy, and on the related power relations, inequality, and political struggles, all emblematic for urban areas. In terms of both political declarations and practices, cities have undoubtedly become central when dealing with pressing issues of global governance, such as climate change, security, or development. In other words, cities have been increasingly considered to be important actors in global governance; their role in the historical development ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Resilience and its discontents
• 2 From problem-solving to self-governance
• 3 Global mobilizers of urban resilience
• 4 100 Resilient Cities
• 5 Operationalizing city resilience
• 6 Barcelona
• 7 San Francisco
• 8 Santiago
• 9 Re-thinking urban resilience: what’s next?
• Appendix
• Index