Does a review of urban resilience allow for the support of an evolutionary concept?

Abstract

Over the last five decades, resilience has received ever greater interest from academics and practitioners and has been applied in different scientific areas, such as engineering, environmental science or medicine. In particular, resilience has become a fundamental concept in contemporary urban development, planning and management (UDPM). Despite the various reviews that have recently been made of this subject, an updated analysis of the concept is required so that commonly held views about resilience can be matched against empirical evidence while, at the same time, clarifying the use of its main formulations and connecting its embryonic development to its application in urban-centric research. This paper therefore reviews the concept of resilience (considering its primary formulations, its historical evolution and its conceptual underpinnings), establishing how it has been applied and developed in the UDPM context. Based on this review, this paper reiterates the idea of a three-dimensional framework for exploring the concept of resilience ([1] 'engineering' vs. [2] 'ecological' vs. [3] 'evolutionary resilience'). The search for urban resilience can potentially adopt an integrative approach, assuming an evolutionary perspective that can be adapted to different situations and stakeholders, thus offering a better adjusted and more dynamic urban planning and management.

Keywords: Evolutionary resilience; Review; Urban environmental management; Urban resilience.