Resilience Imperative

"We have to adapt to the impacts that, unfortunately, we can no longer avoid", said President Obama at the UN Climate Summit in September 2014. Adaptation and resilience are now a must in both academic research and international bodies. A fashionable concept, resilience's polysemy sparks many debates on its uses and operational relevance.

This book bridges the increasing divide between academic research and the latest planning innovations, offering practical and conceptual insights for practitioners, researchers and students. Magali Reghezza-Zitt and Samuel Rufat present a cross-disciplinary, state-of-the-art debate and critical analysis of the social, spatial, practical and political implications of resilience.

• Offers a critical approach of resilience, based on a wide range of case studies
• Provides insights ranging from the most recent theoretical issues to the most practical engineering innovations

• Links the latest cross-disciplinary academic insights with the up-to-date, practical innovations

Practitioners, researchers and students involved within the fields of the environment, geography, planning, climate change and sustainable development

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• Foreword
• Introduction
  • I.1 Resilience, polysemy, cacophony or quandary?
  • I.2 Defining resilience
  • I.3 Resilience put to the test: the theoretical issues
  • I.4 From practical application to critical examination
• 1: Defining Resilience: When the Concept Resists
  • Abstract
  • 1.1 A multidisciplinary construct
  • 1.2 Transfers in cindynics
  • 1.3 Defining resilience
  • 1.4 Two concepts for a single word
  • 1.5 Conclusion
• 2: Resilience and Vulnerability: From Opposition towards a Continuum
  • Abstract
  • 2.1 One or several vulnerabilities?
  • 2.2 The vulnerability/resilience pair
  • 2.3 Beyond opposition: the notion of “resiliencery vulnerability”
  • 2.4 Conclusion
• 3: Resilience: A Question of Scale
  • Abstract
  • 3.1 Resilience as a scalar problem
  • 3.2 The “glocalization” of risk and scalar reconfiguration of resilience
  • 3.3 Changing scales to explain resilience
  • 3.4 Conclusion
• 4: Resilience: A Systemic Property
  • Abstract
  • 4.1 Resilience and systemic analysis
  • 4.2 The case of the city, a complex sociosystem
  • 4.3 Maintaining the cohesion of the system to overcome the crisis
  • 4.4 Conclusion
• 5: From the Resilience of Constructions to the Resilience of Territories: A New Framework for Thought and for Action
  • Abstract
  • 5.1 The conditions of resilient planning on the scale of the territory
  • 5.2 Applying resilience: adaptation and resistance of the material components
  • 5.3 Conclusion
• 6: Adapting Territorial Systems Through their Components: The Case of Critical Networks
  • Abstract
  • 6.1 Technical and critical networks, strategic elements of resilience
  • 6.2 Choosing adaptations
  • 6.3 Conclusion
• 7: Resilience and Global Climate Change
  • Abstract
  • 7.1 Resilience and global change: scales, temporalities and uncertainty
  • 7.2 Adaptation to global change and resilience
  • 7.3 Urban resilience and sustainable urban planning practices
  • 7.4 Conclusion
• 8: Organizational Resilience: Preparing and Overcoming Crisis
  • Abstract
  • 8.1 The components and temporalities of a crisis
  • 8.2 Lessons from feedback
  • 8.3 Organizing to overcome a crisis
  • 8.4 Conclusion
• 9: (Re)Constructing Resilient Districts: Experiences Compared
  • Abstract
  • 9.1 (Re)New Orleans: Big Easy as a resilience laboratory
  • 9.2 Urban renewal and resilience in East London: the Thames Gateway
  • 9.3 Conclusion
• 10: Resilience, Memory and Practices
  • Abstract
  • 10.1 The resilient system between identity and evolution
  • 10.2 Resilience and retaining a memory of risk
  • 10.3 The problem of identity
  • 10.4 Conclusion
• 11: Critique of Pure Resilience
  • Abstract
  • 11.1 Resilience to the test of discourses
  • 11.2 The dark side of resilience
  • 11.3 “Good” or “bad”, who is declaring resilience?
  • 11.4 Conclusion
• Conclusion
• List of Authors
• Index