Beyond urban sustainability and urban resilience: towards a socially just future for London

With risks ranging from severe weather and flooding, to industrial action, pandemic flu and terrorism, there is never a dull day in the London Resilience Team! The best part of our job? Knowing we’re doing our bit to help make London a safer, and more resilient city. (London Resilience Team, 2012, p 1) The reason London is so resilient is because it adapts. It innovates. It invests. It stays modern. It remains at the top of its game. It treats the changing shape of the world economy as an opportunity, not a threat. Let us rejoice in that fact and challenge the doomsters who keep predicting the end of everything. (Fraser, 2012, p 1) In the same way that the term ‘urban renaissance’ became overshadowed by the catchword ‘urban sustainability’, it now seems that urban sustainability is going out of fashion and ‘urban resilience’ is the new buzzword for cities around the world, including London (see Cochrane, 2006, p 689). We are in the midst of a resilience turn, and urban sustainability may rapidly be reaching the end of its shelf life, because it is being challenged, from without, and from within. A growing number of academics, social innovators, community leaders, policy makers, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), philanthropists and governments are touting a supposedly new idea, resilience – how to help vulnerable people, organisations and systems persist amidst unforeseeable disruptions. Ash Amin (2012) describes urban resilience as a new culture of risk management that is accompanied by a return to public narratives about apocalyptic futures. The Mayor of London (GLA, 2011, p 5) has suggested that creating a resilient London is the way forward: We have all seen the disaster movies, in which a sprawling modern metropolis is brought to its knees by a global-warming induced deluge of Biblical proportions, or plunged into a glacial Ice Age of permanent winter. However, Hollywood hyperbole aside, London's climate is changing. We must take steps now to ensure the city is prepared for the future. Not just to avert environmental disaster but also to preserve and enhance our quality of life and prosperity for generations to come.