Ecological resilience and resilient cities

AbstractThe urban realm is changing rapidly and becoming increasingly interconnected across continents, and across contrasting types of land covers, while at the same time facing new environmental threats and experiencing new demographic and social pressures. The urban component of the global ecosystem can be made more sustainable by incorporating the ecological understanding of resilience into the discourse. Sustainability is seen as a social, normative goal, which can be promoted using the mechanisms of ecological resilience. Ecological resilience differs from engineering resilience. Ecological resilience emphasizes the capacity of a site to adjust to external shocks and changes in controlling interactions, while engineering resilience emphasizes its ability to return to a state that existed before perturbation. Ecological resilience is particularly appropriate to urban systems, given the extent and open-ended nature of the changes and challenges they face. Adaptive processes are explored as contributions to the achievement of a successful adaptive cycle in urban socio-ecological systems. Key tools for incorporating the ecological thinking about resilience into the social discourse include landscape or patch ecology, the novel idea of the metacity, an assessment of ecological and design models, and the use of designs as experiments.Keywords:: adaptationadaptive cyclebuilt environmentcitiesecological urban designresilienceresilient citiessustainabilityurban systems AcknowledgementsThe authors thank their colleagues in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study for sharing their insights about social–ecological processes and systems. The manuscript benefitted from discussion and interaction at the workshop on Built Environment Resilience, at the ETH Zurich, with support by the Albert Lück Foundation.FundingThe authors acknowledge support by the US National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research programme [DEB-1027188] and the Urban Sustainability Research Coordination Network [funded by DEB1140077]. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.