Resilient urban forms: A macro-scale analysis

Cities need to build on their resilience to cope with a broad range of natural and manmade hazards that threaten their competitiveness, livability, and functionality. Recognizing this need, the resilience concept is increasingly used as an organizing principle to guide research design and facilitate a more informed decision-making process. However, despite the abundance of studies on urban resilience, research on the link between urban form and resilience is limited and fragmented. This study sheds more light on this issue by reviewing and synthesizing theoretical and empirical evidence on how physical structure of cities can facilitate or hinder urban resilience. Acknowledging that each city is located within a nested hierarchy of scales that is characterized by cross-scale dynamics, only the macro-level aspects and elements of urban form are analyzed in this paper. These are namely ‘scale hierarchy’, ‘city size’, ‘development type’, ‘degree of clustering’, and ‘landscape/habitat connectivity’. Key criteria and indicators for analyzing resilience of each element/aspect are specified and used to discuss how macro-scale urban form is related to various resilience properties such as robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and efficiency. Findings indicate that urban form has major implications for social, ecological, and economic functionality of cities and can play a key role in enhancing their resilience and sustainability.