This book describes the urgent challenge faced by cities worldwide to become resilient to climate change impacts. This challenge goes further than the ability to resist the impacts of extreme weather conditions. Coping with climate impacts and the ability to recover from them are equally important, as well as the capacity to adapt to the effects of climate change and the ability to transform the entire urban system. The book explores how the resilience journey for coastal cities in particular encompasses using scientific knowledge but also the knowledge of citizens and practitioners. Measures and strategies on different scales are needed, from national scale all the way down to neighbourhood, street level and building level. Representing the holistic nature of climate resilience, this collection contains unique insights from leading scientists and practitioners in areas of expertise such as engineering, social sciences and urban design. It will be a valuable resource for scholars, students, practitioners and policy makers interested in the development of resilient and sustainable urban environments.

Drawing from research and examples about resilient cities, this book looks at new initiatives and innovations cities can implement.

Urbanization is occurring at an unprecedented rate; by 2050 three quarters of the world’s people will live in urban environments. The cars we drive, products we consume, houses we live in and technology we use will all determine how sustainable our cities will be. Bridging the increasing divide between cross-disciplinary academic insights and the latest practical innovations, Resilient Sustainable Cities provides an integrated approach for long term future planning within the context of the city as a whole system. In the next 30 years cities will face their biggest challenges yet, as a result of long term, or ‘slow burn’ issues: population growth will stretch to the breaking point urban infrastructure and service capacity; resource scarcity, such as peak oil; potable water and food security, will dramatically change what we consume and how; environmental pressures will change how we live and where and; shifting demographic preferences will exacerbate urban pressures. Cities can’t keep doing what they’ve always done and cope – we need to change current urban development to achieve resilient, sustainable cities. Resilient Sustainable Cities provides practical and conceptual insights for practitioners, researchers and students on how to deliver cities which are resilient to ‘slow burn’ issues and achieve sustainability. The book is organized around three overarching themes: pathways to the future innovation to deliver the future leadership and governance issues The book includes a variety of perspectives conveyed through international case studies and examples of cities that have transformed for a sustainable future, exploring their successes and failures to ensure that readers are left with ideas on how to turn their city into a resilient sustainable city for the future.

This open access book addresses the way in which urban and urbanizing regions profoundly impact and are impacted by climate change. The editors and authors show why cities must wage simultaneous battles to curb global climate change trends while adapting and transforming to address local climate impacts. This book addresses how cities develop anticipatory and long-range planning capacities for more resilient futures, earnest collaboration across disciplines, and radical reconfigurations of the power regimes that have institutionalized the disenfranchisement of minority groups. Although planning processes consider visions for the future, the editors highlight a more ambitious long-term positive visioning approach that accounts for unpredictability, system dynamics and equity in decision-making. This volume brings the science of urban transformation together with practices of professionals who govern and manage our social, ecological and technological systems to design processes by which cities may achieve resilient urban futures in the face of climate change.

Climate change is one of the major challenges facing cities in the future. Landscape architecture is particularly in demand here because it offers solutions that are characterized by complexity and interdisciplinarity and contribute to the quality of everyday life. These range from green roofs and facades to urban gardening and the landscaping of large-scale protection works. This volume presents measures and plans of eleven major cities in North and South America, from Vancouver to Rio de Janeiro, to protect their inhabitants and their habitats against future storms, floods, landslides or long periods of heat and drought. Outstanding projects in the featured cities are analyzed in their geographic and climatic context. The author also addresses the social and cultural dimensions of resilience.

Between 1930 and 2030, the world's population will have flipped from 70% rural to 70% urban. While much has been written about the impacts of climate change and mitigation of its effects on individual buildings or infrastructure, this book is one of the first to focus on the resilience of whole cities. It covers a broad range of area-wide disaster-level impacts, including drought, heatwaves, flooding, storms and air quality, which many of our cities are ill-adapted to cope with, and unless we can increase the resilience of our urban areas then much of our current building stock may become uninhabitable.

The contributors to this volume propose strategies of urgent and vital importance that aim to make today’s urban environments more resilient. Resilience, the ability of complex systems to adapt to changing conditions, is a key frontier in ecological research and is especially relevant in creative urban design, as urban areas exemplify complex systems. With something approaching half of the world’s population now residing in coastal urban zones, many of which are vulnerable both to floods originating inland and rising sea levels, making urban areas more robust in the face of environmental threats must be a policy ambition of the highest priority. The complexity of urban areas results from their spatial heterogeneity, their intertwined material and energy fluxes, and the integration of social and natural processes. All of these features can be altered by intentional planning and design. The complex, integrated suite of urban structures and processes together affect the adaptive resilience of urban systems, but also presupposes that planners can intervene in positive ways. As examples accumulate of linkage between sustainability and building/landscape design, such as the Shanghai Chemical Industrial Park and Toronto’s Lower Don River area, this book unites the ideas, data, and insights of ecologists and related scientists with those of urban designers. It aims to integrate a formerly atomized dialog to help both disciplines promote urban resilience.

Half of the world’s inhabitants now live in cities. In the next twenty years, the number of urban dwellers will swell to an estimated five billion people. With their inefficient transportation systems and poorly designed buildings, many cities—especially in the United States—consume enormous quantities of fossil fuels and emit high levels of greenhouse gases. But our planet is rapidly running out of the carbon-based fuels that have powered urban growth for centuries and we seem to be unable to curb our greenhouse gas emissions. Are the world’s cities headed for inevitable collapse? The authors of this spirited book don’t believe that oblivion is necessarily the destiny of urban areas. Instead, they believe that intelligent planning and visionary leadership can help cities meet the impending crises, and look to existing initiatives in cities around the world. Rather than responding with fear (as a legion of doomsaying prognosticators have done), they choose hope. First, they confront the problems, describing where we stand today in our use of oil and our contribution to climate change. They then present four possible outcomes for cities: ”collapse,” “ruralized,” “divided,” and “resilient.” In response to their scenarios, they articulate how a new “sustainable urbanism” could replace today’s “carbon-consuming urbanism.” They address in detail how new transportation systems and buildings can be feasibly developed to replace our present low efficiency systems. In conclusion, they offer ten “strategic steps” that any city can take toward greater sustainability and resilience. This is not a book filled with “blue sky” theory (although blue skies will be a welcome result of its recommendations). Rather, it is packed with practical ideas, some of which are already working in cities today. It frankly admits that our cities have problems that will worsen if they are not addressed, but it suggests that these problems are solvable. And the time to begin solving them is now.

Drawing on evidence from urban resilience initiatives around the globe, the authors make a compelling argument for a "resilience reset", a pause and stocktake that critically examines the concepts, practices and challenges of building resilience, particularly in cities of the Global South. In turn, the book calls for the world’s cities to alter their course and "pivot" towards novel approaches to enhancing resilience. The book presents shifts in ways of acquiring and analysing data, building community resilience, approaching urban planning, engaging with informality, delivering financing, and building the skills of those running cities in a post-COVID world grappling with climate impacts. In Resilience Reset, the authors encourage researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to break out of existing modes of thinking and doing that may no longer be relevant for our rapidly urbanising and dynamic world. The book draws on the latest academic and practice-based evidence to provide actionable insights for cities that will enable them to deal with multiple interacting shocks and stresses. The book will be an indispensable resource to those studying urbanisation, development, climate change and risk management as well as for those designing and deploying operational initiatives to enhance urban resilience in businesses, international organisations, civil society organisations and governments. It is a must-read for anyone interested in managing the risks of climate impacts in urban centres in the Global South.

This book is on urban resilience – how to design and operate cities that can withstand major threats such as natural disasters and economic downturns and how to recover from them. It is a collection of latest research results from two separate but collaborating research groups, namely, researchers in urban design and those on general resilience theory. The book systematically deals with the core aspects of urban resilience: systems, management issues and populations. The taxonomy can be broken down into threats, systems, resilience cycles and recovery types in the context of urban resilience. It starts with a discussion of systems resilience models, focusing on the central idea that resilience is a moving average of costs (a set of trajectories in a two-player game paradigm). The second section explores management issues, including planning, operating and emergency response in cities with specific examples such as land-use planning and carbon-neutral scenarios for urban planning. The next section focuses on urban dwellers and specific people-related issues in the context of resilience. Agent-based simulation of behaviour and perception-based resilience, as well as brand crisis management are representative examples of the topics discussed. A further section examines systems like public utilities – including managing power supplies, cyber-security issues and models for pandemics. It concludes with a discussion of the future challenges and risks facing complex systems, for example in resilient power grids, making it essential reading for a wide range of researchers and policymakers.