Resilience beyond rhetoric: Integrating ecology, planning, and design for the city

Background/Question/Methods: Contemporary ideas about urban resilience abound in politics, planning and public debate, propelled by the growing urgency of climate change, from coastal to continental contexts, from municipal policy case studies to national design competitions. From its origins in ecology and engineering to its emergence as policy construct, resilience offers powerful implications for ecologists and planners alike, and for tangible design solutions for cities. What does resilience mean for the work of urban ecologists, planners and designers? How can we engage better in this work, together, to advance meaningful solutions towards urban resilience?

Results/Conclusions: Resilience demands both design of adaptive responses and transformative capacity under the emerging yet uncertain conditions of climate change. Yet in an era when resilience is quickly becoming the "new sustainability", cities and their urbanising landscapes present a novel and complex decision-making problematique; a challenge in which ecologists, planners and designers respectively study, represent and create the conditions necessary for urban resiliency. Yet rarely is this urgent work done in a holistic, interdisciplinary, collaborative or systematic way. Our professions continue to operate within disciplinary silos, in fragmented jurisdictions, within rigid hierarchies. However, the challenge of resilience presents an attendant and urgent need for experimentation and evidence-based design supported by integrated planning strategies—approaches that at once defy both traditional governance and standard practice, and so must extend to new models that embrace systems thinking, diversity, flexibility, transdisciplinarity, and collaboration. To this end, a critical analysis and multi-focal exploration of the concept and constructs of resilience, from ecology to engineering, reveals new opportunities and innovative strategies to engage novel methods for resilient design solutions. Emerging examples in integrated planning and urban ecological design from across North America suggest conditions for collective movement towards meaningful urban resilience. It is now clear that resilience—beyond rhetoric—lies in planning for uncertainty through post-normal science, evidence-based, integrated planning, and the agency of design.