Defining the Resilient City

This note serves to inform the United Nations University project on Resilience and the Fragile City. This is an accompanying note to ‘Conceptualizing City Fragility and Resilience’ (de Boer, Muggah, Patel 2016) which formally presents the resilience framework and indicators for fragile cities. As resilience has become a more prominent and pervasive concept, several past and current endeavors aim to specifically operationalize it for policy and programmatic intervention by delineating frameworks, dimensions and indicators of resilience generally, urban resilience more specifically. This paper explores how resilience can be conceptualized and delineated for urban environments that are characterized by fragility as defined by this project (those that combine high levels of violence and extreme poverty affected by a disaster) (see de Boer 2015). Though frameworks exist to describe urban resilience using a variety of dimensions and indicators, these component parts have yet to be weighted or tested empirically. As this note lays out, most formally developed frameworks and indicators for resilience rest heavily within the natural disaster and risk reduction literature while various reports, programs and tools have added political, social and economic elements to the this debate to supplement these existing frameworks. A theory of change, rather than evidence, underlies how the vast majority of frameworks and indicators have been developed and justified. They are decidedly inductive rather than independently derived. Empirical data is overwhelmingly concentrated in the vulnerability and risk literature rather than resilience literature. The obvious gaps lie in the lack of specific frameworks applicable to this definition of fragile cities and empirically sound indicators independently developed for resilience against fragility in cities. This concept note reviews the literature base and these resilience frameworks as well as current debates to present a working definition of resilience for fragile cities and guidance towards specific dimensions and indicators.