vulnerable groups and locations. Specifically, resilience design seeks to generate co-benefits that contribute to the reduction and mitigation of a city’s main chronic stress conditions that reduce the capacity of people, businesses and institutions to withstand shock events. To identify and develop co-benefits, the approach generally requires collaboration between stakeholders and across departments, functions and disciplines, and to co-design with vulnerable communities.
D. Build adaptive capacity. A resilience design process advances the design of assets and infrastructure through enabling their adaptability to new needs and operating conditions. It also seeks to raise the awareness and develop the capacity of institutions, businesses, communities and households to anticipate changing circumstances. The design process builds know-how and facilitates access to relevant information in the instance of an extraordinary shock event.
The concept of urban resilience has evolved over time to advance a wide range of development aims and to address new catastrophic threats, such as climate change. Urban resilience work continues to help develop governance systems and processes that are more integrated and inclusive. The Cape Town case study demonstrates how the process of building transformative urban resilience can be used to address situations of acute shocks and multi- dimensional chronic stress, which many other cities are also currently facing as they continue to deal with the COVID-19 crisis and fallout.
5.5 Inclusive and just city pathways
The final dimension of an inclusive and just city (discussed in chapter 4) can be defined as one in which all – both humans and non-human species– have the equal opportunity to thrive, and where health outcomes and environmental benefits are shared equitably, regardless of
people’s economic status, gender, age, ethnicity, religion and ability. However, although the need to articulate justice in the pursuit of urban environmental sustainability and resilience has been long acknowledged (Agyeman 2005; Heynen 2013; UN-Habitat 2015), equity considerations for all occupants of cities, both human and non-human, are often absent from sustainable urban development efforts (Bulkeley, Edwards and Fuller 2014; Horne 2017).7
Working
towards this aim requires confronting the historical contexts that have produced and continue to produce injustice. The persistence of a historical disregard for nature, the increasing commodification of urban life, the inadequacy of planning systems and the invisibility of the “informal” city are just some of the underlying processes discussed in chapter 2 that impede the transition towards inclusive and just cities.
Although fair access to resources is a key component of transformative change, efforts to build justice into the vision discussed in chapter 4 show that focusing solely on such access and distribution is not enough. For example, addressing equitable and environmentally sustainable access to food throughout American cities requires tackling the differentiated impacts of policy measures on marginalized black communities, the exclusion of agroecological practices and the loss of biodiversity (Raja, Morgan and Hall 2017). While many American urban policies have focused their attention on the “poor diets” and individual behaviour of African-Americans, very little attention has been given to the steady decline of their control over healthier and more sustainable food production. Pursuing environmentally sustainable and socially just urban development therefore demands tackling processes of maldistribution and misrecognition in cities, while also seeking equality in decision-making participation and striving towards nature- positive actions. In short, such urban development requires bridging actions towards justice, environmental sustainability and resilience through everyday planning and political practices, and critically examining historical urban contexts and policies and the factors that make them unjust.
Valuing cities as complex, self-organizing “adaptive systems” that are structured through multiple human and non- human interactions across different scales and levels of organization is therefore important (Olazabal 2017). To avoid locking urban development into socially and environmentally negative pathways, cities need to be more self-sufficient in terms of food, power and water, create multiple options for recycling, reusing and remanufacturing materials, and enhance car-free mobility, which links back to the circular cities pathway (section 5.2). These substantial changes are not easy, particularly in the time frame in which urgent action is needed. It is clear that transformative action towards inclusive and just urban development requires difficult ethical questions to be tackled in relation to human and non-human species, and the collective capacity of city residents to be strengthened through the state’s capacity to lay the foundations for equitable processes and outcomes.
7 For example, when confronted with competing priorities and interests, local authorities often struggle to align low-carbon aspirations and equitable housing to ensure that all households have equal access to low-carbon services through accountable production and distribution mechanisms.
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GEO for Cities
© Shutterstock/Dennis Mortensen
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