Urban Resilience

Course goals

• Identify the key determinants of urban resilience of social and economic structure;
• Sketch the main dynamics of recovery path of cities and regions that were experiencing an external shock (e.g. environmental , social, economic, etc.);
• Analyse the recovery path of cities and regions along their short and long term trajectory;
• Identify the key actors in the process of recovery, the role they played and their contribution to the recovery;
• Make a critical analysis of policy measures that are aimed at facilitate recovery or prevent shocks.

Content

The following main themes will be dealt with during this course:

1. In this course, we ask why some cities or regions are able to survive major shocks, crises and sustained periods of decline while others ultimately collapse. In a global context of financial crises, raising inequality and climate change, this question is becoming increasingly prominent on the political agenda.
2. Understanding urban resilience first requires to adopt a dynamic view of the economic structure of cities/regions. Resilient cities/regions are not always the biggest or the ones that experienced a fast growth in the past. They are the ones that are able to quickly adapt to changing economic, social and environmental conditions.
3. How can cities/regions re-invent themselves and continuously find new economic paths? This question deeply challenges our understanding of cities/regions and the role of urban and regional policy. Resilient cities/regions are characterized by an intense process of creative-destruction, in which sustained periods of growth also means abandoning obsolete sectors, modes of work organization and institutional practices. In resilience thinking, what can be considered economically efficient in the short run can also lock them in and accelerate their decline in the long run.  This is for instance the case when intense economic specialization comes at the expense of economic diversity, further exposing cities to economic shocks while limiting their opportunities to find new growth paths.