Measuring resilience in the assumed city

This article unpacks how the idea of a city has been shaped within and by urban resilience frameworks - and what implications a wide and somewhat uncritical acceptance has had on the future of cities. Resilience is assumed to be located in the physical infrastructure of specific places or as a quality of the people located there. For disasters, we are often trying to conceptualize, measure, or render legible resilience in physical structures. But what is it that we are trying to measure, and is the idea of a city reflected in these measurements?

Using interpretive policy analysis, we explored five well known disaster resilience frameworks (UNDRR’s Making Cities Resilient Campaign, UN-Habitat’s City Resilience Profiling Programme, The World Bank and GFDRR’s Resilient Cities Program, Arup and The Rockefeller Foundation’s City Resilience Index, and The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities) to identify the working definition of “city” and of “resilience.” The researchers conclude that if the demand for cities to become more resilient is an acknowledgment of the risk produced by globalized urbanization, then the call itself is an indictment of the current state of our cities.