Resilient cities in a Sea of Islands: Informality and climate change in the South Pacific

This paper demonstrates pathways for building on the resources, networks, and latent capacities of urban informality to enhance the climate resilience of urban systems, using post-disaster case study research from two Pacific Small Island Developing States to illustrate conceptual and practical opportunities for urban planning to engage constructively with endogenous resilience.

Semi-structured qualitative interviews with informal settlement households (n = 57) and institutional representatives (n = 26) were used to identify informal modes of resilience, with secondary analysis of institutional projects and spatially-differentiated socio-economic data being integrated with these primary datasets. Findings demonstrate important distinctions in sub-city scales of resilience relating to values and equity within socio-ecological resilience research that have not been extensively studied to date.

These case study observations have implications for understandings of ‘core’ systems functions, which are critical for planning communities when conceptualising resilience at a metropolitan level. Sub-city analysis also highlights aspects of urban resilience not previously identified in practice elsewhere, with informal maintenance of ecosystem services, use of kinship and familial networks, and translocation of traditional knowledge providing opportunities for enhancing urban climate change adaptation and climate resilient development initiatives.