Cities need to begin exploring effective strategies for developing greater capacities for resilience to the future impacts of both Climate Change and Peak Oil.
We have chosen the word “resilience” as an umbrella term for the planning and design strategies needed in order to help our cities develop the necessary capacity to meet the challenges of the future.
Over the coming decades, the need to build capacity for greater resilience will require our cities to develop strategies for coping with the future shocks and stresses to our urban infrastructure systems associated with climate change. Our cites will also have to find ways to significantly reduce their dependence on oil and other fossil fuels - to find ways to become more self-sufficient and energy efficient in the face the economic realities energy transition associated with peak oil. We think that effective urban planning and building design could play an important role in facilitating the development of a greater capacity for future resilience.
Resilience is typically understood to describe a material’s ability to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed. The term Resilience the way we are using it in this website has its origins in the science of ecology. In ecology, resilience has been described as the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state. Thus, a resilient ecosystem is considered to be one that can more effectively withstand external shocks and rebuild itself when required.
Resilience in human social systems has the added capacity of humans being able to anticipate and plan for the future. But resilience is conferred in both human and ecological systems by their capacity for adaptation to these external stresses and shocks. In the column to the right are definitions of resilience that have helped us in shaping the development of our resilient planning and design ideas and principles for resilient cities.
To become more resilient, cities will need to adopt planning and design strategies that allow them to develop the capacities to better respond and adapt to the economic, social, and physical stresses they will face as they confront the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change.
Developing the capacity for greater resilience will involve cities in a complex web of planning, design and development decisions that in combination must be designed to transform our current hugely energy-intensive urban economic systems into much less energy-intensive and much less carbon-intensive ones. Our planning and design professions will be challenged to find new paradigms, new technologies, new public services, new economic models -- and more -- in order to plan and then implement more resilient cities.
