Urban Resilience Essay

The word resilience has originated from the Latin root word of ‘resi-lire’ meaning to leap back or to rebound’ and the idea of resilience refers to the capacity of an entity or system to ‘recover form and position elastically’ following a disturbance or disruption of some kind (James Simmie and Ron Martin, 2009). M. Tabibian and M. Rezapour (2015) elaborated that the concept was first used by physical scientists.

However, based on Pickett et al 2008; Mc Phearson et al 2015; Andersson et al 2015, Dr. Niki Frantzeskaki, (2016) elicited that the concepts of resilience existed since 1970s and researches conducted on urban ecology has been engaged with the notion primarily for introducing the thinking on multifaceted, social-ecological structures

A resilient system, Tuna T. et al, 2013 based on Hudson (2010: 12), can be possibly defined as “an adaptive system that adjusts and responds in ways that remain functioning or threaten its operative activities, enduring on the current path of developmental or initiating the shift in to a new situation. Thus, as a system urban resilience has been a center for various scholars who provided a salient definition which vary in terms of the governing theory adopted i.e. either threshold or Panarchy/adaptive cycle. Hence, as a complex system cities are subject to lose their resilience through manmade and natural hazards. Alberti et al. (2003: 1170) provided a definition to Urban Resilience stating that it is the degree to which cities are able to tolerate alteration before reorganizing around a new set of structures and processes”. The tolerance attached to changes is referred as robustness while reorganization is considered as rapidity of response or adaptation cycle required to sustain previous functions. Thus, according to Benson H. and S. Garmestani (2011) a system’s resilience, in this case urban, is dependent upon the interactions between structure and dynamics at multiple scales which have a direct implication on the planning of urban